Power Source

Welcome! This week we continue our series, “Superheroes through Christ.” This is the third week of this series. John Farmer opened the series two weeks ago by referring to John 14:12, where Jesus says that whoever believes in Him would do the works He was doing and would do even greater things than these. Hard as it is to believe, these are Jesus’ own words. John went on to talk about our mission, how it includes things such as going and making disciples, obeying Christ’s commands, and much more, but how at a basic level it really all comes down to believing God. As it says in Hebrews 11:6, “without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to Him must believe that He exists and He rewards those who earnestly seek Him.” The last passage quoted in this message was Mark 9:23, which says, “Everything is possible for one who believes.” Do you truly believe He exists? Do you truly believe that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him?

Last week we first spent some time really exploring the depth of God’s love for us. He made us in His image, and He loves us “just because,” not because of our works. He loved us before we did anything, and He continues to love us even after we fail and reject Him. He doesn’t just love us at a distance, either; He desires to walk with us, to be intimately involved in relationship with us. We are God’s poiema, His masterpiece, His love poem, and He puts us on display for all to see.

Last week we looked at and actually memorized two verses that really lay the groundwork for what it means to be a superhero in Christ. If you were here last week, do you still remember them?

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. – Phil. 4:13 (NKJV)

Apart from Me you can do nothing. – John 15:5b

This is essential to remember if we are to think of ourselves as superheroes, because this is a radically different message than what you see in nearly all superhero stories. We will go deeper into this today. But let me finish discussing what we talked about last week. Looking “under the cape,” what is our actual superpower through Christ? Love. Supernatural love is the power that enables us, somehow, to do, as Christ said, “even greater works than these.” Love changes hearts. This week I read a wonderful analogy Spurgeon made about people’s hearts:

“Now, men's hearts are very hard to affect. If you want to get at them for any worldly object, you can do it. A cheating world can win man's heart; a little gold can win man's heart; a trump of fame and a little clamor of applause can win man's heart. But there is not a minister breathing that can win man's heart himself. He can win his ears and make them listen; he can win his eyes, and fix those eyes upon him; he can win the attention, but the heart is very slippery. Yes! The heart is a fish that troubles all gospel fishermen to hold. You may sometimes pull it almost all out of the water; but, slimy as an eel, it slip[s] between your fingers, and you have not captured it after all.”  

But the superpower of love, displayed in believers’ lives as they believe and live by faith, can easily overpower a man’s heart. The love I saw and experienced in other the lives of my Christian friends back in graduate school had a powerful pull on my heart. It revealed to me the lack of love, the darkness in my own heart, and it made me see how different they were from me. I could not explain their love, how they were so “different” from me, apart from the faith they professed. I could not be an eyewitness of Christ, indeed, none of us in this age can be that, but I was an eyewitness of Christ in them, and it drew me powerfully to Christ Himself.

This week our title is “Power Source,” and in this, if you are a fan of superhero stories, we come to an interesting divergence from most of these stories. A theme, again and again, in superhero stories is that your superpower in itself is never enough – you also need to find the power inside yourself, the will, the determination, the “grit,” or you will not be able to triumph. Rarely does a superhero need an external source of power. There are a few exceptions; in at least some of the Iron Man stories, Iron Man needed to be externally recharged, and the Green Lantern in its various versions of the stories obtained his power through a special ring. But the vastly more common kind of superhero finds his power source from within himself.

This is not true for us! As Christ said, “Apart from Me you can do nothing.” Our power source is not ourselves, and neither is it a special device; it is a Person. It is God. Now God is God in the Trinity, Three-in-One, God the Father, God the Son (Jesus Christ), and God the Holy Spirit. Although it is difficult for us to really understand the exact nature of the Trinity, Scripture does imply that there are differences in personality in the three Persons of God, and as we shall see, again and again in Scripture, the source of our power is shown to be the Holy Spirit.

The Book of Acts is the account of the early church, of the very earliest believers in Jesus after His death and resurrection. Here is an account from before His ascension into heaven, from Acts chapter 1:

On one occasion, while He was eating with them, He gave them this command: “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” Then they gathered around him and asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” – Acts 1:4-6

He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by His own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” – Acts 1:7-8

Baptism with the Holy Spirit which Jesus explained was a gift promised by the Father – and it was promised that accompanying the Spirit would be the receiving of power. The Holy Spirit is indeed our power source. The Greek word for power is dunamis from which we get the word dynamite. The power of the Holy Spirit is the very power of God. It’s not a couple of AA batteries; it’s more like the entire Duke nuclear power plant.

In Acts 2 the disciples receive this promised gift, and in Acts 3, Peter and John came by a beggar who was lame from birth. Peter told him, “Silver or gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you. In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, walk.” He took him by hand, and instantly his feet and ankles became strong, healed, and the beggar jumped up and began walking and jumping (how I love that detail) and praising God. The people around were amazed, and a crowd formed. Here is what Peter said (and I believe his words were given to Him with the very same power that caused this man to be healed):

“Fellow Israelites, why does this surprise you? Why do you stare at us as if by our own power or godliness we had made this man walk? The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified his servant Jesus. You handed him over to be killed, and you disowned him before Pilate, though he had decided to let him go. You disowned the Holy and Righteous One and asked that a murderer be released to you. You killed the Author of life, but God raised Him from the dead. We are witnesses of this. By faith in the name of Jesus, this man whom you see and know was made strong. It is Jesus’ name and the faith that comes through Him that has completely healed him, as you can all see.” – Acts 3:12-16

Peter went on, calling them to repent and turn to God that their sins would be forgiven and that “times of refreshing” would come to them. And although the Jewish leaders then arrested Peter and John, many people came to believe because of this demonstration of God’s power. But notice what Peter says – “Why do you stare at us as if by our own power or godliness we had made this man walk?” Again, our power source is not internal; we don’t have to toughen up, or even look inward at all – we look to God; it is He and He alone who gives us the power we need for that moment.

After that arrest, they went before the elders and teachers of the law, certainly including many of the very people who were responsible for the death of Jesus, and Peter, as it says in Acts 4:8, spoke powerfully, filled with the Holy Spirit; that is, the Holy Spirit empowered and guided Him to say the things He said. The leaders commanded them not to speak or teach in the name of Jesus, but they refused, again emboldened by the Spirit. The believers got together to pray, and it says the Holy Spirit enabled them to continue to share the word of God boldly; as it says in Acts 4:33,

With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. – Acts 4:33a

 In Acts 6 we are told of Stephen, a superhero of the faith if there ever was one, and it says the following:

Now Stephen, a man full of God’s grace and power, performed great wonders and signs among the people. Opposition arose, however, from members of the Synagogue of the Freedmen (as it was called)—Jews of Cyrene and Alexandria as well as the provinces of Cilicia and Asia—who began to argue with Stephen. But they could not stand up against the wisdom the Spirit gave him as he spoke. – Acts 6:8-10

Notice yet again how this passage makes it clear that Stephen’s power was not his own, but that given by the Spirit. The Spirit enabled Him to perform miracles and speak with great wisdom.

In the book of Romans, Paul writes much about the nature of grace and salvation, and near the end of the letter he writes,

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. – Romans 15:13

So even our hope rightly comes from a power outside of us, again, the power of the Holy Spirit. Paul goes on to say:

I myself am convinced, my brothers and sisters, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with knowledge and competent to instruct one another. Yet I have written you quite boldly on some points to remind you of them again, because of the grace God gave me to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles. He gave me the priestly duty of proclaiming the gospel of God, so that the Gentiles might become an offering acceptable to God, sanctified by the Holy Spirit. Therefore I glory in Christ Jesus in my service to God. 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 wonders, through the power of the Spirit of God. – Rom. 15:14-19

Again, it is all by the power of the Holy Spirit. We don’t look inward; we look to God. I want ot give you a few more examples of this great truth:

Therefore, as it is written: “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.” And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power. – I Cor. 1:31-2:5

As superheroes through Christ, in ourselves we have nothing to boast about. If we tell someone about God and they come to faith in Christ, that wasn’t us; it was Him. If we show someone radical love and it significantly affects the person, again, it is all Him. The power, the dynamite, is of the Holy Spirit. He is the power source.

To be a superhero through Christ, relying on self is toxic. Scripture even says that hardships are good in that they help us to give up relying on self. From Paul in 2 Corinthians:

We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and He will deliver us again. On Him we have set our hope that He will continue to deliver us, as you help us by your prayers. Then many will give thanks on our behalf for the gracious favor granted us in answer to the prayers of many. – 2 Cor. 1:8-11

In the superhero stories hardships come because it makes the stories exciting, interesting. If there weren’t major conflicts, superhero stories would be pretty boring. It is a somewhat discomforting feeling, but might it also be true that our hardships and trials, at least in part, are there to help us not only rely on God ourselves, but also to point others to do the same? We are a story that is being read by those around us, our friends and family and coworkers and even this very body of believers. Paul expresses this thought later in 2 Corinthians when he writes  

But we have this treasure 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. – 2 Cor. 4:7-9

Clay pots were a dime a dozen – plain, unadorned, used for mundane purposes. I have mentioned before that a modern equivalent might be the plastic bags you get at the grocery store – at a yard sale, you couldn’t even give these away (unless you put other more valuable stuff in them). We are superheroes but we look like Wal-Mart bags. No one would know just by looking at us that we are superheroes. We are Clark Kent on the outside but Superman on the inside, empowered totally not buy us but completely by God.

Paul later in 2 Corinthians talks about his unspecified “thorn in the flesh,” which he three times asked God to take from him.

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. 12:9-10 

Again, the hard circumstances are an opportunity to rely on the power of Christ, to give up on trying to find the power within us. This is a hard lesson! Do you delight in weaknesses? Really? Do you love it when people speak badly of you at work or elsewhere? Do you enjoy hardships and difficulties? I don’t think this comes naturally to any of us. And I don’t think we need to go out seeking hardships – that is the wrong lesson to take away from this. Even Paul did pray for God to take away his thorn in the flesh. But when you have prayed and the answer is no, when you can tell that a challenge has led you to say, “Lord, I give up! Help me!” understand that God is working powerfully in your life! He is making you an earthen vessel so that His power can at last shine through you. What Paul is saying here is, it’s worth it. It’s worth it to go through all this stuff if that is what it takes to fully yield to Christ so that His power can work through you.

This power God gives us through the Holy Spirit means that we can be bold like, well superheroes, bold like the apostles in Acts. I love what Paul writes to Timothy along these lines:

For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love and self-discipline. So do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord or of me his prisoner. Rather, join with me in suffering for the gospel, by the power of God. He has saved us and called us to a holy life—not because of anything we have done but because of His own purpose and grace. – 2 Tim. 1:7-9

The Spirit is our power source not only for boldness but for love, the love we talked about last week, our superpower. And also the Spirit is our power source for self-discipline, something we will talk about in a later message in this series. The Spirit enables us to do everything God calls us to do in this life. As it says in 2 Peter, written by the guy who was God’s instrument to make that lame man jump for joy in Acts,

His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and goodness. – 2 Peter 1:3

So if the Spirit is our power source, what are some practical steps we can take? I think it is important to remember that the Holy Spirit is a person, not “stuff.” To be filled with the Spirit is to be filled with Him, not with some kind of substance. The issue at heart is what will it take for us to allow the Holy Spirit to really direct us, to even control us?

To be controlled by someone is something that goes against our nature, perhaps especially here in America, where independence is part of our national DNA. But to be filled with the Spirit really is to be controlled by Him.  Jesus spoke about the Spirit repeatedly during His years on earth, but I am especially drawn to this particular instance:

On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to Me and drink. Whoever believes in Me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” By this He meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified. – John 7:37-39

I want to read to you portions of a powerful extended commentary by Alexander Maclaren, a preacher who lived in England from 1826 to 1910:

“The occasion and date of this great saying are carefully given by the Evangelist, because they throw much light on its significance and importance. It was ‘on the last day, that great day of the Feast,’ that ‘Jesus stood and cried.’ The Feast was that of Tabernacles, which was instituted in order to keep in mind the incidents of the desert wandering. On the anniversary of this day the Jews still do as they used to, and in many a foul ghetto and frowsy back street of European cities, you will find them sitting beneath the booths of green branches, commemorating the Exodus and its wonders. Part of that ceremonial was that on each morning of the seven[th], and possibly on the eighth, ‘the last day of the Feast,’ a procession of white-robed priests wound down the rocky footpath from the Temple to Siloam, and there in a golden vase drew water from the spring, chanting, as they ascended and re-entered the Temple gates where they poured out the water as a libation, the words of the prophet, ‘with joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation.’”

“Picture the scene to yourselves – the white-robed priests toiling up the pathway, the crowd in the court, the sparkling water poured out with choral song. And then, as the priests stood with their empty vases, there was a little stir in the crowd, and a Man who had been standing watching, lifted up a loud voice and cried, ‘If any man thirst, let him come unto Me, and drink.’ Strange words to say, anywhere and anywhen, daring words to say there in the Temple court! For there and then they could mean nothing less than Christ’s laying His hand on that old miracle, which was pointed to by the rite, when the rock yielded the water, and asserting that all which it did and typified was repeated, fulfilled, and transcended in Himself, and that not for a handful of nomads in the wilderness, but for all the world, in all its generations.” […]

“You remember the story of how the people in the wilderness, distressed by that most imperative of all physical cravings, thirst, turned upon Moses and Aaron and said, ‘Why have ye brought us here to die in the wilderness, where there are neither vines nor pomegranates,’ but a land of thirst and death? Just as Christ, […] selected and pointed to the poisoned and serpent-stricken camp as an emblem of humanity, and just as He pointed to the hunger of the men that were starving there, as an emblem, […] here He says: ‘That is the world – a congregation of thirsty men raging in their pangs, and not knowing where to find solace or slaking for their thirst.’ I do not need to go over all the dominant desires that surge up in men’s souls, the mind craving for knowledge, the heart calling out for love, the whole nature feeling blindly and often desperately after something external to itself, which it can grasp, and in which it can feel satisfied. You know them; we all know them. Like some plant growing in a cellar, and with feeble and blanched tendrils feeling towards the light which is so far away, every man carries about within himself a whole host of longing desires, which need to find something round which they may twine, and in which they can be at rest.”

“‘The misery of man is great upon him,’ because, having these desires, he misreads so many of them, and stifles, ignores, atrophies to so large an extent the noblest of them. I know of no sadder tragedy than the way in which we misinterpret the meaning of these inarticulate cries that rise from the depths of our hearts, and misunderstand what it is that we are groping after, when we put out empty, and, alas! too often unclean, hands, to lay hold on our true good.”

“Brethren, you do not know what you want, many of you, and there is something pathetic in the endless effort to fill up the heart by a multitude of diverse and small things, when all the while the deepest meaning of aspirations, yearnings, longings, unrest, discontent is, ‘My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God.’ Nothing less than infinitude will satisfy the smallest heart of the humblest and least developed man. Nothing less than to have all our treasures in one accessible, changeless Infinity will ever give rest to a human soul. You have tried a multiplicity of trifles. It takes a great many bags of coppers to make up L. 1000, and they are cumbrous to carry. Would it not be better to part with a multitude of goodly pearls, if need be, in order to have all your wealth, and the satisfaction of all your desires, in the ‘One Pearl of great price’? It is God for whom men are thirsting, and, alas! so many of us know it not. As the old prophet says, in words that never lose their pathetic power, ‘they have hewn out for themselves cisterns’-one is not enough-they need many. They are only cisterns, which hold what is put into them, and they are ‘broken cisterns,’ which cannot hold it. Yet we turn to these with a strange infatuation, which even the experience that teaches fools does not teach us to be folly. We turn to these; and we turn from the Fountain; the one, the springing, the sufficient, the unfailing, the exuberant Fountain of living waters. Some of you have cisterns on the tops of your houses, with a coating of green scum and soot on them, and do you like that foul draught better than the bright blessing that comes out of the heart of the rock, flashing and pure?”

“But not only are these desires misread, but the noblest of them are stifled. I have said that the condition of humanity is that of thirst. Christ speaks […] as if that thirst was by no means universal, and, alas! it is not, ‘If any man thirst’; there are some of us that do not, for we are all so constituted that, unless by continual self-discipline, and self-suppression, and self-evolution, the lower desires will overgrow the loftier ones, and kill them, as weeds will some precious crop. And some of you are so much taken up with gratifying the lowest necessities and longings of your nature, that you leave the highest all uncared for, and the effect of that is that the unsatisfied longing avenges itself, for your neglect of it, by infusing unrest and dissatisfaction into what else would satisfy the lowest. ‘He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver, nor he that loveth abundance with increase,’ but he that loves God will be satisfied with less than silver, and will continue satisfied when decrease comes. If you would suck the last drop of sweetness out of the luscious purple grapes that grow on earth, you must have the appetite after the best things, recognised, and ministered to, and satisfied. And when we are satisfied with God, we shall ‘have learnt in whatsoever state we are, therewith to be self-sufficing.’ But, as I say, the highest desires are neglected, and the lowest are cockered and pampered, and so the taste is depraved. Many of you have no wish for God, and no desire after high and noble things, and are perfectly contented to browse on the low levels, or to feed on ‘the husks that the swine do eat,’ whilst all the while the loftiest of your powers is starving within. Brethren, before we can come to the Rock that yields the water, there must be the sense of need. Do you know what it is that you want? Have you any desire after righteousness and purity and nobleness, and the vision of God flaming in upon the pettinesses and commonplaces of this life which is ‘sound and fury, signifying nothing,’ and is trivial in all its pretended greatness, unless you have learned that you need God most of all, and will never be at rest till you have Him?”

I believe this is the first I have read of Alexander Maclaren, but I intend to read a lot more of him. Applying what he says, we need to repent of our thirsts for this world so that we can once again find our thirst for Christ. And then we do need to come to Him and drink; drink through reading His Word, drink through prayer, drink through contemplation and reflection and simply being quiet before Him. We need to drink deeply. Then, and only then, will we find ourselves filled with the Holy Spirit, yielded to Him, controlled by Him, and only then, rivers of living water will flow from within us.

There is no being a superhero for Christ apart from desiring Christ. There is no source of power apart from God. There will be no fruit, no works, nothing, apart from Him.

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. – Phil. 4:13 (NKJV)

Apart from Me you can do nothing. – John 15:5b

The power source is God. It is the Holy Spirit. It’s not us. Unlike all those superhero stories, the answer is not to look deeper within us, to have more resolve, to try harder. It is to come to Christ and drink. I want to end with this awesome prayer in Ephesians 3:

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 Lord’s holy people, 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. – Eph. 3:16-21