“But you shall receive power after that the Holy Spirit has come upon you….”
Every Christian has been given the power of the Holy Spirit. As in our text, it is the power to witness, but it goes beyond that. It is the power to live victoriously. Several years ago the city of New York spent several days in darkness because of a power outage. If electricity cannot get to homes, there is no power to turn on lights, or anything else. We have a power outage when we fail to depend on the Holy Spirit as we should, because He is the source of our power. When do we have “power outages” in our lives? We have “power outages” when we do not seek God in the plans for our lives. I think that we would call this “prayer power.” We always need to seek God’s wisdom and direction when we want to serve Him. If we don’t seek His wisdom and direction, we might go on our own, and we have no innate power. This is illustrated in the ninth chapter of Joshua. The Gibeonites were afraid of the Israelites and were afraid that they would be overrun by them. They pretended to live far away from the Israelites, though they did not. God told Joshua to take all of the land of the Canaanites, and the Gibeonites lived in Canaan. Why did Joshua and his leaders make that mistake? Verse 9:14 tells us: “And the men took their victuals, and asked not the counsel of the Lord.” They found out later that they were neighbors, but it was too late to do anything about it, because they had “made a league with them.” (Read Joshua 9 if you would like to get the whole picture.) It was a simple matter of seeking the Lord. We have “power outages” when we do not stay close to God. James gives us a promise in James 4:8: “Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.” When we ignore the leadership of the Holy Spirit, we lose our closeness to God. We need to consciously stay close to the Lord by daily reading of the Bible and by spending time in prayer. One thing is for certain, if you are not close to God at the present moment, it is because you have moved. Jesus promised just before He ascended back to the Father, that He would “be with (us) always.” Jesus has not moved and He will not move. The Holy Spirit also has not moved away from us, we have just ignored His leadership in our lives. When we do this, we pay a price in one way or the other. This is one reason that the Bible tells us that God disciplines those He loves. “Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.” We have “power outages” when we have human relationship problems. Jesus gave us His love, and He intends for us to share His love with other people. When we allow relationships with fellow Christians to go sour, we cannot serve with the power that we can when we are right with them. But we are not supposed to love just fellow Christians; we are expected to love all people. I know that this is not easy, but if we want to stay clear of “power outages,” we should have good relationships with our fellow human beings. This is difficult in the workplace and it is also difficult in the church. But if we want God’s power in our lives we need to stay right with people. We have “power outages” when we do not forgive other people. There are many Christians who are not serving as powerfully as they should because they have not forgiven someone for some affront. If Jesus could forgive us, we should certainly be able to forgive others. If there is anyone that you have not forgiven, ask God to give you a forgiving heart. This is not an exhaustive list of “power outages” in our lives, but I think they are among the major ones. Bro. Joe
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AuthorDr. Joe Beauchamp is the author of this blog and website. Categories
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