The #1 thing to remember – if you are praying, reading the Bible and going to church then you probably ARE walking in power even if you don’t feel like it! The devil is going to try to mislead you. “I’m useless, I’m not doing what God wants me to, I’ve still got this problem so I can’t be effective, this happened and that ruined everything, blah blah blah.”

Here are 4 reasons that we don’t feel powerful – and why we’re probably wrong.

#1. God is teaching you to depend on Him and not on yourself. Ask for discernment so you can see where God is using you, especially around your spiritual gifts. Praise God for using you in this way!

See, the Sovereign LORD comes with power,
and he rules with a mighty arm.
See, his reward is with him,
He tends his flock like a shepherd:
He gathers the lambs in his arms
and carries them close to his heart;
he gently leads those that have young. (Is. 40:10-11)

#2. God is helping you to root out deeply entrenched sin or guilt. You have unresolved sin in your life that is stopping the flow of power. We are all sinners and we can certainly keep bearing fruit in some areas, but some sin really gums up the works and God is working with you on it. Ask God for discernment about a sin that’s stopping you from realizing a lot of blessing. Remember that we are forgiven, and if you are confessing your sin and trying to obey then you will still bear fruit!

You may also be dealing with guilt over an old sin or sins that are over and done with. Ask for forgiveness and know that you have it.

Comfort, comfort my people,
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and proclaim to her
that her hard service has been completed,
that her sin has been paid for,
that she has received from the LORD’s hand
double for all her sins. (Is. 40:1-2)

#3. Satan is telling you all sorts of lies so you don’t really believe you can have power in Christ! Study the power of God in the Bible and pray that God helps you to see the truth about Him, and receive His blessing and power. Remember that Satan is the father of lies! If you hear a discouraging voice inside your head that is NOT the voice of our loving Savior! The Holy Spirit may warn you about something but He will not condemn you.

Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:
“Now have come the salvation and the power
and the kingdom of our God,
and the authority of his Messiah.
For the accuser of our brothers and sisters,
who accuses them before our God day and night,
has been hurled down. (Rev. 12:10)

#4. God has you walking through the desert in order to learn and grow. Trust in Him and keep walking because He’s walking right alongside you!

A voice of one calling:
“In the wilderness prepare
the way for the LORD;
make straight in the desert
a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be raised up,
every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
the rugged places a plain.
And the glory of the LORD will be revealed,
and all people will see it together.
For the mouth of the LORD has spoken.” (Is. 40:3-5)

Just keep going – and trust Him for the strength you need. He will give it to you whether you feel like you’re flying, running or just trudging along.

He gives strength to the weary
and increases the power of the weak.
Even youths grow tired and weary,
and young men stumble and fall;
but those who hope in the LORD
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint. (Isaiah 40:29-31)

And…

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, forever and ever! Amen.  (Eph. 3:20-21)

Immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine? I can imagine a lot! So if you are not experiencing power in your life, what’s the deal?

There are TWO KEYS that open the door to power. One is obvious — and one isn’t.

• The master key is Christ. Look – His Holy Spirit is inside of us. It is His death, resurrection and ascension that allowed us to receive great power. This power is very real and is always available to us when we act in the will of God. Satan actively works to keep us blinded to the great power available to us in Christ Jesus. Christ’s body IS the church! Christ is not LIMITED to the church but the church embodies His power and presence in the world. He is the key to unlock salvation and the entry into the kingdom of God.
• There is another key – our own need and weakness. We think of our weakness as blocking the power of Christ. But that isn’t true at all. Because when we admit our weakness to God, THEN His power flows into our lives. From 2 Cor. 12:9 “’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.” Note that I knew the FIRST part of the verse. I didn’t realize until just this morning that the verse has a Part 2!

What Are our Weaknesses?

There are lots of kinds of weaknesses. Let’s look at 5 in particular: sin, insults, hardships, persecution, and calamity. The last 4 are from Paul’s list in 2 Cor. 12.

1. Sin — One weakness is certainly sin. We are sinful creatures. Sin can block up the flow of power, but we are also under grace! If we waited to be sinless before we had God’s power, we’d be waiting a really, really long time. Pray to be healed from sin and temptation, confess your sin, and God will forgive and empower us in spite of our weakness.
2. Insults — When people make snarky comments about you or about what we believe. When gossip gets back to you it hurts. (By the way – DON’T GOSSIP!) Or someone says something insulting to your face, or even when you read some really rude person who hates Christianity and Christians.
3. Hardships — Tough circumstances that are hard to bear. They may be forced on you or they may be consequences of your own bad decisions. Whatever caused them, they are happening and they are no fun at all.
4. Persecutions — When people abuse you because of your faith. This is not as obvious in this country as it is in countries with active political or social persecution. But there are people around who seriously will not like you because you are a believer. In the U.S. this generally takes the form of people thinking you are judgmental, mean, weak, or deluded. Or all of the above. They will try to get back at you if they can, with words if nothing else.
5. Disasters – These are the really big things like bankruptcy, losing your house, losing your job, losing loved ones, major illnesses. These are terrible things to walk through.

Yet in all of these things, what did God tell Paul? Let’s read it again: “’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.” (2 Cor. 12:9)

So when you feel weak, you know what? Turn to God in prayer and ask HIM to make you strong with HIS power, not with your own! Ask and you will receive.

As I was studying this, I felt bad because I don’t feel powerful at all these days. But you know what? Good! Because I needed to let God fill me with HIS power, not mine. Mine is tiny and inadequate and is based on feeling confident about stuff. What I need to do is have confidence in HIM and HIS power in me.

We may feel weak. In fact, we are! But we don’t STOP there. Our own weakness lets us look to Christ and Christ alone. Amen.

“Sin”

by D. Gwenallt Jones

When we strip off all our garments,
The cloak of respectability and academic knowledge,
The cloth of culture and the silks of learning,
How bare is the soul, the naked impurity:
The primitive mire in our makeup is revealed,
The beastly slime in our blood and bone,
The bow’s arrow held between our finger and thumb
And the barbaric rhythm in our dance.
As we wander through the ancient, primeval forest,
We glimpse through the branches a strip of Heaven,
Where the saints sing anthems of grace and faith,
The magnificat of His salvation;
So like wolves we lift our nostrils sky-wards
And howl for the Blood by which we are redeemed.

He was the Word, a wild and dancing Word,
before the world began; he danced in flame,
and galaxies were born, and songs became
the sinew of our bones, and he was Lord.

He danced in bread and wine, and in the bright
blue fountains of the Water of our birth,
and all the bells rang, and along the earth
the incense of a prayer rose, fresh and light.

He danced in speech, in names that had a power, in dreams with symbols vibrant and unknown, and all that was and is and is to come
was whole in grace and worship in that hour.

But we have fenced him in and tied him down;
we think he comes as words and not as Word,
as only what we prove, what we have heard—
not seen, not tasted, and therefore not found.

We preach a thousand sermons, and we lift
a thousand prayers in motions memorized,
and stumble home and have not realized:
the dance is mind and heart—the dance is gift.

He seeks us in the bread we fear to break,
the banners that we lift with trembling hand,
the images we fail to understand,
the steps in God’s strange dance we fear to take.

He is the Word, a wild and dancing Word;
he sings; his joy is fierce, his longing deep.
He calls us from ourselves and bids us weep
and dance and worship him, for he is Lord.

(“Lord of the Dance” by Jennifer Lynn Woodruff. Reprinted from Weavings XVII/2, March/April 2002, “Creativity.”)

“Ephraim is like a dove,
easily deceived and senseless—
now calling to Egypt,
now turning to Assyria.” (Hosea 7:11)

The book was probably written in the 8th century BC by the same circle of prophets who wrote down the deeds of Elijah and Elisha in 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles. This is not fiction, it is an inspired report of the prophet Jonah’s experiences in Nineveh of the Assyrians.

Historical Background

Jonah was a prophet during the 8th century reign of Israel’s King Jeroboam II, who ruled for 41 years. At that time Israel was divided into the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah. Jerusalem and the Temple were located in Judah, so the rival kings of Israel tried to institute their own places of worship within their borders.

At the time of Jonah, Jeroboam was a very successful military leader. He had crushed Israel’s conqueror Syria and their capital city of Damascus. The Assyrian Empire and the great royal city of Nineveh was a threat but they had not yet started the series of invasions that would later destroy Israel.

But the northern kingdom, whose capital was Samaria, was proud, rich, oppressive, and apostate because the kings supported cultic worship in conflict with the Temple in Jerusalem. And the prophets Hosea, Joel, Jonah and Amos all rose up during this period to warn the Israelites that God was not pleased! Later the northern kingdom would fall permanently to Assyria.

In fact, listen to this: archeologists recovered inscriptions from the Assyrian king Sargon’s palace about these very events! One inscription reads: “The inhabitants of Samaria, who plotted with another king against me, not to do service and not to bring tribute and who did battle, I fought against them with the power of the great gods, my lords. I counted as spoil 27,280 people, together with their chariots, and gods, in which they trusted. I formed a unit with 200 of [their] chariots for my royal force. I settled the rest of them in the midst of Assyria. I repopulated Samaria more than before. I brought into it people from countries conquered by my hands. I appointed my eunuch as governor over them. And I counted them as Assyrians.”

But here is the thing. While Hosea, Joel and Amos were called to prophesy to Israel and warn it to repent, Jonah was given a different mission. He was supposed to go to Nineveh, Assyria’s royal city, and call them to repent too! And he didn’t want to go! So he thought he would run away from God. This was a big part of his problem, that he identified God completely with Israel. Remember that the ancient world believed in local and regional gods, and the farther you went from their physical locations the less power they had. Of course that is not true of God and Israel knew it.

Psalm 139:7-12 says:
7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.

But we can understand how Jonah felt that way. So when God told Jonah to go to Nineveh and preach to them, he did what any red-blooded 8th century guy would do – he ran away! He went to the Jewish port of Jaffa and set sail as a passenger for the Asia Minor port city of Tarshish. By the way, we can’t be sure but Tarshish may have been the NT city of Tarsus where the apostle Paul would be born 800 years later.

But God sent a huge storm that nearly broke up the ship. The sailors were shouting and praying to their own gods – the Bible says “each cried out to his own god” (Jonah 1:5). As all this is going on, Jonah ended up confessing to the sailors that he was a prophet of the Lord and that he was running away from his God “who made the sea and the dry land.” (Jonah 1:9) Jonah heroically told them to toss him overboard since the storm was his fault.

By the way, this may not be the great act of courage that it looks like. Jonah apparently made a habit of asking God to just kill him and get it over with, as we will see later in the book. To their credit, the sailors tried not to kill him. “Instead, the men did their best to row back to land. But they could not, for the sea grew even wilder than before.” (Jonah 1:13) They ended up praying to to the Lord as well. Note that the Bible makes it very clear that they stopped praying to their own gods right then, and prayed to the God who had power over the waves, far from his own Temple. And quite unlike their own weak gods! This is the first example in Jonah of God displaying His power and mercy to Gentiles! So they tossed Jonah overboard at his own request. “At this the men greatly feared the LORD, and they offered a sacrifice to the LORD and made vows to him.” (Jonah 1:16)

But Jonah did NOT drown. The Lord sent a giant fish to swallow him up, and Jonah spent 3 days and nights inside the creature. He did not curse God but praised Him with a beautiful prayer found in Jonah chapter 2.

8 “Those who cling to worthless idols
turn away from God’s love for them.
9 But I, with shouts of grateful praise,
will sacrifice to you.
What I have vowed I will make good.
I will say, ‘Salvation comes from the LORD.’” (Jonah 2:8-9)

Now – everybody asks how Jonah could have survived 3 days in the belly of a great fish or whale. It is possible for a large whale like a blue or sperm whale to swallow a human whole, also great white sharks could do it. And they have multi-chambered stomachs where the first stomach does not have digestive juices. Air would be a problem though! Ultimately I believe that God rescued Jonah miraculously from going overboard, and I think He did it with a marine creature that He prepared. Do we honestly believe that the creator of all animals could not create a creature anymore?

After 3 days the creature expelled Jonah onto dry land. We don’t know the location of the land, but God told Jonah again to go to Nineveh and preach that it would be destroyed unless it turned to God.

This was exactly the same message that God gave Jonah’s contemporaries to preach to Jerusalem, but this message was to the Gentiles! This time Jonah did what God said, traveled to the great city of Nineveh, and started to preach in the streets. His message? If they did not repent and turn to the real God, in 40 days Nineveh would be destroyed! Jonah may have expected to be run out of town, even martyred. But what happened? Nineveh listened! The people believed what Jonah was saying! And when the message of the prophet reached the King (or Royal Governor) of Nineveh, he commanded a city-wide fast and repentance! And this was a city that worshipped multiple “gods!” So the Bible says that because they repented, God did not destroy them at that time.

By the way — later on Assyria would fall into evil again and God reinstituted His judgment. In 612 BC, about 150 years after Jonah’s trip, Nineveh would be utterly destroyed by a combined force of Medes and Babylonians. It would never rise again from the ashes. Its ruins were discovered in 1909 located close to the Iraqi city of Mosul. Even the ruins are unprotected from weather, modern building, and looting, and it is a sad and lonely place.

But at Jonah’s time that generation was saved because God loved them, and generations after them would have been saved as well if they had been faithful to God.

Jonah’s Response

Well, you’d think that Jonah would be happy about his successful prophetic mission.

You would be wrong. He was furious! He didn’t WANT the Ninevites to be saved, he hated them! God spoke to Jonah about that. God’s words are among the most moving in the Bible. God said about the violent Ninevites: “Should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?” (Jonah 4:11) God did not WANT to destroy 120,000 ignorant people OR their animals! We concentrate a lot in the OT on the cities and people that God directed the Hebrews to destroy. He is a sovereign God and really doesn’t owe a sinful world a thing. But He is both Justice AND Love, and He wanted to save Nineveh’s people and their animals from destruction. And when they turned to Him in time, He did.

The story ends there. We don’t know Jonah’s response but we can guess. He must have made his way back to Israel because his story was recorded, and God’s words of love and concern were written down. That is why I believe that Jonah repented for good this time.

Finally, Jesus referred to the story as a prophecy of His own coming to Jew and Gentile.

38 Then some of the Pharisees and teachers of the law said to him, “Teacher, we want to see a sign from you.”
39 He answered, “A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. 40 For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. 41 The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now something greater than Jonah is here. (Matthew 12:38-41)

Jonah was a prophecy not only to the Gentile city of Nineveh, but it was also a Messianic prophecy to the Jews – and to us. Amen.