That God Might be Glorified Through Us
A Different Kind of Prophetic Voice
Nothing is Impossible with God
The Fulfillment of Worthy Work
The American Standard of Living
Only That Which Is Given From Heaven
Human Efforts -- Human Results
“Holding the form of religion but denying the power of it.” 2 Timothy 3:5
The Church needs power and has precious little of it. I am not talking about the kind of political and economic power that it has lusted after in the centuries since Jesus ascended. I am talking about power from on high. We have, as a Church, given ourselves to every kind of influence imaginable except the genuine power which is given in the Name of Jesus Christ. We have tried to rule nations, form coalitions, influence politicians, sway elections, dine with kings and queens, entice, entertain, allure, and manipulate. None of these methods are those we learned from Christ Himself. Christ patently rejected political and religious power as the means by which His purposes would be accomplished.
Individual believers lack power as well. The greatest untapped resource on the face of the earth is the spiritual authority given to every believer and yet most of that authority lies about, waiting for someone to exercise it in the manner and for the purpose for which it is intended. Preachers and teachers have not told the populace of the community of faith about their true authority, calling, and destiny in Christ. The Church has, on the whole, stripped the gospel of its power because it has marginalized the Holy Spirit. The power of the Spirit has been reduced to a more manageable and reasonable theological concept or relegated to the realm of the Pentecostals and Charismatics. We talk about the Holy Spirit but have no clue as to how He works and how people can position themselves in relationship with Christ so that God’s life flows through them in ever-increasing measure. When the Spirit is mentioned at all, He is portrayed as the little “good angel” on your shoulder telling you the good things you should be doing. This stands in stark contrast to how the Spirit is presented in the Bible.
I had been a pastor for ten years when it occurred to me that something was terribly wrong with my own ministry. I was performing the tasks I thought were required of me and to the limit of my understanding and ability tried to be a good pastor. For the most part, I followed the example of others within my denomination with mixed results at best. However, as I read the Scriptures, I was haunted by what was clearly stated there:
“You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.” Acts 1:8
“Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of Hosts.” Zachariah 4:6
“And my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.” 1 Corinthians 2:4
“The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” Luke 1:35
“The blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up and the poor have good news preached to them.” Matthew 11:5
“Truly I say to you, he who believes in Me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do because I go to the Father.” John 14:12
“God did not give us a Spirit of fear, but of power and love and a sound mind.” 2 Timothy 1:7 (KJV)
It appeared from what I read in the Bible that everything God does was through Christ in the power of His Spirit. It seemed to me, however, that the Church had ignored or somehow managed to explain away everything that smacked as a manifestation of the power of God. I wasn’t seeing anything like the demonstration of the Spirit in the context of my own ministry. Everywhere I turned in the Bible, miracles were breaking out. I was not foolish enough to lust after miracles as if there were no cost to following the Lord, but neither could I ignore the miraculous power of God as if it were no longer valid. In the Bible, God often identified Himself as the One who parted the sea and led His people out of bondage. God is a God of miraculous power. A statement such as that is not some get rich “prosperity gospel” it is the continuous and pervasive witness of the very nature of God in the Scriptures.
It was at that point in my life that I began to dramatically change the way I approached my own spiritual walk and ministry. I had to quit trying to do it the way others were doing it and begin to do it the way I felt was prescribed by Scripture. It was a learning experience because no one had taught me how to function in the power of God. My Charismatic friends seemed to make everything about the Spirit as if there was nothing else in the Christian life; my denominational colleagues told me that people who functioned by the Spirit’s power were mindless bumpkins or crazy people. I did a lot of spiritual trial and error in those days, but God gives grace to fools and began to show me how He works and how to give Him a place to move. One of the biggest revelations I had in those days was that Jesus Christ is Lord of the Church and He exercises His dominion through the Spirit. I learned also that the Spirit flows to the place of least resistance and that the power of God is most manifest where Jesus is adored and obeyed. It takes time for the Spirit to work, and few of us build that into our personal or corporate worship. Through it all I began to see how God works when He is given license and freedom to work within Christian congregations. Some people resisted, and many fought against me, but many more came forward to drink from the River of Life. We began to see lives transformed and ministry empowered. That River began to flow out from us into the community and the world.
As I have lived and ministered in the days since then, I find myself wondering how it can possibly be that the Church, which claims to believe God’s Word, can continue to function by holding the form of religion but denying the power of it. They fill congregations with trite religious catch phrases, but there is no depth of spiritual revelation in what they teach. They hold services of worship but do not give God room to move. They function with religious authority but it is the authority of humans and not God. They look disdainfully at those who hope for a miracle from God as if those who hold such hope are foolish to believe that God would actually work a miracle in these days. They simply refuse to relinquish control, and this is the crux of the matter. The power of the Spirit is the dominion of Christ. There can be only one Lord. In the last analysis, the wisdom of God supersedes the wisdom of men and women. Our intellectual pride simply will not allow that to happen. The wisdom of God is not mindless spiritual irrationality but neither is it subject to the dictates of the human mind nor the rational plausibility of the current age. The Spirit is not about loud music and goose bumps – it is about allowing Christ to have complete dominion. As a rule, we humans are reluctant to give anyone, even Christ, that much power over us.