7. Growing Strong: The Empowered Christian Life
Growing Strong:
The Empowered Christian Life
I kneel before the Father. . . . I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
EPHESIANS 3:14-21
As servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: in great endurance; in troubles, hardships and distresses; in beatings, imprisonments and riots; in hard work, sleepless nights and hunger; in purity, understanding, patience and kindness; in the Holy Spirit and in sincere love; in truthful speech and in the power of God; with weapons of righteousness in the right hand and in the left.
2 CORINTHIANS 6:4-7
Power: An Overused Word?
At the turn of each year TIME magazine looks back, looks ahead, and makes whatever comments it thinks fit. The first issue for 1990 contained a list of “Buzzwords Most Ready for Early Retirement,” in which, after “upside potential, upscale marketing, fast-tracker, bottom line, synergy, networking, streamlining, interfacing, prioritizing quality time, soft landing, hands-on manager” came “power player, power breakfast, power tie, power anything.”
As I look at my bookshelves today, I see there items titled Power Healing, Power Evangelism, Healing Power, Power Encounters, When the Spirit Comes with Power, Christianity with Power, all published since 1985. Round go the wheels of the mind. Buzzword, eh? Huffy, tiresome jargon, right? Overused among Christians, just as it is in the commercial world? Ripe for retirement? First thoughts might prompt us to say so, but second thoughts should give us pause.
For “power” is a very significant New Testament word. Where would I be if I imposed a self-denying ordinance on myself and declined to use it any longer? Where would the Church be if we all acted that way? If we stopped talking about power we should soon stop thinking about it. If that happened we should be impoverished indeed. Hey, then, put on the brakes; stop being snide. For Christianity, at least, the word “power” is precious. Buzzword it may be, but we need it, so that we can focus on what it refers to. This chapter will, I hope, make clear the importance of doing that.
The Power of God
The power that now concerns us is God’s power—the energy exercised by Him in creation, providence, and grace. The usual word for it in the Greek New Testament is dunamis, from which comes our word “dynamite.” Here we shall deal with just one segment of this tremendous topic, namely the power of God regenerating, sanctifying, and operating through us sinners.
To deal with this, however, means facing up to a problem, the recurring buzzword problem of passionately committed shortsight. We may analyze the problem thus: a word presses buttons of interest, excitement, and desire to be in the swim and not be left behind. So people pick up the word and flash it as a kind of verbal badge, in order to show that they are fully up to date and know about the latest significant thing. But such use reflects little or no thought about this latest thing in itself. So the more the word is used this way, the woollier grows its meaning and the shorter the sight of its zealous users.
At the present time, more and more people are anxiously asking themselves and each other whether they have the power of God in their lives, with less and less certainty in their minds as to what that might mean. All they are sure of is that they want to identify with the folk who claim acquaintance with that power, since they do not want to be left out of any good thing that is happening. As in other instances, the buzzword problem thus opens out into a flock-of-sheep neurosis, an inclination to follow fashions blindly so long as one is part of a confident crowd. Where buzzwords buzz, you get notional fuzz! If we are to talk meaningfully about the power of God, we shall have to cut through some of that.
As a first step towards proper clarity on our theme, we need to see right at the outset that God does not give us His power as a possession of our own, a resource to use at our discretion. It should not be necessary to say that, but the amount of talk today about using the power of God shows that this misconception is common. God uses us, calling into play the powers He has given us, as channels through which His own power flows. But we are not storage units like batteries, or receptacles like buckets, in which the potential for power in action can be kept until needed. And we do not use God, or God’s power, as we use electricity, switching it on or off as we like.
Wanting to possess divine power to use at his own discretion was the sin of Simon the sorcerer (Acts 8:18-24). His sin is recorded as a warning, not as an example to follow. The right desire at all times is to be “an instrument for noble purposes, made holy, useful to the Master and prepared to do any good work” (2 Tim. 2:21). The King James Version reads, “a vessel unto honour, sanctified, and meet for the master’s use,” which is stronger and clearer.
Should Christians speak to us of using the power of God, red lights should flash before our mind. If however, the talk is of how to be usable and useful to God, we should be nodding our heads. Let us see to it that we do not go wrong here.
God’s Supernatural Power
During the past century, evangelical Christians (and some others with them) have been very concerned about power in the Christian life. Was that wrong? Not at all. A journal founded in the 1870s was called The Christian’s Pathway of Power. Its theme was God’s enablement of us to do our duty, to perform the tasks that life sets us, and to overcome the temptations that would keep us from thus pleasing God. During the years of my nurture by an evangelical student movement, a whole regiment of devotional speakers knitted their brows and pressed on us the question, “Do you have power in your life?”—meaning the same thing. Was it wrong to want greater self-control and a more thorough, fruitful practice of righteousness through God’s power? Of course not.
At the same time, and among the same people, concern focused too on being able, through God’s power, to influence others for God through one’s witnessing (and, if one was a preacher, through one’s preaching). A great deal was said about the difference between Christians whose witness had “power” and those whose witness did not have “power.” Was it right to be concerned that one’s witness have power? Was it right to be fearful lest one’s witness prove to be powerless? Of course it was right. These should be our concerns as well.
More recently, Christians who have been touched by the movements known as Pentecostalism, the charismatic renewal, and the Third Wave, have begun to seek (and some claim to have found) the ability through prayer to channel supernatural demonstrations of God’s power in all sorts of healings: healings of the body, inner healing of the heart, and exorcisms where there appears to be something demonic acting in a person’s life.
Again I ask myself, is it wrong that Christians are concerned about these things? Though I see some dangerous pitfalls,1 I cannot find it in my heart to say this is wrong. In my New Testament, I read a great deal about such manifestations of the power of God, understood as “powers of the coming age” (Heb. 6:5)—in other words, the Holy Spirit in action.
It is true that the New Testament regularly views the “signs and wonders” as the Father’s authentication of the ministry of Jesus and His apostles (Acts 2:43; 5:12; 14:3, cf. 10:38; 19:11; Rom. 15:19; 2 Cor. 12:12; Heb. 2:3). There is no clear promise that these manifestations will continue after the apostles’ ministry is over.2 But there is no denial that they will either. The New Testament leaves open the possibility.
In any case, it is said most emphatically that all Christians, as new creations in Christ, have already been touched by the supernatural (2 Cor. 5:17; Eph. 2:4-10; 1 John 3:9). The consistent expectation is that now they will live differently, and will be seen to be living differently, from the rest of the world. The supreme sign and wonder, giving the fullest credibility to Christianity, will thus always be the changed life of the believer. Two conclusions seem to follow. First, a Christianity that is prepared to go on cheerfully without any signs of God’s supernatural transforming power in people’s lives shows a very unbiblical spirit. Second, this expectation of overall moral change is the frame into which all hopes and quests for supernatural healing properly fit.
Miracles of the New Creation
The coming of Christ the Savior has led to the outpouring of the Spirit on the Church and on the world. And the Holy Spirit comes with power. In the New Testament, we see this power manifested in all the modes of which I have spoken so far: the ability to perform tasks of devotion and service, and to overcome temptation; the ability to influence others through preaching and witness; and the ability to act as a channel for God’s power in miracles, healings, and the like. Let us consider each of these three modes, in reverse order.
Signs and Wonders
First, in the Gospels and in Acts, we encounter works of power in the physical realm, including miracles of nature and healings of all sorts. The phrase “signs and wonders” is used for them by Jesus Himself in John 4:48. These are, to use C.S. Lewis’s apt phrase, “miracles of the new creation,”3 in which the power of God that made the world works again to bring something out of nothing—to bring about a state of affairs for which no explanation can be given in terms of what was there before. Everyone knows you cannot get enough food for five thousand people out of five loaves and two fishes, but enough food for five thousand was produced. Everyone knows you cannot bring the dead back to life, but on three occasions Jesus brought the dead back to life: Jairus’ daughter, the widow’s son at Nain, and Lazarus (see Luke 7:11-17, 8:49-55; John 11).
To be sure, these three incidents were not the same as the greater miracle of new creation that occurred when Christ Himself was raised from the dead. They were only resuscitations. In each case, the person died again a little further down the road. The same was true of Dorcas, whom Peter raised (Acts 9:36-41), and of Eutychus, whom Paul raised (Acts 20:9-12), just as it had been true of the dead children whom God restored to life through Elijah and Elisha (1 Kings 17:17-23; 2 Kings 4:18-37). Jesus, however, rose from the dead never to die again. His resurrection is an even more remarkable miracle of new creation—indeed, it is the normative one. Christ is the first-fruits, the beginning of the new creation of God, as the New Testament itself says (see 1 Cor. 15:20,23; Col. 1:18; Rev. 1:5).
Nevertheless, all these are instances in which the power that created the world out of nothing produces effects for which no cause can be cited, except that God the Creator has been showing His power again.
Words of Power
Second, one reads on in the New Testament and finds that words of power in Christian communication are very much a part of the gospel story and of the story of the new Church. Luke is particularly interested in the power of God, and there are several texts in Luke that are significant here. Let us look at some of them.
In Luke 4:14 we read that, following the wilderness temptation, “Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit.” This text introduces not only His works of power but also the words of power that came from His lips. Then, after His resurrection, Jesus told the disciples to wait in Jerusalem until they were endued with “power from on high” for the ministry of worldwide evangelism to which He was committing them (see Luke 24:49).
At the beginning of Acts, Luke picks up the same theme. Jesus tells His followers, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses . . . to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Later we read, “With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all” (Acts 4:33).
Paul likewise has tremendous things to say about the power of God working through the gospel and through its messengers. “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes” (Rom. 1:16). At the end of the lengthy argument that makes up the letter to the Romans, and speaking of his own ministry, Paul says, “I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me in leading the Gentiles to obey God by what I have said and done—by the power of signs and miracles, through the power of the Spirit” (Rom. 15:18-19, emphasis added). Again, in his first letter to the Corinthians, he says: “For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:17-18, emphasis added).
“Words of human wisdom” is a phrase Paul uses to indicate the endeavor to swap philosophy with the philosophers. The people in the Greek cities where Paul went to evangelize expected him to parade his own cleverness when he spoke in public. Wandering lecturers who showed off in this way were familiar figures in Greek cities, and they were appreciated as good entertainment. But Paul would not behave as they expected. He adopted a plain, straightforward, matter-of-fact style of presentation which made him seem foolish to those who were expecting the sort of self-display they got from other traveling teachers.
“I knew what you wanted,” Paul tells them, “and I was resolved not to give it to you. You wanted me to show off as a philosopher, with dazzling arguments, and to put on a performance that pandered to your sophistication, but I wouldn’t do it. I was with you as a messenger, not a philosopher or an orator or an entertainer; I came to testify to God and Jesus Christ and his cross, and to tell you how to be saved from sin and hell [cf. 1 Cor. 2:1], and that was all I was willing to do. And so you thought me a fool.”
But, says Paul, they should by now have come to appreciate his strategy. “My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words [wise, by the world’s standards], but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power” (1 Cor. 2:4-5, emphasis added). It was to make way for God’s power that he spoke as he did.
Jesus Himself had predicted that through the apostles’ witness, the Spirit would convince people of the truth about Jesus and their need of Him. Paul had trusted the Holy Spirit to do just this, and he had not been disappointed.
Third, the New Testament speaks not only of God’s power in the miraculous and in the communication of the gospel, but also of God’s power at work in us, enabling us to understand and do what we otherwise could not.
In Ephesians 1:17-19, Paul tells the Christians what he prays that God will give them: “I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us [other translations say, “in us”] who believe” (emphasis added).
The power of which Paul speaks is not just power in the message. It is not just power through the messenger. It is power in and upon those who believe, opening their formerly shuttered hearts wider and wider so that they understand gospel truth better and better, thereby making their life utterly different from what it was before. It is resurrection power—a matter of God raising with Christ those who have become willing to die with Christ. Clearly Paul is expecting tremendous changes in the lives of those who now belong to Christ.
He comes back to this theme at the end of Ephesians 3: “I pray that out of [God’s] glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (vv. 16-19, emphasis added).
Again we see that Paul is talking about something radical, in the fullest sense of that word: something that produces a total change. He is praying that through this marvelous inner transformation and enrichment of which he speaks, the Ephesians will become utterly different from folk around them—utterly different, indeed, from what they have been so far. This becomes obvious when he moves into the closing doxology of his prayer and gives praise to “him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us” (Eph. 3:20, emphasis added). Paul speaks as if for him the sky is the limit so far as the transforming agency of the Holy Spirit is concerned, and his expectations of change are accordingly high.
These are samples of the many precious texts in the New Testament about the power of God. Each was an example of God’s power working through Christ and through the apostles, manifested in works of power in the physical realm, in giving power to Christian communications so that they would have a significant impact, and also in enabling Christians to understand and do what otherwise they could neither understand nor do.
Thus, reflecting on the matter in light of the New Testament, I am compelled to correct my initial feeling about TIME magazine’s wish to retire the word “power.” It remains a word in season for Christian people. Power is a theme that Christians must ever hold on to. It is very clear from the New Testament that the power of God is meant to accompany the gospel, and to find expression through its messengers and in the lives of those to whom the message comes.
Manifesting God’s Power
This book is about holiness. Our review of the power of God as seen in the New Testament has led us to look at ministries of various kinds. Was that relevant? Are we not ranging too widely, and going beyond our subject? I do not think so. It is artificial and unscriptural to draw a hard and fast dividing line between God’s work of transforming a person’s character, which is what we have discussed so far, and His work of thrusting that person into ministry—into active service of others, accepted as a task that God has given. I am not speaking here of ordained or salaried ministry only, or even primarily. Ministry means any form of service, and there are many such forms. Thus:
• being a faithful spouse and a conscientious parent is the form of ministry at home;
• discharging an office, fulfilling a role, and carrying a defined responsibility is the form of ministry (both ordained and lay) in the organized church;
• sustaining pastoral friendships that involve advising, interceding, and supporting is a further form of ministry in Christ; and
• loving care for people at any level of need—physical or mental, material or spiritual—is the true form of ministry in the world.
Holiness, as we have seen, is neither static nor passive. It is a state of increasing love to God and one’s neighbor, and love is precisely a matter of doing what honors and benefits the loved one, out of a wish to raise that loved one high. Holy persons, therefore, show themselves such by praising God and helping others. They know they should, and in fact, they want to. God Himself has made them want to, however self-absorbed they may have been before.
As their Christlikeness adds to their impact, credibility, and effectiveness for God when they serve their neighbors, so God uses their experiences in such ministry (success, failure, delight, frustration, learning patience and persistence, going the second mile, staying humble when appreciated, staying kind when attacked, holding steady under pressure, and so on) to advance the change “with ever-increasing glory” in their own lives (2 Cor. 3:18). He continues to make them more like Jesus than they were before.
It is noteworthy that most speakers and books on holiness say little about ministry, while most speakers and books on ministry say little about holiness. It has been this way for over a century. But to treat holiness and ministry as separate themes is an error. God has linked them, and what God joins man must not put asunder.
One regular result of ongoing sanctification is that concern for others, with recognition of what they lack, and wisdom that sees how to help them, is increased. Ministry blossoms naturally in holy lives. In effective ministry, God’s power is channeled through God’s servants into areas of human need. A saintly person of limited gifts is always likely to channel more of it than would a person who was more gifted but less godly. So God wants us all to seek holiness and usefulness together, and the former partly at least for the sake of the latter.
Out of this awareness I now venture to formulate five theses that bear on the manifesting of the power of God among His people today. My aim in putting them forward is to make us readier to receive and show forth this power in its various forms. I must frankly say that I think there are unhelpful crosscurrents in today’s discussions about the power of God in Christians and in the Church. Thus I offer some aspects of these five theses for corrective purposes. I want the power of God to be manifested to God’s glory in your life, in my life, and in our churches. That is why I write as I do.
1. Heightened Expectations
It is right to firing the supernatural into prominence and to raise Christians’ expectations with regard to it.
Generally speaking, our expectations with regard to seeing the power of God transforming people’s lives are not as high as they should be.
It is a fact of history that in the years before the Reformation broke in on the Church in the sixteenth century, there was a tremendous amount of superstition regarding the working of miracles. I do not deny that God may have worked many miracles through many saints before the Reformation (as it seems He has worked some miracles through some of His saints since the Reformation). But the Reformers saw a great deal of the supposedly supernatural, which seemed to them unmistakably superstitious, and they reacted violently against it.
Packer’s proverb, however, if I may so speak, is that the reaction of man worketh not the righteousness of God. This is surely obvious. If you are walking backward away from something that you think is a mistake, you may be right in supposing it is a mistake, but for you to be walking backward is never right. Sooner or later people who walk backward in the physical sense stumble over some obstacle behind them that they never saw, because their minds and their eyes were fixed on what they were trying to get away from, and then they fall. We are meant to walk forward, not backward. Reaction is always a matter of walking backward, and thus it brings its own nemesis.
The Reformers, being Bible-based, believed in a Creator God who controls His world absolutely, who worked many miracles in biblical times, and who still takes special action in response to prayer. So, when Luther thought that Melanchthon, his right-hand man, was dying, he stood at the sickroom window looking at the sky and prayed aloud for some hours for the young man’s recovery. At the end of this time Melanchthon’s temperature was down, and he was visibly getting better.4
Praying for the sick, and looking for special providences of recovery, was in fact standard evangelical practice from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, though with a clear understanding that continued illness and early death might well be God’s gracious will in any particular case—an understanding, let it be said, that is often (and very unfortunately) less clear among those who pray for the sick today. But because belief in the saints’ miracles was bound up with the supposedly meritorious relic-cult of the Middle Ages, the Reformers spent time ridiculing it, just as they ridiculed claims to supernatural revelations and miraculous providences on their own left wing. Thus they left the impression that in their view, supernatural providences should not be expected at all now that the apostolic age was over.
This negativism, the legacy of a defensive reaction, as we can now see, was later reinforced by the Newtonian notion of the material universe as a closed box of forces and processes. This makes it appear at least unseemly, and perhaps impossible, for God to break into the world which He has created—a notion that came to pervade Protestant culture and seems to have led directly to the still widespread assumption that God in grace touches only the soul, not the body at all. It is clear that such an assumption drastically dampens one dimension of biblical faith.
At the beginning of this century, the new Pentecostal denominations challenged this assumption, and Christians touched by the charismatic movement have maintained the challenge. During the past thirty years openness to the supernatural in the physical realm has been recovered by many who had lost it. Expectations of direct divine healing and other startling providences in answer to prayer have risen throughout the Christian world. For this we should be thankful. Twentieth century hostility to the idea that God might heal or shape events today in a way that would call attention to His presence in power was always unjustified and unbalanced. Its motives do not bear examination. We should be glad that it is melting away.
But a caution is now in order, for an opposite error, no less unjustified and unbalanced, now threatens. The corrective pendulum-swing away from one extreme of reaction was itself a reaction. This has led to another extreme, just as false as the first. The immaturity and childish egoism that infect our culture claim their victims among Christians too. Symptoms of these defects appear in the all-too-common tendency of modern Christians to undervalue the natural and the ordinary. There are just too many people who want every problem to be solved by an immediate miracle, a display of the supernatural, a wonderful providence that will change everything. I think that is a sign not of great faith, but of great immaturity. Let me explain.
Again and again our Lord leads us into situations that are painful and difficult, and we pray—as Paul prayed regarding his thorn in the flesh—that the situation will change. We want a miracle! But instead the Lord chooses to leave things as they are and to strengthen us to cope with them, as He did with Paul, making his strength perfect in continuing human weakness (see 2 Cor. 12:7-10).
Think of it in terms of the training of children, and you will see my point at once. If there are never any difficult situations that demand self-denial and discipline, if there are never any sustained pressures to cope with, if there are never any long-term strategies where the child must stick with an educational process, or an apprenticeship, or the practice of a skill, for many years in order to advance, there will never be any maturity of character. The children (who, of course, want life to be easy and full of fun, as children always do) will remain spoiled all their lives, because everything has been made too easy for them. The Lord does not allow that to happen in the lives of His children.
It is extraordinary how little the New Testament says about God’s interest in our success, by comparison with the enormous amount that it says about God’s interest in our holiness, our maturity in Christ, and our growth into the fullness of His image. Typical of His revealed interest is His message through the writer of Hebrews to a group of converted Jews who were being harassed, apparently by unconverted Jews, because of their Christian faith. He does not promise to shield them from trouble, either by natural or by supernatural means. Instead, He tells them (and thereby tells us) that, like Jesus, Christians must focus their thoughts on the joy set before them. They must be ready to shed their blood rather than yield to pressure and renounce their faith. Moreover, they must understand that hardship is the discipline by means of which their heavenly Father hammers them into shape for a harvest of holiness, which is what He is resolved to see in their lives. If they were not being thus hammered, one way or another, they would have a reason to doubt whether they were His children at all (Heb. 12:2-14). Strong stuff!—but it makes crystal clear what we need to know: God’s priority in all His dealings with us is to make us holy. It would be ruinous to twist today’s healthy openness to the supernatural in a self-serving direction.
2. Empowered Ministry
It is right to aspire to use one’s God-given gifts in powerful and useful ministry.
It is right to want to know what gifts for ministry God has given us. It is right to want to harness them and see them used for the blessing of others as widely as possible. Sanctified persons (as we saw) want to serve. Therefore, they both want and need to know what resources God has given them for this purpose.
But there is always a danger that the person who sees that God has given him or her a good sprinkling of gifts will be betrayed by that old enemy, self-importance—which is another name for pride. God does not value us according to the number of gifts we have, or by their spectacular quality. God does not value us primarily in terms of what we can do—even what we can do in His strength. He values us primarily in terms of what He makes us, character-wise, as He conforms us to Christ by His grace. We dare not forget that.
Jesus was already sounding the warning note when His disciples came back from a preaching tour all gung-ho, as we would say, and excited. “Lord,” they cried, “even the demons are subject to us in your name!”
“Very good,” says Jesus. “But do not rejoice that the demons are subject to you. That is not the truly important thing. Rejoice, rather, that your names are written in heaven. Rejoice in your salvation. Rejoice in what you are by the grace of God, rather than in the way God uses you. Rejoice in being his children, and in entering upon your destiny of being transformed into my image” (see Luke 10:17-20).
Gifts are secondary. Sanctity is primary. Never let anything divert you from holding that truth before your mind and heart.
3. Meeting Needs
It is right to want to be a channel of divine power into other people’s lives at their points of need.
Neighbor-love, as we have seen, seeks the good of the loved ones. For strong neighbor-love to be active in our hearts is a sign of spiritual health. But be careful lest you become one of those people who suffers from the neurosis of needing to be needed—the state of not feeling that you are anything or anybody unless you are able to feel that others cannot get on without you! That is not true neighbor-love, nor is it spiritual health. That is lack of spiritual health; it is in fact another form of pride. Our sense of personal worth is to flow, not from our Christian activities, nor from having others depending on us, but from our knowledge that God loved us enough to redeem us at the cost of Calvary.
Redeeming love imparts worth to the otherwise worthless creatures in whom it is invested, making it needless to seek a sense of worth from any other source. And if I am using my neighbors to bolster my sense of self-worth, I am using them, which is something different from loving them. My attitude is likely to make me keep them dependent on me when I ought to be setting them free, and that will be harmful both to them and to me.
One of the disciplines to which the Lord calls us is the willingness, from time to time, not to be used in significant ministry. Jesus modeled this when, having told Peter to bring Him some of the fish miraculously caught (as we must consecrate to Him the gifts He has given us), He then proceeded apparently to ignore Peter’s offering and to feed the disciples from fish He had prepared independently (see John 21:9,13).
Imagine, now, a devoted and gifted Christian woman, whose ministry has been precious to her, finding that for quite a long period the Lord sidelines her so that her potential is not being used. What is going on? Is this spiritual failure? It is probably not spiritual failure at all, but a lesson in Christ’s school of holiness. The Lord is reminding her that her life does not depend on finding that people need her. The prime source of her joy must always be the knowledge of God’s love for her—the knowledge that though He did not need her, He has chosen to love her freely and gloriously so that she may have the eternal joy of fellowship with Him. Regarding her ministry, what matters is that she should be available to Him. Then He will decide when and how to put her to service again, and she should leave that with Him.
In the spiritual life, what we are always takes priority over what we do. If we lose touch with what we are, and with the reality of God’s free mercy as the taproot of our spiritual life, the Lord may have to sideline us until we have learned this lesson again.
4. Empowered Evangelism
It is right to want to see God’s power manifested in a way that has a significant evangelistic effect.
Holy persons who seek God’s honor and glory and their neighbor’s good will care deeply about evangelism, the activity that seeks to exalt God in Christ by persuading sinners to turn to Him and find new life. They will want to see evangelism done in a way that shows as clearly as possible that the gospel is true, and what is declared about new life in Christ through the power of God is, as we say, “for real.” They will want to see the reality of moral and spiritual transformation by the Holy Spirit proclaimed by speakers whose manner and style indicate that they are personally living in the power of the great change they are talking about They will be very comfortable with the current vogue for describing evangelistic activity as designed, under God, to bring about a “power encounter” between the sinner and the Savior. They will want to share in the activity themselves.
A line of thought about evangelism discussed recently seems to say that public preaching of the gospel is not all it should be, unless it is accompanied by a particular kind of physical manifestation (signs, wonders, miracles). These, it is implied, give the message credibility that it could not otherwise have and trigger the “power encounter” that the verbal message alone would hardly induce. By biblical standards, however, that seems to me a gross overstatement and indeed a real error.5 Also, it sets those who proclaim the gospel in public on a very slippery path. The temptation to manipulate people and situations to make it appear that the power of God is producing the desired manifestations is likely to prove irresistible. The backlash that comes when investigations show that God was not acting to the evangelist’s order is likely to prove inescapable.
We cannot institutionalize and harness the power of God, either in converting souls or in supplying miracles. God uses us, but not we Him. It is a spiritual lapse, however well meant, every time we try to make Him dance to our tune. This is not to imply that the God of all grace will not use human ventures in evangelism that are misconceived in this way. My point is only that evangelism is one of the activities covered by the old adage: if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing right. Perhaps it is relevant to note that most if not all of yesterday’s greatest evangelists—men like Richard Baxter, John Wesley, George Whitefield, Dwight L. Moody, Charles Spurgeon—impressed their contemporaries as, not indeed sinless, but certainly holy men. This was recognized as having much to do with the power of their ministry.
5. Real Righteousness
It is right to want to be divinely empowered for righteousness, for moral victories, for deliverance from bad habits, for loving God and for pleasing God.
The good news here is that through the means of grace—Scripture, fellowship, prayer, and church worship—all Christians may be so empowered. Through the Spirit, whose power we come to know as we discipline ourselves to use these means, we may “put to death the misdeeds of the body” (Rom. 8:13), grow in the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-26), and find strength for the specifics of living to God (1 Cor. 16:13; Eph. 6:10; Phil. 4:13; Col. 1:11; 1 Tim. 1:12; 2 Tim. 2:1; 4:17). Diligence in using the means of grace is the prime secret of deepening holiness and ongoing usefulness. Through this we enter into the momentous process envisaged in Paul’s prayer—“that you . . . may have power . . . to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ . . . that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:17-19).
The sanctifying process operates from the inside out. Grasping and being grasped by the love of Christ (cf. 2 Cor. 5:14) is right at its heart. Partially, unevenly, and incompletely, but nonetheless really, effectively, and sometimes dramatically, Christians prove in experience that the power of God changes lives. This is what real Christians want and seek, and this is what they find.
The Intensity of God’s Holiness
A further point, however, needs to be made here, or my upbeat last paragraph will have to be censured as facile and naive for only telling half the story. The spiritual growth process opens the eyes of the Christian’s heart to see more clearly not only the greatness of God’s love, but also the intensity of His holiness. We have already noted that “holiness” is the biblical label for all that sets God apart from humanity, with direct focus on His majestic potency and His moral purity. Here, the focus is on the latter.
Clearer perceptions of God’s purity have a reflex effect, as if that purity were a light shining into the recesses of the self and showing up all that has been lurking in the dark there. As a result, Christians come to see in themselves sinful motives and attitudes, failures, shortcomings, and deficiencies, of which they were unaware before, simply because until now their consciences had not assessed their conduct by so bright a light from God. The things they see include:
• stubborn habits of sin;
• chronic patterns of moral evasion;
• weaknesses of moral character;
• cravings that are really vicious;
• attitudes that are really arrogant;
• behavioral flaws due to temperament;
• inclinations to self-aggrandizement, self-indulgence, and self-pity;
• built-in self-protectiveness because of past hurts;
• moral quirks due to scars of abuse and layers of fear.
All of these faults and many more like them are now thrown into relief, as it were. One has to face them. The meaning of moral perfection—perfect love, humility, joy, peace, goodness, patience, gentleness, wisdom, fidelity, reliability, courage, fair-mindedness, and so on—is etched on the mind more clearly. The distance between that perfection and our own performance, looked at from the standpoint both of motivation and of execution, is perceived willy-nilly. Personal limitations for which we once made excuses to ourselves now seem indefensible. We wince, maybe even weep, at our own former crassness on moral matters.
Like Isaiah in the temple, so with Christians everywhere. The more vividly they see how holy God is, the more poignantly they feel how sinful and corrupt they are themselves. Because spiritual advance thus enlarges insight into the depths of one’s own fallenness, those going forward in holiness often feel they are going backward. Their deepened awareness of how sinful they still are, despite their longing to serve God flawlessly, weighs them down. As we have seen already, it calls forth from them their own “wretched man” heart-cry, echoing Paul’s in Romans 7:24. Over and over again they dare to hope that they have overcome the downdrag of sin in some area of life. Over and over again God humbles them by letting them discover that it is not yet so. To feel that one’s reach is always exceeding one’s grasp is distressing. Though knowledge of gospel grace brings them joys in abundance, they are from this standpoint distressed.
This does not, however, mean that they are in an unhealthy spiritual state. Paul’s own “wretched man” outburst is the word of the dynamic, spiritually healthy man who is dictating the letter to the Romans. His argument has led him to review what the law tells him about himself as he walks the path of new life in Christ (see Rom. 6:1-14, 7:4-6, 8:1-39). From the fact that he could not feel healthy, or claim to be healthy, as he groaned under the burden of not yet being morally perfect as he wanted to be (see Rom. 7:22; 8:23), some have inferred that either he really was not healthy or that in Romans 7:14-25 he was not writing about himself at all, despite his use of “I” and the present tense. They have taken for granted that no spiritually healthy person could feel about himself the way Paul does. But this is not so.
Intense distress at one’s continuing imperfection, in the context of an intense love of goodness as God defines it and an intense zeal to practice it, is the clearest possible sign of the holiness of heart that is central to spiritual health. The paradox—too hard a nut, it seems, for some to crack—is that increase of real holiness always brings increase of real discontent, because of what has not yet been achieved. The truth is that the sense of frustrated longing that the “wretched man” heart-cry expresses belongs to the experience of all those who seek to live in the power of the Spirit and so please their Savior-God.
But this is not the most important thing about them, nor is their continued sense of sin the best indicator of the power of the Spirit in their lives. The clearest sign is, quite simply, love for God and other people: love that, with or without much strength of feeling (for we cannot always command strong feelings), actively honors God by grateful praise and active service of others by helpful care. Love that constantly says “no” to what the Puritan Richard Baxter called the “carnal self” in order constantly to say “yes” to its own selfless calling is the strongest proof of the Spirit’s power that anyone can imagine.
This book has said things about love already which make further discussion of it needless now. All that is needed here is the above reminder that love framed by truth is the surest verification of the power of God at work in a person, plus the further reminder that the power to love is rooted in the ability to receive love from others—in the first instance, from the Father and the Son.
That you . . . may have power . . . to grasp . . . the love of Christ . . . (Eph. 3:17-18).
Christ’s love compels us (2 Cor. 5:14).
[God] loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. . . . Since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another (1 John 4:10-11).
We love because he first loved us (1 John 4:19).
A Panorama of God’s Power
The present chapter has taken us across country that is tricky to traverse these days. But now, once again, we are approaching the head of the pass, the place where the panoramic view unfolds. In light of what has been said so far, the panoramic account of the power of God in human lives, ours and those of others, comes out like this:
The Power of God Is God Himself in Action
Most modern talk of power has to do with impersonal forces in nature or society, or human prerogatives of control, but our present theme is not either of these. We are talking about the divine energy that brought the universe into existence when nothing but God Himself was in existence; the energy that upholds the universe in being every moment (for no created thing is self-sustaining), and that orders, controls, and directs everything that happens within the universe at any time. Our immediate concern is with the operation of this energy in the vast complexity of our human lives—both in the intricacies of our bodily functions and in the greater intricacies of our conscious personal being. These intricacies include our thinking, planning, decision-making, and maintaining of commitments; our habits and behavior patterns; our actions and reactions; our use of our skills, natural and acquired, and of our creativity; our hopes, fears, joys, pains, and what they do to us; our relational, moral, and aesthetic experiences; all our ups and downs of feeling, from exuberance to exhaustion, from ecstasy to apathy, and from delight to depression; and so on. All these facets of our life are touched by the energy of God.
Most particularly, we are focusing on God’s exercise of His energy in redemptive grace. By this He regenerates, assures, sanctifies, alters our disposition, changes our character through moving us to practice Christlike virtues, equips us to serve others, and enables us to do and be for God what, left to ourselves, we never could have been or have done. The power here is not the sort of power that we humans can grab hold of and manipulate. It is power that belongs to God, and that He alone manages. Just as my will is me in action, so God’s power is God in action. When God acts upon human beings they are under His control, but He is not under theirs. God’s power is sovereign power, sovereignly employed.
As God exerted great power in creation, and exerts great power in His providential upholding and shaping of things, so He has committed Himself to exert great power in the saving and upbuilding of His people. In Ephesians 3:10, Paul, having declared that the riches of Christ are unsearchable, explains the divine intent in the economy of grace as “that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms.”
The vivid picture that these words conjure up is one of the Church as God’s display area, where He shows an audience of watching angels what a breathtaking variety of wonderful things He can do in and through sin-damaged human beings. My three Greek dictionaries render the Greek word translated “manifold” 
polupoikilos) as much variegated, very many-sided, and of greatly differing colors—which renderings give us some idea of the range and resourcefulness of God’s ongoing work of power in the Church. This word, writes John Stott, “was used to describe flowers, crowns, embroidered cloth and woven carpets. The simpler word poikilos was used in the LXX [Greek Old Testament] of the ‘coat of many colours’ (AV) or ‘richly ornamented robe’ (NIV), which Jacob gave to his youngest son Joseph (Gen. 37:3,23,32). The church as a multiracial, multicultural community is like a beautiful tapestry.”6 Yes—and also as a multi-repair shop, where disordered and broken-down lives, made ugly by sin, are being reconstructed in Christlike shape. The wisdom of God that Paul has in view is not just the wisdom that brings Jew and Gentile together in the body of Christ, but is also the wisdom that directs the power that quickens the spiritually dead and makes new creatures of them in a new and lovely fellowship of holiness and love (Eph. 2:1-10; cf. 4:20-24).
Great is the power of God in the lives of the people of God! Paul’s stupendous prayer that follows, asking God that his readers might be empowered to know the full dimensions of the love of Christ so that they might be filled to all the fullness of God, and his great doxology after that, celebrating the fact that God can do “immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Eph. 3:20), further confirms the point. The potential of God’s power in our lives is incalculable. Do we reckon with this fact?
The Power of God Is the Power of the Holy Spirit
The personal distinctness of the Holy Spirit is part of the New Testament revelation of the triune nature of God. His personal ministry since Pentecost as the second Paraclete (John 14:16) is part of the New Testament revelation of the tri-personal God in loving and saving action. “Paraclete” is a Greek term to which no single word in English does justice; it means counselor, helper, advocate, supporter, comforter in the sense of encourager, in short anyone who sustains another in any connection at all. Jesus Himself was the first paraclete, and it is His place as care-giver that the Holy Spirit takes. The personal indwelling of the Holy Spirit as the source, guide, and enabler of our new life in Christ, the inner intercessor who makes up for deficiencies in our praying (Rom. 8:26) and the resident within us who is grieved when we dirty His home (Eph. 4:30), is highlighted in the New Testament (John 14:17; Rom. 8:9-11). The power of God that operates in human lives in connection with the gospel is more than once identified as the power of the Holy Spirit (Rom. 15:13,19; cf. 1 Cor. 2:4; 1 Thess. 1:5).
“Power,” as we noted, is a word associated in everyday English with impersonal forces, but the power of the Holy Spirit is the effective agency of a person, who personally relates Himself to those in whose lives He works. “Even when the New Testament speaks of the Spirit in impersonal images, the chief of which are wind, fire and water,” writes Tom Smail, “the images are used dynamically to show that they are pointing to one who has the will and the power to control us rather than to something we ourselves can control.”7 The Holy Spirit is not an impersonal force put at our disposal or harnessed to our wills; rather, the Spirit is a sovereign person who at His own will, which is also the will of the Father and the Son, disposes of us.
The Spirit operates in and through:
• our thinking (He convinces us of God’s truth);
• our decision-making (He leads us to will the will of God); and
• our affections (He draws forth from us love and hate, hope and fear, joy and sorrow, and other feeling-laden dispositions, all responding to the realities of the gospel).
His blessing on the Bible we read, and on the Christian instruction we receive, persuades us of the truth of Christianity. He shows us how God’s promises and demands bear on our lives. His new creative action at the center of our personal being so changes and energizes us that we do in fact obey the truth. The persuasion at conscious level is powerful. The heart-changing action that produces Christian commitment is almighty. First to last, however, the power exercised is personal. The Holy Spirit is a living person, not a mere force.
To be sure, He is, so to speak, shy and faceless. His ministry is to focus our attention on the Father and the Son, to teach us to say “Lord” (divine master) to Jesus and “Abba” (beloved Father) to the Sender of Jesus, and to know that when we say it we mean it (see Rom. 8:15; 10:8-13; 1 Cor. 12:3; Gal. 4:6). He does not call attention to Himself. Most of the time there is nothing humanly abnormal about our experience to force on us any awareness that the Spirit is at work in us—not, at least, until we look back on what we said and did, and see that mere nature cannot account for it. For the truth is that, as the hymn says:
Every virtue we possess,
And every victory won,
And every thought of holiness
Are his alone.
So, too, in all our service of others, from the simplest forms of practical help to the most delicate spiritual guidance and the most forthright dissuasives from sin, we are activated by the Spirit—whether we know it or not. It is the Spirit’s power that generates all the goodness of the Christian’s good works.
Something of the range of the Spirit’s ministry to the saints appears in Romans 8:4-16, where in the space of thirteen verses Paul speaks of:
1. believers living according to the Spirit, with the Spirit driving them on toward God (Rom. 8:4-6);
2. believers being inhabited by the Spirit here and now (Rom. 8:9);
3. believers having their mortal bodies quickened by the Spirit when the day of resurrection comes (Rom. 8:11);
4. believers putting to death (mortifying) their vices “by the Spirit” (Rom. 8:13);
5. believers being moved constantly to say—indeed, to cry—“Abba (Father)” to God, under the prompting of the Spirit as He witnesses to their adoption (Rom 8:15).
All this shows the aptness of Tom Smail’s title for his book on the Holy Spirit, The Giving Gift. The Spirit (the gift of the Father and the Son to us who now believe) gives us what it takes to give ourselves back to God in the grace-taught gratitude that is sparked and fed by grace-given assurance. Thus the Spirit by His power engineers our return to God, from whom we first fell.
The Father and the Son have given us the Spirit, we might say, so that He may give us back to the Father and the Son by sovereignly inducing us to give ourselves back, as the free and resolute determination of hearts now freed from sin’s dominion. The test, therefore, of whether a paranormal physical condition, or state of consciousness, is Spirit-wrought is whether it points and pulls us along the road of biblically defined self-giving to God, in humility, love, zeal, praise and thanksgiving. As a tour guide showing a building always leads sightseers along a set route, so no manifestation of any sort of power that lacks this directional thrust should ever be ascribed to the Spirit, whose agenda is always to lead us to the divine throne.
The Power of God Is Exerted in Accordance with God’s Purpose
Scripture is full of references to the power of God. We are told of its working:
• in creation;
• in providence (natural regularities, meaningful coincidences, miraculous deliverances);
• in grace (the quickening and enabling of individuals for faith, repentance, righteousness, service and witness; also, the reviving of the Church); and
• in the future glory that Christ’s return will usher in (the remaking of the cosmos, the bodily resurrection of every dead person, and the bodily transformation of every living person).
In all these acts of power, we are told, God shows Himself sovereign. He is working out His own purpose for each individual person, human or angelic, and for the history of the universe, over which He rules and which He directs towards its climax according to His eternal plan.
With regard to the history of this world, the Church is at the center. The Bible tells us what the essence of the plan is: Jesus Christ, already this world’s reigning Lord, will continue to reign until, one way or another (opinions among believers differ as to just how), all created rational beings come to acknowledge His Lordship. In the broadest sense, God is exerting His power here and now in order, step by step, to bring about this final consummation.
God has made His purpose a matter of promise to us. The Bible is full of particular promises in which aspects of that purpose are spelled out as a basis for our responsive trust. Were it not so, you could hardly call our contact with God a personal relationship at all. Real personal relationships always involve personal commitments, and promises are the utterances that regulate such commitments. A promise is a word that reaches into the future, creating a bond of obligation on the part of the one who gives it and of expectation on the part of the one who receives it. In this sense it is what logicians call a “performative” word, one that brings about a new state of affairs for those by whom and to whom it is spoken. That our mighty Creator should have bound Himself to use His power fulfilling promises to us—“very great and precious promises,” as 2 Peter 1:4 puts it—is one of the wonders of biblical religion.
All God’s promises relate, one way or another, to His purpose of glorifying Himself by blessing His human creatures. There are announcements of His purpose of:
• preserving earth’s natural order for humanity until history ends (Gen. 9:8-17);
• maintaining an abiding covenant relationship with Abraham and his descendants, including all who are in Christ (Gen. 17:1-8; Gal. 3:7-9,14,22-29);
• bestowing particular benefits on His people here and now according to their needs—forgiving their sins, delivering them from evils, strengthening them in their weakness, comforting them in their sorrows, guiding them in their perplexities, and so on;
• sending Christ back to this world in glory, to create new heavens and a new earth, and to bring His people into a final state of joy with their Savior compared with which, as C.S. Lewis says somewhere, “the highest raptures of earthly lovers will appear as mere milk and water.”
All God’s universal promises to His people relate to the fulfilling of His saving purpose for them. He wants us to see this and be glad of it.
Scripture also tells of God giving and miraculously fulfilling many specific promises to many special people—promises of progeny to particular childless wives, for instance (Gen. 17:15-19; 18:10-15; 30:22; Judg. 13; 1 Sam. 1:9-20; Luke 1:7-20), and to the Virgin Mary (Luke 1:26-38). We need to be careful in the lessons we draw from such stories. Because these miraculously born children each had a special role in the fulfilling of God’s purpose for the world, we must not read these narratives as constituting a divine promise of pregnancy to all childless wives who pray.
Nor, to give another example, may we treat narratives of Jesus’ miraculous healings in Palestine, where He evidenced His messianic claims (see Matt. 11:2-6), as constituting a promise of similar healing to any and all who pray for it today.
Nonetheless, all biblical stories of specific promises fulfilled by God’s power, and of particular gracious displays of that power in blessing, remind us of what God can do. They encourage us to rely on His omnipotence and trust Him to fulfill His purpose in each Christian’s life in the way He sees best.
Questions about the power of prayer—the relationship between our praying and God’s using of His power in the situations we pray about—constantly arise to perplex us. What has been said suggests the way to resolve them.
Prayer and God’s Will
First, can we by petitionary prayer control and direct God’s power? Is that the meaning of Jesus’ words about moving mountains by prayer (Matt. 17:20; 21:21; Mark 11:22-24; cf. 1 Cor. 13:2)? Is this the lesson for us of Elijah’s stopping and starting the rain by prayer (Jas. 5:16-18)? The short answer is: no, we cannot manipulate God into doing our will when our will is not His. Yet He regularly wills to give blessings in answer to the prayers that, through incentives from Scripture and the burdening of our hearts by His Spirit, He prompts us to make.
By this means He achieves two goals together: giving of good gifts to His children, which He loves to do; and enriching of their relationship with Him through the special joy and excitement of seeing that the good things were given in response to their petitions. Moreover, there are times—not many, but they do occur—when God gives great assurance as to what to pray for, and great confidence before the event that the prayer will be answered (as He did in Elijah’s case). The memory of such occasions (one does not forget them!) remains as a strong incentive to pray confidently and expectantly about the next need that appears.
I cannot claim to know much about this. But I recall a day of prayer for a Christian institution, for which I had some responsibility, that out of the blue had been told to close. Two hours into our praying I knew that I was being shown exactly what to ask for—a pattern of survival involving seven items. All of them at that moment seemed impossible to achieve, but all of them within eight months became reality. I recall too a morning when I walked home praying for a person facing a cancer operation the next day. As I neared home, the load of care lifted. I had a strange sense of being told I had been heard, and need not pray anymore. Many others were praying for this person, and I do not know whether any of them had any such experience. All I know is that next day the surgeon could find no trace of cancer. Such precise intimations from God in advance as to how He plans to use His power are (I believe) very rare. But others have told similar stories of how God took them into His confidence, so to speak, while they were praying to Him to use His power and show forth His glory in particular situations. As I said above, these things happen, and we should recognize and rejoice that they do.
The truth here is not that prayer changes God’s mind or twists His arm, but rather that our prayer, generated and sustained as it is by God Himself, becomes the means of our entering into God’s mind. We end up asking Him to do what He had planned all along to do, once He had brought us to the point of asking Him to do it with an appropriately felt seriousness of concern. If we want to see the power of God at work answering our prayers (and there is something wrong with us if we do not), our task is not to screw ourselves up to a self-induced certainty that what we have chosen to ask for is going to happen, just because we have assured ourselves that it will. Our task is, rather, to seek God’s mind about the needs that press on us and to allow Him to show us (with as much or as little detail as Scripture and the Spirit may suggest to us in each case) how we should pray “thy will be done”—thus following Jesus’ path of prayer in Gethsemane.
Miracles
Second, is it ever right to ask God to show His power by a miracle? Provided that the bottom line of our prayer is “thy will—not mine as against thine—be done,” there is nothing improper in our telling God when we think that a miracle—a spectacular coincidence, or a display of the power of the new creation in, for instance, organic healing—would advance His glory and the hallowing of His name. Paul prayed for miraculous healing of his thorn in the flesh. He was not wrong to do so, although as it turned out a miracle was not God’s answer to his prayer (see 2 Cor. 12:9). We only go wrong if, when we ask for a miracle, we are not prepared to find that God has other ideas. But His power remains undiminished; and although we must recognize that miracles are always unlikely, we need to remember that they are never impossible.
Our hope to see miracles must, however, always be tempered by a grasp of this next point.
The Power of God Is Shown Most Fully in Human Weakness
There are many sorts of weakness. There is the bodily weakness of the invalid or cripple; there is the character weakness of the person with besetting shortcomings and vices; there is the intellectual weakness of the person with limited ability; there is the weakness brought on by exhaustion, depression, stress, strain, and emotional overload. God sanctifies all these forms of weakness by enabling the weak to be stronger (more patient, more outgoing, more affectionate, more tranquil, more joyful, and more resourceful) than seemed possible under the circumstances. This is a demonstration of His power that He delights to give.
Paul states the principle thus: “We have this treasure (knowledge of God in Christ) in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. . . . So then, death is at work in us” (2 Cor. 4:7-12). In a self-centered, pleasure-oriented, self-indulgent world like ours today, this sounds most brutal and chilling. But it is, in fact, the true meaning of the time-honored, much-applauded dictum, “Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.” Opportunity for what?—to show His power, the power of His grace, now displayed for the praise of His glory.
Being weak, and feeling weak, is not in itself fun, nor can it be a condition of what the world would see as maximum efficiency. One might have expected God to use His power to eliminate such weakness from the lives of His servants. In fact, however, what He does again and again is to make His weak servants into walking wonders—sometimes, of course, in the physical sense, immobilized wonders—of wisdom, love, and helpfulness to others despite their disability. It is thus that He loves to show His power. This is a truth that is vitally important to understand.
Paul himself learned this lesson very thoroughly through his interaction with the Corinthians. Paul was not a man for half measures, or self-effacement, or standoff relationships. He was naturally a “ball of fire,” as we say, imperious, combative, brilliant, and passionate. Conscious of his apostolic authority and very sure that his teaching was definitive and health-giving, he spent himself unstintingly in the discipling of his converts. He felt and expressed deep affection for them because they were Christ’s, and naturally looked not only for obedience but also for affection in return.
In the case of the Corinthians, however, the obedience was wavering and grudging, and the affection was virtually nil. This, as Paul’s letters to them illustrate, was partly because Paul did not come up to their conceited expectation that any teacher worth his salt would throw his intellectual weight about in order to impress them. It was partly too because other teachers, who did throw their weight about, had secured their loyalty, and partly also because they had embraced a triumphalist view of spiritual life that valued tongue-speaking and uninhibitedness above love, humility and righteousness. They thought of Christians as persons set free by Christ to do just about anything, with no regard for the consequences. They looked down on Paul as “weak”—unimpressive in presence and in speech (2 Cor. 10:10), and possibly wrong in some of his doctrinal and moral teaching. They were very critical of his personal style and behavior.
Anyone in Paul’s position would find this painful to a degree, and it is clear from his letters to the Corinthians, with their expressions of anguished love and their alternations of pain, anger, disappointment, frustration, and sarcasm, that Paul himself did find it exceedingly painful. His response, however, was magnificent. He embraced weakness—not the weakness of ministry alleged by the Corinthians, but the weakness of a sick body, a servant role, and a hurting heart—as his calling here on earth. “If I must boast,” he wrote, “I will boast of the things that show my weakness” (2 Cor. 11:30). “I will not boast about myself, except about my weaknesses” (2 Cor. 12:5). And he suited the action to the word:
To keep me from becoming conceited . . . there was given me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong (2 Cor. 12:7-10).
What was the thorn? We do not know. But it must have been a personal disability, some malfunctioning in his make-up, or he would not have said it was in his “flesh” (meaning his created humanity). And it must have been painful, or he would not have called it a “thorn.”
Why was Paul given it (by God, in providence)? For discipline, as the apostle recognized, to keep him humble—no mean agenda, let it be said, when a man had such an enormous ego as did Paul.
In what sense was Paul’s thorn a messenger of Satan? It sparked thoughts of resentment at God, pity for himself, and despair about the future of his ministry—the sort of thoughts that Satan specializes in stirring up within us all. Anything that prompts such thinking thereby becomes a messenger of Satan to our souls.
Why did Paul pray specifically to the Lord Jesus about his thorn? Because Jesus was the healer, who had wrought many miraculous cures in the days of his flesh and some through Paul during Paul’s years of missionary ministry (see Acts 14:3,8-10; 19:11). Now Paul needed Christ’s healing power for himself, so in three solemn seasons of prayer he sought it.
Why was healing withheld? Not for lack of pure-hearted prayer on Paul’s part, nor for lack of sovereign power on Christ’s part, but because the Savior had something better in view for His servant. (God always reserves the right to answer our requests in a better way than we make them.) Jesus’ response to Paul’s prayer could be expanded like this: “Paul, I will tell you what I am going to do. I am going to display My strength in your continuing weakness, in such a way that the things you fear—the ending or enfeebling of your ministry, the loss of your credibility and usefulness—will not occur. Your ministry will go on in power and strength as before, though in greater weakness than before. You will carry this thorn in the flesh with you as long as you live. But in that condition of weakness, My strength will be made perfect. It will become more obvious than ever that it is I who keep you going.” The implication was that this state of things would be more to Paul’s personal blessing, more to the enriching of his ministry, and more to the glory of Christ the enabler, than an immediate cure would be.
What should we make of Paul’s reaction? Clearly he understood and accepted what Christ had communicated to him as he prayed. Clearly he saw it as defining his own vocation. It is natural to suppose that one reason why he narrated it so fully was that he knew he was being made a model for others to imitate. His experience certainly is a model to which again and again we find ourselves required to conform.
The pattern is that the Lord first makes us conscious of our weakness, so that our heart cries out, “I can’t handle this.” We go to the Lord to ask Him to remove the burden that we feel is crushing us. But Christ replies: “In my strength you can handle this, and in answer to your prayer, I will strengthen you to handle it.” Thus in the end our testimony, like Paul’s, is: “I can do everything through him who gives me strength” (Phil. 4:13); “The Lord stood at my side and gave me strength” (2 Tim. 4:17). And we find ourselves saying, with Paul: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows” (2 Cor. 1:3-5).
By “comfort,” Paul means the encouragement that invigorates, not the relaxation that enervates. It is in that sense that we join him in testifying to the comfort of God. We find ourselves living (if I may put it this way) baptismally, with resurrection out of death as the recurring shape of our experience. And we realize with ever-growing clarity that this is the fullest and profoundest expression of the empowered Christian life.
It appears, then, that being divinely empowered so that one grows stronger in Christ has nothing necessarily to do with performing spectacularly or, by human standards, successfully (whether or not one performs so is for God to decide). It has everything to do, however, with knowing and feeling that one is weak. In this sense, we only grow stronger by growing weaker. The world means by strength (of character, mind, and will) a natural endowment, the ability to press ahead, undistracted and undiscouraged, towards one’s goals. God-given strength or power is however a matter of being enabled by Christ Himself through the Spirit to keep on keeping on in:
• personal holiness before God;
• personal communing with God;
• personal service of God; and
• personal action for God.
One keeps on however weak one feels. One keeps on even in situations where what is being asked for seems to be beyond one, and one does so in the confidence that this is how God means it to be. For only at the point where the insufficiency of natural strength is faced, felt, and admitted does divine empowering begin.
So the power path is humble dependence on God to channel His power to the depths of our being so as to make and keep us faithful to our calling in sanctity and service. With that we depend on Him to channel His power through us into others’ lives to help them move forward at their points of need. The power pitfall is self-reliance and failure to see that without Christ we can do nothing that is spiritually significant, however much we do quantitatively, in terms of energetic activity. The power principle—God’s power scenario, we might call it—is that divine strength is perfected in conscious human weakness. The power perversions suppose that God’s power is something we can possess and control, or that we may look to Him to empower us for service when we are not looking to Him to empower us for righteousness; but those ideas, as we have seen, are utterly wrong.
If I could remember, each day of my life, that the way to grow stronger is to grow weaker, if I would accept that each day’s frustrations, obstacles, and accidents are God’s ways of making me acknowledge my weakness, so that growing stronger might become a possibility for me, if I did not betray myself into relying on myself—my knowledge, my expertise, my position, my skill with words, and so on—so much of the time, what a difference it would make to me!
I wonder how many others, besides myself, need to concentrate on learning these lessons? If you have read thus far, I urge you to pause, and ask yourself how firmly they are anchored in your heart. They need to be anchored there very firmly indeed, and I fear that in many Christian hearts today they are not. May God in His great mercy weaken us all!