Dunamis

I was looking back in my prayer journal recently, and came upon an entry from January 2, 2009.  If you remember, there was a devastating ice storm that hit the south .  Much of the region, over one million people, were without power.  My parents, in Springfield, MO survived  for 2 weeks with heat from a wood stove. As I looked at the pictures and read the first-hand descriptions, God laid on my heart that much of the “church” had been operating without power for ages, and no one was complaining. Sadly, it was business as usual.   The early church was a “happening place”.  People being healed of all sorts of physical and mental illnesses; lives were changed in dramatic fashion; prisoners released while guards slept, and so on.  To top it off, people were excited, and happy to be working in the supernatural power of God.  They believed that the promise of Holy Spirit infilling was true, and it showed in everything they undertook.  The Greek word for miraculous power, dunamis, was used to explain this phenomenon.  Our English word dynamite is derived from it.  Authentic, supernatural power, available to all believers, at all time.  Today, people, even Christians, seem to think that this type of power is not available.  How wrong they are, and how weak it has made the body of Christ.  Nowhere can I find scripture stating that God will ever shut off the power.  Just the opposite…we need power now more than ever in this intellectually, technologically jaded world.   A showroom fresh Mercedes may look pretty sweet sitting in your driveway, but if it has no engine it’s useless.  That is what we have let the church become, pretty but not functional.  Jesus promised us this, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”  Acts 1:8. I, for one, am holding him to it.  Please join me today in employing His power!!