His Power In Us

(The following was published in the bulletin at St Charles Bible Church – Feb 16th, 2020, St Charles MN)

     Today, Jan and I are visiting with our little families on a short weekend outing north of Duluth, where they are hoping to spend the day skiing at Lutsen Mountain.  When I visited with my friend, Pastor Jerry, and he told me what God had laid on his heart for this morning, I thought, “Really! God wants to talk to our hearts again about His power in us!”   

     I stopped to think about the challenges that are facing members of our church family, and I understood better why we need so badly the amazing, life giving, problem solving, resurrecting power of God in our church.  You won’t see the frustration and sadness on our Sunday morning faces; but out of sight, in our personal “caves”, we cry out for God’s power in our lives.  The challenge is not believing that God is all powerful, it is knowing how to harness the power available to us.   

     So, what virtues mark a disciple of Christ, filled with the power that Jesus promised?  To answer that, we need to evaluate what changes happened in the lives of the disciples—before and after Pentecost.  Several changes are quite easy to identify: 1) There is a change in the struggle for preeminence among the disciples.  Before Pentecost, there was a seemingly constant jockeying among the disciples as to who would be the greatest—none of that after the Holy Spirit came in power.  2) The “fear of man” was a constant companion of the disciples before Pentecost.  The disciples, who pledged their loyalty before the arrest of Jesus, forsook him and fled.  Of course, Peter’s denial by the fireside was “the final nail that pinned their cowardliness to the wall”.  But not after the power of Pentecost:  Peter suddenly announces to the Sanhedrin, “Do what you must, but we ought to obey God rather than men.”   Stephen speaks so confidently and pointedly that the Sanhedrin decide to get rid of him—by the Jewish form of capital punishment—stoning.  In Acts 4, when Peter and John do come back from public flogging, the church goes to prayer—asking God for more power.   3) Before Pentecost, the disciples and followers of Jesus were more concerned about their “kingdom on earth” than their “kingdom in heaven”.  They were concerned about bread (Mark 8), fish (John 21:3), money (Mark 10), clothing (Matthew 5), and creature comforts (Matt. 9:27).  “What about this man?” Peter asks Jesus about John (John 21:21).  4) The biggest difference in the “power-filled” disciples was their willingness to bear crosses without complaining.  Paul could say, “for me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”  Every disciple of Jesus gained heaven’s approval by being willing to lay down their lives for what they believed. 

     His power would suggest that lives can change, habits can be forsaken, attitudes can be like Christ’s; anger can be controlled—with His power.  His power is there, but we must turn the key!  Pastor Jim B

  ’47 / ’56 St Charles MN

 Tim Keller tells the following story about the power of Christ’s resurrection: 

“A minister was in Italy, and there he saw the grave of a man who had died centuries before who was an unbeliever and completely against Christianity, but a little afraid of it too. So the man had a huge stone slab put over his grave so he would not have to be raised from the dead in case there is a resurrection from the dead. He had insignias put all over the slab saying, “I do not want to be raised from the dead. I don’t believe in it.” Evidently, when he was buried, an acorn must have fallen into the grave. So a hundred years later the acorn had grown up through the grave and split that slab. It was now a tall towering oak tree. The minister looked at it and asked, “If an acorn, which has power of biological life in it, can split a slab of that magnitude, what can the acorn of God’s resurrection power do in a person’s life?”

Keller comments:

The minute you decide to receive Jesus as Savior and Lord, the power of the Holy Spirit comes into your life. It’s the power of the resurrection—the same thing that raised Jesus from the dead …. Think of the things you see as immovable slabs in your life—your bitterness, your insecurity, your fears, your self-doubts. Those things can be split and rolled off. The more you know him, the more you grow into the power of the resurrection. 
          Nancy Guthrie, editor, Jesus, Keep Me Near the                             Cross (Crossway, 2009), p. 136