Mind-Blowing Power Available to You
Has anyone ever told you that if you believe in Jesus Christ you have more power available than you can possibly imagine? It is a power so incredibly great & get this:
It Can Be Yours If You Just Ask For It!
But, How Would You Know, If I Had Not Told You?
If You Don't Know What You Don't Know, How Would You Know Unless Someone Told You ?
Jesus has asked me to reach out to you on His behalf. He wants you to know that He loves you so much that He would give up His life so that you and He can live together ... forever.
And guess what? He did not wait for your answer to prove it ...
He's already died so you and He could live together ... forever.
All you have to do is to die to yourself and live the way He did.
"How could I possibly do that?" you might ask. And even if I told you, how would you know what I am telling you is the truth? I mean, one has to be pretty sure their doing the right thing by dying to themselves. Afterall, that is a pretty final thing, isn't it? How does one "die to themselves?"
Your question is a good start at finding out, because I ask myself that same question every day.
You aren't the only one asking that question ...
There is a recounting in Acts 8:25-31 about Philip being led to go south from Jerusalem to Gaza. He met an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians who was in charge of all her treasure reading about Isaiah out loud. Hearing him do that, Philip asked the eunuch if he understood what he was reading. The eunuch answered Philip in Acts 8:31:
And he said, "Well, how could I, unless someone guides me?" And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.
The Apostle Paul, like Philip, died to himself and this is how he is helping Jesus to guide us. He prays for you and everyone with whom he guides:
I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. (Ephesians 1:16–21)
Paul prays that the saints would know “what is the immeasurable greatness of God's power toward us who believe.”
Here is another instance when Paul was apparently preaching to Christian Jews about how they acted to Gentiles who did not know or necessarily believe in Jewish rituals and customs, and yet he wanted them to be given the chance for salvation. About Romans 6:1-23:
THEY DID NOT KNOW WHAT THEY DID NOT KNOW
I didn’t know the truth in Romans 6:1-23 my first year as a Christian, that believers are no longer under the dominion of sin.
What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it? Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.
For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin.
Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.
What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? May it never be! Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness?
But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.
I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, resulting in further lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, resulting in sanctification. For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.
Therefore what benefit were you then deriving from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the outcome of those things is death. But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
I thought I was a Christian when I answered the evangelists call at the church's revival event at the tender age of 11. But one evening years later, when life wasn’t going the way I wanted it to go, and feeling rejected and dejected sitting in a hotel room by myself, I was brought to tears in my perceived predicament. I was so frustrated things were not going my way that I threw the Gideon Bible from the nightstand across the room. It hit the wall and fell opened face down across the room on the carpeted floor.
We all hear stories of something like this happening. Like me, you might just pass it off as chance. But, it really happened exactly as I said. What happened next was to me U-N-B-E-L-I-E-V-A-B-L-E! But every word is true.
Today and every day I thank God that He treated and counseled me as the father I had lost to a head-on collision on the dark single lane roads of northwestern Mexico when I was three years old. Rather than chastising me about my hastiness and appalling behavior towards His Holy Word by throwing it against the wall in frustration, I felt that God was counseling me personally.
I went to the Bible I had thrown, picked it up and began reading where it had been opened by my wake-up-the-guests-in-the-next-rooms-throw. I began reading at Hebrews 10:19-25:
Therefore, brethren, since we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He inaugurated for us through the veil, that is, His flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful; and let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near.
What does that tell you relative to what I had just done? To me that immediately told me that I should go to church, or Bible study, or to talk to a Christian someone who might be able to counsel me as much as I needed to be counseled. I was not going to find solace in a hotel room on my own.
And then God’s Holy Spirit told me what I would face if I did anything less, in Hebrews 10:26-31:
For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a terrifying expectation of judgment and THE FURY OF A FIRE WHICH WILL CONSUME THE ADVERSARIES.
Anyone who has set aside the Law of Moses dies without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much [more severe] punishment do you think he will deserve who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has insulted the Spirit of Grace?
For we know Him who said, "VENGEANCE IS MINE, I WILL REPAY." And again, "THE LORD WILL JUDGE HIS PEOPLE."
It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
My eyes were opened so wide you could see the whites in them. In the almost 40 years before then when I answered an invitation to believe and follow Jesus, nobody had ever told me this stuff. I definitely remember how small I felt knowing that God could have and should have squashed me like a bug, which I felt He had every right to do.
Instead, I read on and was so surprised at what I had read that it made me realize that I had not noticed my repeated efforts to being a Christian. What I did not realize is that Jesus noticed them and wrote about it His Word. I suddenly got a little clue about God's omniscience not to miss a thing. The proof came in what I read in Hebrews 10:32-34:
But remember the former days, when, after being enlightened, you endured a great conflict of sufferings, partly by being made a public spectacle through reproaches and tribulations, and partly by becoming sharers with those who were so treated.
For you showed sympathy to the prisoners and accepted joyfully the seizure of your property, knowing that you have for yourselves better possession and a lasting one.
I strangely felt God gently rubbing my shoulders and hugging me as I read His words. I had not even realized that anyone noticed what and how I did in His name, nor did I realize how God noticed or felt about my accepting Jesus as my Savior and Lord, until I read those words. And then I realized that He had written those words through a scribe just for me thousands of years before I had even been born.
Is that awesome or what?
Growing up, I had had many “woes-me” days of feeling unwanted by God because I had no father to guide, counsel or love me from the age of three. I did have a step-father, but when my family grew to six children of which I was the oldest son and the youngest daughter was twelve years younger, I felt that I was all alone in my family.
Then, I did the math.
From the age of three to that evening in 1996 was exactly 40 years. Of course, it was many years later that I realized the significance of 40 years. Perhaps it represented a personal Wilderness Journey.
My Wilderness Journey was just like the journey to the Promised Land that God took the Jews with Moses on from Egypt. After 40 years of trudging across deserts, mountains and streams, and after the entire first generation of Jews leaving Egypt had died, the surviving Jews realized that they were not their own god.
That it took 40 years is a testament to how hard headed and hardhearted all of mankind is. ALL of mankind will throw away his Garden of Eden just to be able to glory in having it.
What is a wilderness journey?
I am so glad you finally asked.
God made that so clear in Deuteronomy 8:2-3;
- to humble you and test you, for whether you would keep His commandments or not;
- allowed you to hunger, fed you with manna which you did not know;
- that you would know what was in your heart, that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the LORD
I later learned that, just as God allowed the Israelites led by Moses to wander in the wilderness for 40 years before their remnant found The Promised Land which God promised them, He gave me a 40 year dose of the same until I realized that I could not be a Christian and be my own god at the same time.
And - Neither - Can -You
Don't believe me?
How many forty Year time frames do think you have?
The mercy of a wilderness journey is the realization that God loves us enough to wait forty years for us to believe wholeheartedly, not "hole-heartedly," that we are not, nor will we ever be, G-O-D.
The story of mankind since Creation is that he tries to use his own reason and method for God-sized problems and decisions
I gasped at the relief from the weight and responsibility that was lifted off my shoulders, a burden I had never let God carry before. Since I didn’t have a father from the age of three, I had been trying to do it, to be a Christian, on my own. I never knew about wilderness journeys; I just did not feel loved in my own family.
God’s Holy Spirit then started to guide me out of the wilderness of a life that I had been living without guidance or direction before as I read on in Hebrews 10:35-39:
Therefore, do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised. FOR YET IN A VERY LITTLE WHILE, HE WHO IS COMING WILL COME, AND WILL NOT DELAY. BUT MY RIGHTEOUS ONE SHALL LIVE BY FAITH; AND IF HE SHRINKS BACK, MY SOUL HAS NO PLEASURE IN HIM. But we are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but of those who have faith to the preserving of the soul.
And then I asked God what pleased Him and how I could please Him more.
God did not leave me to figure it out for myself. Doing that probably would have led to another 40 years of trying to do it myself. He knew that, left alone, I wouldn't have much more time to figure it out on my own, for seven years later my doctors said I came within 30 minutes of death because of the onset of an infection after open heart surgery.
I know now what wilderness journeys are because I lived one and I praise the Lord that I didn't die in one.
God led me to His Word and the Church from that lonely hotel room. He knew I would need help finding answers that might arise in my quest to understand. The Holy Spirit, our Counselor, took me through a whirlwind tour of God's Word to answer that simple question, “God, I have tried and tried and nothing seems to work. What pleases you? Please, I beg of you, teach me, because I don't know how!"
His putting me to work to answer that question gave me a whole new meaning to "on the job training." God's economy is so enormous in that way. Not only would I get my answers, but the work that I would do teaching while I was learning would glorify Him infinitely more when I passed on my answers to many others.
Before then I started dozens and dozens of times to read The Bible. I would start to read it as though we would read a book, any book, from start to finish. I always lost interest in being unable to even pronounce the seemingly endless list of names. I didn't even realize it when they were duplicated from one Book to another. I stopped somewhere around Numbers or I & II Chronicles or Deuteronomy, to read God's Word. Some people might be able to succeed, but I was never able to read it on my own as you or I would a book.
But with God's help, I read through the entire Bible in less than six-months. I would ask a question and His Holy Spirit would take me to those areas in His Word where I would find the answers. I became assured just as "Abraham was fully assured," in Romans 4:21 as I read it I wondered, "What assured him. How was he assured?" I did not even realize I had consciously asked that question, when The Holy Spirit took me directly to Genesis for an answer to me. I say "an answer" because there may be answers, but this excursion to Genesis would satisfy my curiosity at the pace which I needed.
By the way, the passage to which I was led was a genealogy of Adam and Abraham, the same genealogical verses that had stopped me before. The Lord knew that I was somewhat of a math nerd. He had to have known that I would put the years each person in those passages lived on a timeline I created on my own. In doing that, God led me to realize that Noah was still alive and living with Abram's tribe or clan before God sent Abram on his journey to UR, which started when he was 75 years old.
The timeline I jotted down showed me that Noah lived in the same tribe as Abram for 58 years before he died; God sent Abram to Ur 17 years later. I learned about how the Hebrew clans tended to congregate around the campfire and shared what they knew of God and provided testimonial evidence to their historical events so their clan would remember what God did for them.
So, to me, this process of "reading-questionning-reading-rationalizing" was God answering me through His Word to say, "Well George, I'm glad you asked.
One reason Abraham, then called Abram, became fully "assured" could be that Noah, the leader of the eight survivors of the Great Flood, was there to testify that God could and would do what He promised." I had images of Noah holding little Abram on his knee during a round-robin-campfire-discussion saying, "and you can believe it, because I saw it personally."
And that is how I was led through the Bible in six months or less. God started me off with the Book of John, then took me to Romans and then to Genesis and so on and so on. All along the way, I asked questions, such as, "Why was that so important?" or "How can that be possible?" or "Well what else ...?" My experience could be described as drinking God's Word as though I was trying to drink a flood of living water through a firehose.
All I had to do was ask for it "sincerely." That word I just wrote, "sincerely," is an extension of "sincere." Further, it has been explained to me that in the Greek, "sincere" means "without wax" as in porcelain pottery that had no cracks when held up to the light because there was no evidence that cracks had been filled in by wax so that they could not be seen by the eye. The implied is that whatever cracks had been there would have been seen by holding the porcelain up to the sunlight even if the cracks had been filled in with wax. Literally the word "sincere" meant "with honesty, truly, candidly, or rightly." And that came to mean "without sin" to the Hebrews and the Greeks.
Yes, I asked even about why certain words were chosen by the Bible's scribes. It was the Holy Spirit Who told me about Strong's Concordance and Bible Commentaries and anything else that is used to assist those wanting to learn about The Bible.
I took more notes than I had ever done in college. I even indexed them in a journal for future references. And then I began reading what I had read again and again. I haven't stopped ever since. I would find out a little of how God thinks and works as I read and rationalized and put into practice. Little did I know that God was going to use me to do what I have never known I could do or would do.
The Lord led me in a wonderful what's-left-of-life-mission that helped validate Ephesians 1:16-21 to me. He personally proved to me that He has unbelievable, incomprehensible, mind-blowing Power available to us. That Power is Jesus with the help of His Holy Spirit. I thought to myself, no wonder Abraham was fully assured (Romans 4:21) that God would keep His covenant promises to him and his lineage. No wonder Noah built an ark without questioning or doubting before God's worldwide cleansing.
And then I realized why I was just now learning all of this to tell others what nobody had bothered tell me. I thought to myself, "No wonder God took the time to pick me up from the pits of despair, dust me off and send me to His Word and to Church. All of God's answers had been in His Word which I had not known how to read.
God's calling for me to teach others what I had read and learned was suddenly incredibly clear. Sixth months later I walked to the front of my church worship center to let the Pastor know that God wanted me to be a Bible Study Teacher.
Being single, and when a Bible Study position opened up soon afterward, God put me to work as a Bible Study Teacher for the church's 20’s and 30’s singles. The singles attendance at my church exploded from maybe 30 to over 300 in the next year. And then the members of the church anointed me to be the first and only single Deacon their church had ever had. The other Deacons referred to me as, “Oh, you’re the one.”
It was a very humbling experience for me. I learned the truth of Isaiah 45:23 and Romans 14:11. (BTW: I give both of those because many apparent editors think there is inconsistency between the Old and New Testaments.)
I had never realized what being a Christian was all about until then. Just as Philippians 2:12-13 said, I was working out my salvation with fear and trembling, ... because it was God Who was working in me to will and to act in order to fulfill His good purpose. Finally I was being discipled.
Not really knowing that my sins grieved God, I didn’t realize that I had the Holy Spirit to put my sinful desires to death. Alas, I did not even know I could ask for help. I wandered in my desert of a life for forty years without corporate discipleship, thinking that the church members I had witnessed early on were all hypocrites. What a waste of God-given Grace my life had been up to then.
My ignorance of the Power available to me resulted in needless misery. It appears by this Ephesians passage that similar experiences have befallen humanity for a long, long time.
So, Paul wants his readers to know about this awesome Power they can access. He prays that God would enlighten their hearts that they may know the immeasurable greatness of God’s Power toward them. I did not ask the Lord for discipleship assistance until after my frustration in being unable to disciple myself reached its fever pitch and popped.
Just how great is this Power? It is the very Power of God. It is the Power that raised Christ from the dead and seated him in heavenly places. It is a Power greater than the mightiest angels have. It is:
- A Power greater than all rule, authority and dominion;
- A Power greater than the power of satan and demons;
- A Power greater than all the power of the nations; &
- A Power greater than the power of sin and temptation.
It is the Power that gave us life and will raise us from the dead by simply, but genuinely believing in Jesus' sacrificial death to atone for our sins. It is the Power that transforms us into the likeness of Christ. It is the Power to not be Christ, but rather, to become like Christ, to serve others, to persevere in trials, to endure persecution, and to lay down our life to love others. It’s the Power to fight temptation and to deny sin. It’s the Power to obey God’s commands, to share the Gospel, and the Power to pray; this Power is available to every believer young and old. The newest Christian has as much access to this Power as someone who has believed for 60 years. That Power is forgiveness for our sins by the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
We get this Power by praying and asking for it, as Paul did for the Ephesians. But first they must know that The Power exists and is available to them for the asking because they believe. His Power is the Power that works in us to complete good works for His purposes. The Almighty One, the Warrior of Heaven is waiting to come to our aid with His infinite Power, as He tells us in these verses:
- God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. (Psalm 46:1)
- He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. (Isaiah 40:29)
- but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength;
- they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
- they shall run and not be weary;
- they shall walk and not faint. (Isaiah 40:31)
- I can do all things through him who strengthens me. (Philippians 4:13)
- that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, (Ephesians 3:16)
- being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience (Colossians 1:11)
The Christian life is harder than life itself. Jesus calls us to hard things, like dying to ourselves and loving the unlovable. He calls us to fight the good fight against spiritual powers and against our sinful desires and weaknesses.
You come to know you have infinite resources in Christ, including his mighty, incomparable Power to save when you are blessed to be told and then experience its reality in your life. In short, you come to know His Power when The Triune God takes you under the tutelage of discipleship.
A recent Barna survey statistic found that two-thirds of young adults in the U.S. profess to be Christian, but only one in ten are resilient Christians and 42% to 45% do not have a discipleship relationship with the church. (Faith for Exiles)
If we believe in God, why would we not tap into this infinite Power?
No matter what you are facing today, Jesus has more than enough strength for you. Just ask Him for it for yourself and may the Power of the Holy Spirit propel you to tell others about it so they will ask for it too!
Always remember, though, answering your request will be at a time of His choosing and purpose. When will that happen then? It will happen in His timing when He feels your heart is in the right place to fulfill His purposes.
Take it upon yourself as a Christian to discuss, inform, or shout from the top of your Bible to everyone with whom you come in contact that “We can receive the very strength of God Himself just by asking!”
THEY WILL NEVER KNOW
WHAT THEY DO NOT KNOW UNTIL YOU TELL THEM!
But, then follow through by leading those you tell to and through God's Word so they will be equipped for every good work that God has already planned to give them (Jeremiah 29:11 & 2 Timothy 3:17).
I praise the Lord for allowing me to have seen and lived the results of telling this to others. Once I stepped into my church with a sincere heart to learn about God, the Lord led me through the Bible in very short order relative to the time I had wasted. God's Holy Spirit, our Counselor taught me personally how to deal with the Power that He would use through me.
It wasn’t as though I didn’t believe; I just never knew who I could ask for help. I probably sat down to intentionally read the Bible from cover to cover hundreds of times during my 40 years of wandering in my life’s wilderness, only to lose purpose and focus somewhere between Deuteronomy and Numbers.
I Did Not Know Then What I know Now
"Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they do."
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