- Overcomer Literature Trust
- Swindon
- Wiltshire
THE POWER OF GOD.
By Gordon Watt.
“Girded with the golden girdle, Shining as the mighty sun,
Still His pierced hands will finish all His work of love began”.
In his first letter to the Corinthians chapter 1 verse 21, Paul affirms that to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God. That is God’s statement about His Son. If there is anything we require, it is power.
The greatest need of the Church to-day lies in the need for power, and the danger is that we look for power somewhere else. The Church is losing power because we have lost the vision of Calvary, and the sad thing about it is that we do not recognise it. We have lost touch with central things and are busy with those on the circumference. Our supreme requirement is that we may become sensitive to our loss and rediscover Calvary. We may have anything and everything else, a crowded church, magnificent preaching, finest music and perfect organisation, but if the word and power of the Cross are absent, we have nothing to touch the heart of the world.
Christian living is less fruitful than it ought to be because of our lack of power. How powerless are we against temptation? How powerless when we try to impress some one with their need of Christ? This power is not intellectual, social, financial or political, it is Christ. Christ is the power of God. The meek and lowly one of the Gospels, crucified in weakness upon the Cross, becomes the power of God in the epistles and the conquering Lamb in the Revelation. That is God’s statement about His Son.
There are two Greek words used in the New Testament for power, the one is ‘dunamis’, which means ‘might’, and the other ‘exousia’, which can be translated authority. Paul uses the first here in 1 Corinthians 1, v21. The Cross is the expression of the might of God.
The secret of all Christian influence is Christ. We must see that the condition for possessing, experiencing and manifesting the power which Christ alone can give, is union with Him. Power is in Christ and apart from Him we can have none. We cannot preach if we are not united with Christ. We can lead no one to Christ if we are not ourselves united with Him.
Where does such union takes place? At the Cross. God can meet us nowhere else, and if we will not meet Him at the Cross in grace we must meet Him at the throne in judgment. The Cross is the point of contact between God and the sinner. The one thing to which we have a right in this world is the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, all that is meant by and included in His atoning sacrifice. When we come “to the place called Calvary” God gives us everything.
This union forms an unbreakable bond. When we received the Lord Jesus Christ as Saviour, the new birth became a glad experience. We thank God for every remembrance of it. How our hearts filled with joy and gladness in that hour as we said, “I am in Christ and Christ is in me”. Union with God through Christ was a reality. There is a closer and deeper union for us as we recognise our identification with Christ in His death.
Oh, wonderful fact of mercy and grace. When Christ died on the Cross we died with Him and now are in a position where we can be conquerors over everything in and around us which is against God and would hinder us from knowing His power. “Joined to the Lord” is the marvellous description of the one who has come to the Cross and in whom Christ has begun to live. As we maintain this union with Christ in His death, by yielding ourself to the Holy Spirit for that death to be worked out in us in a practical manner, we can know what Paul means when he speaks of “Christ the power of God”. The Cross is the point of contact, the spring of life, the hiding-place of God’s might.
We can no more take in the fulness of God as it is in Christ than a child can carry away the ocean in his bucket. But perhaps the great hindrance to our receiving the power of God is our unbelief. If our capacity to receive is limited, our capacity for unbelief is almost unlimited. What unbelieving believers we often are in practical ways. We do not receive because we do not believe. Thank God, there is a way by which everything that is against us in our lives and surroundings can be dealt with, but only as we yield ourselves to the Holy Spirit that He may make real in us the power of the death and the resurrection of the Son of God.
How does the Lord Jesus Christ reveal Himself as the power of God? Let us turn to four passages in the Word of God which will answer that question.
In Hebrews 1 v3, we read, “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory, and the exact representation of His being, sustaining all things by His powerful word. After He had provided purification for sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven”. The first expression of the might of God is made manifest in the power of Christ as He upholds us by His word.
Have we experienced the healing power of the Word of God? Do we not remember, when our minds were full of anxiety and we could scarcely think of what to-morrow might bring, and we went to the Bible and God said, “Cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you”, and the unrest vanished? Do we not recall that occasion when, faced with some great difficulty, and with no clear vision of the way out from it, the Holy Spirit brought this word to us “I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will council you and watch over you”, and our spirit was healed? Was there not a time at home when our hearts were gripped with fear and we could hardly breathe because of the sense of coming trouble or possible tragedy? Then the Word of God came to us and said, “I will never leave you, I will never forsake you”, and we left the valley of despair, with our hearts filled with a new confidence and courage. “He sent forth His word and healed them”, and Christ is ever doing that for His children, upholding them by the word of His power.
Look again at 2 Peter 1 v3, “His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and goodness". The supplying power of Christ is a gracious reality and never has He been found to fail. The deeper our need, the fuller the measure of the supply which will flow from Him. Generations have found it to be true. No need exists which cannot be met and matched by Him Who is the power of God. Let Him live in us, let the blocks to faith be taken out of His way and He will show us that according to His divine power He will give us everything for this life and the next.
In 2 Corinthians 13 v4, the apostle writes with great emphasis, “He was crucified in weakness, yet He lives by God’s power. Likewise, we are weak in Him, yet by God’s power we will live with Him”. Let us join those words with 1 Peter 1v 5, “shielded by God’s power”. The power of God in Christ is made real in the protection which He gives. The Christian life is a conflict increasing in its intensity with the passing of the days. All conflict means strain and all strain creates danger. The daily environment of life is full of peril, and the Word of God with its crystal-clear vision of our weakness and the subtle power of Satan, reminds us that at no point are we invulnerable. We require constant power to keep and protect us. In Christ that power lives in its fulness, but we need to claim it. Do not let us take the keeping power and the protecting grace of the Lord Jesus Christ for granted. We must personally claim and make the promises of God our own by an act of faith. Satan is ever on the watch to get us off our guard and send us to sleep, lulling us into a false security. The apostle constantly warned us in the letters, “Be self-controlled and alert”.
To claim day by day, hour by hour, step by step, circumstance after circumstance, the keeping and protecting power of the living, ever ready, ever watchful Son of God is our responsibility. We need to-day, as believers, the protection of God for our bodies.
To claim protection for the mind is imperative lest through what we see or read or hear Satan injects a drop of poison which will work spiritual damage. We need to claim similar protection for the spirit or Satan will bind it up in the prison of passivity, depressing and burdening us to make prayer an impossibility. This Divine protection is most necessary for the will. Many of God’s children are being paralysed in will-power, and find themselves robbed of all desire to fight against what is evil.
Turn to Luke’s Gospel, “I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions, and to overcome all the power of the enemy” (Luke 10 v19). Join that with Ephesians 1 v20-21, Christ is “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given”.
The purpose of Christ is revealed in the fact of His overcoming power. Authority to tread upon every manifestation of Satanic opposition is given us because we are in Christ and He is far above all. Do we believe that is as true for us today as it was for the first century disciple? It is surely marvellous that He has given to us power to tread on all the power of the enemy, but snakes and scorpions? There are different kinds of snakes and scorpions. Do we know the serpent which glides about from mouth to mouth, insinuating, whispering, adding a little to a story about someone until their reputation has been soiled and the atmosphere of suspicion envelops them? The serpent’s trail is seen all through life.
What magnificent equipment we are given with which to go into the battle, as along the paths of work and life we meet the temptation of the enemy. What a strong position on which to rest. “I have give you authority over all the power of the enemy”. It is blessedly true. What the Holy Spirit has written in the Word of God is for us to put into practice and find real. As believers, because of the victory won on the Cross, we can place our feet on every manifestation of the power of Satan, and say, ‘I put you under my feet in the Name of the Lord Jesus’. “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.”
How much does it take to knock us over in the day, to depress us? A letter in the morning, or an angry word from someone during the day, or something unexpected happening? Does God find us to be a rock against which the billows of temptation and testing and sin dash themselves in vain, or has He the sorrow of seeing that we are only little sand castles which disappear with the first incoming wave? There is nothing we cannot overcome is Christ’s word of cheer to us and the message of the Cross. The death and resurrection of Christ is the pledge of victory. At Calvary the victory was won and we are entitled to reap its fruits. To do that Christ gives us authority. Faith is the power to appropriate that victory at every point, claiming that what was done on the Cross two thousand years ago shall be made real to us today.