We Must Have Power

We must have the power of God if we are to realize “thy kingdom come.”

Christians have prayed the prayer, preached the prayer, and worked hard to make the kingdom of God a reality on earth, but with little widespread or long term success. My own church’s mission statement calls for us to make an impact on our city, but our influence hardly reaches past the sanctuary door. The tide of paganism and godlessness around us is a whelming torrent that we seem powerless to even influence, much less stop.

We have no power.

It is interesting to me that even though Jesus declared plainly, “I can do nothing by myself,” we do not believe him in the least. As we tend to do with all of Jesus’ radicalisms, we ignore the simple truth of his words, and filter his statement through our own perceptions in order to distill some principle that makes us feel good about what he said. It never occurs to us that Jesus plainly, simply, actually meant that he was powerless on his own. He said it, but we don’t believe it.

When we consider the fantastic works of Christ, we immediately seek the comfort of separation between him and ourselves, saying “He was the Son of God. Of course he could do those things. We cannot do those things, however, because we are only human.” We cannot stand the uncomfortable disparity between Jesus’ works and our own, so we hide behind our humanity and pretend that he was not truly human. We deny Jesus’ own testimony that, as a man, he could not preach a powerful sermon or perform a testifying miracle until the Holy Spirit descended on him.

Jesus received power and told us to do the same, but we have not. Some of us don’t even want it.

Our Christian brethren of the cessationist theology believe that miracles and other manifest demonstrations of spiritual power ceased with the completion of the New Testament. The outpouring of divine dunamis (Greek for “power”) through the lives of Jesus and the apostles was totally unique, never to be repeated again. Jesus, the Word of God among us, depended upon dunamis to empower his preaching and demonstrate his power, but we have no need of it because we have the New Testament. The cessationist doesn’t even want power; it’s against his religion.

We are like the man who purchased a new chain saw to clear a stand of timber. After a whole day’s labor, he only managed to cut down two trees. He took the saw back to the dealer and complained. The salesman looked over the saw to find the problem. When he pulled the starter cord, the engine roared to life, and the customer shouted “What’s that noise? Turn it off!”

Thy kingdom come does not mean “hurry up heaven.” It means that we are to “put on the whole armor of God” and fight against the forces of darkness that have captured the hearts of men. To push back the darkness, to quash the rebellion of men’s hearts, to impact our society with the gospel, we must have divine dunamis. Jesus depended upon the power of God to empower his preaching and to validate his words with miracles. We can do no less. We need the same anointing from heaven that he received at his baptism. The Holy Spirit descended upon him, and the Father proclaimed over him “This is my son, in whom I am well pleased.”

When the Spirit descends upon us, and the Father proclaims over us, we will do the “greater things” that Jesus promised.