Third Article - Power
This article is part of a series looking at some of the areas which we feel God stirring us to grow in over the course of 2024.
The first two areas we looked at were Passion and Presence, you can read all articles in the series here: https://jubd.uk/t7v2bG
Power
The third area which I feel God stirring us to grow in, in the year ahead is POWER. I think we can all agree that we need more of God’s power!
We need it personally, in our own lives, and we need to see God’s power at work in His church.
The good news of this is, that Jesus promised us His power! Power comes when the Holy Spirit comes to us. Too often though, we try and do things in our own strength and power, and pretty soon we begin to wonder why it’s such hard going!!
Acts 1:8 (NIV)
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
We need the power of God in order to be the people of God.
If you take even a cursory glance through the New Testament, you will see that following Jesus is a supernatural endeavour. However, our Westernised, modernised version of Christianity, often removes the supernatural and turns Christianity into nothing more than a philosophical set of beliefs or ideas that one should try and follow.
No! No! NO!!!
Not so with us, that’s not what New Testament Christianity is about and if we settle for that, then we’re missing out!
This year, I want us to ask God for more of His Supernatural power to be at work - in our own lives and in our church!
I don’t know about you, but I want God to break in! I want Him to mess with our plans, to challenge our expectations and to do that, we need to give Him room to move.
Of course, we don’t NEED to do that, He can just break in whenever He likes but typically, God chooses to work with us, not against us. So we need to allow space and time for God to break in and we need to be ready for His power to be at work.
This will apply to our meetings together, but the context that Jesus was referring to in Acts 1, when He is talking about the power of God, is in the context of Evangelism.
The power, the promised Holy Spirit brings, is a power to witness and a power to speak about Jesus. Which is surely why we are here!
It is also a supernatural power bringing supernatural gifts. Don’t you want to see more healing? More words of knowledge? More prophecy etc?
This isn’t just for Sunday mornings! Of course we want to see more healings, more words of knowledge, prophecy and the like on Sundays as we gather - we really do!
But these gifts are not meant to be restricted to 2 hours on a Sunday morning and may be a couple more mid-week… These power gifts - and others - should be operating throughout the week, in the marketplace, not just in the gathered place!
When Jesus promises power to be His witnesses, He’s not just talking about having words to say, He’s talking about Holy Spirit, supernatural power.
John Wimber used to call it “the stuff”!! When he became a Christian he asked those in the church he was part of: “When do we get to do the stuff? You know, the stuff here in the Bible; the stuff Jesus did, like healing the sick, raising the dead, healing the blind – stuff like that?”
The answer is: NOW!!
In our next article we’ll look at the next P ‘People’.
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