From Powerless To PowerfulSample

Lights Out

Bam! Zap! Pow! and all of the other Batmanesque cartoon words you can think of described the moment, and then the power went out. New York City came to a screeching halt. Subways stopped, Times Square no longer glowed with neon, the evening Mets game against the Giants was cancelled, and Wall Street closed its doors. The largest city in the U.S. was in the dark ages, literally. The newspaper headlines the next day simply read “Powerless.” That one word said it all. Even with all the state-of-the art technology, and buildings reaching into the clouds, the lack of power resulted in thousands of people walking home from a shortened and purposeless workday.

New York City residents still had all of the appliances they’d had before the storm, but they were now useless. No power, no progress; just sit and wait.

God’s power is a necessary ingredient for us too. Not much happens without it, because true light for our path comes from the power source of Christ.

Every Christ-follower and every leader can rest assured that God’s will has God’s power behind it. God’s power may be manifested in quiet, steady ways, or in dramatic, you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it miracles. Moses experienced both, but as he carried out his burning-bush assignment, he came to understand that God’s will, done in God’s way, has God’s power. Always. 

Moses made it his business to know the God of God’s will. He followed his God from the back-side of nowhere to the courts of Pharaoh the same way you and I are called to follow Him: one step at a time. And God did, indeed, demonstrate His power in spectacular ways when Moses came before Pharaoh. Why were those demonstrations needed? Because when Moses and Aaron asked Pharaoh for the release of the Israelites, he resisted, just as God predicted he would. 

It was that persistent hardness of heart that prompted God’s mighty demonstrations of His power through a series of miraculous signs and terrible plagues. Some might argue that these were merely coincidental or caused by nature, but at least four factors mark the difference between a miraculous sign and a natural phenomenon: timing, location, purpose and prediction. These factors can determine what is a miracle and what is not. And these factors also help us personally determine God’s will; so, a quick overview of how we know the plagues were miraculous is helpful.

If you want to get Gregg Matte’s book, Finding God’s Will, please visit: http://www.bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/finding-god-s-will/358282