Great Themes No.8 The Power of God

The reading is from Ephesians chapter 3. For this reason I pull the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles. Surely you have heard about the administration of God's grace that was given to me for you, that is, the mystery made known to me by revelation, as I have already written briefly. In reading this then, you will be able to understand my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to men in other generations, as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to God's holy apostles and prophets.

This mystery is that through the gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus. I became a servant of this gospel by the gift of God's grace given me through the working of his power. Although I am less than the least of all God's people, this grace was given to me to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ and to make plain to everyone the administration of this mystery, which for ages has been kept hidden in God, who created all things.

His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to his eternal purpose, which he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord. In him and through faith in him we approach God with freedom and confidence. I ask you, therefore, not to be discouraged because of my sufferings for you, which are your glory.

The burden still remains from last week when I brought to your attention this fact that a Christian is born in power. The initiation experience, the coming to Jesus Christ is a power experience. But not only is he born in power, he continues in power and he will go out in power.

The Christian community as I see it are individuals around the world of which the Tabernacle Fellowship is but a small, small sample that are placed into God's circuit and pulsating through that circuit is the power of God as the illustration floods into your mind of an electrical circuit with a generator and the power of the mains humming its way through. Now, just for starters, let me remind you and those of you who are not Christian need to be informed about this that the moment a person comes to the Lord Jesus and asks for his sins to be forgiven, he has an experience of the dynamic of God. A Christian, let it be said, is someone who acknowledges that Jesus is the Lord, the second person of the Trinity, that he died on the cross so that all our misdoing might be forgiven and when we confess this in faith, then we are born again.

The word that sometimes is used from the pulpit to describe such an experience is regeneration and that's a word that jumps out of the vocabulary of the electrician. Regeneration. The renewing of power.

Not that you ever had that power before yourself but the beginning of the race when Adam was alive, before he fell, he knew the power of God but it was disconnected when he broke the law of God and as a result he was disarmed of that power. And we are born into this world as sinful people, powerless people, strangers from God, cut off from the life of God. But the day comes in the experience of the believer when he encounters Jesus Christ and he confesses, as I have just indicated, his need of the Savior, he recognizes that there is no other hope in this world.

This world is in a state of utter confusion. There are many, many people, many voices outside that of the evangelical pulpit which are saying more or less the same thing. The whole situation is hopeless.

And the believer in Jesus Christ comes to him and says, I believe that life makes sense with you. I need your life within me. I want to become partaker of the very power, of the very essence of your being.

And that is what the apostle Peter said really constituted salvation. You become partaker of the life of God. Now that's again a concept that's difficult to grasp hold of.

You certainly can't just acquire it intellectually. The Bible tells us that when people confess Jesus, then to Him, to them, gives He the power to become the sons of God. Now I grant you that word power really means authority.

But you can't have authority without power, can you? And when you move through to the letter that Paul writes to the church at Rome, you find one of the greatest definitions of the gospel. Romans 1.16, I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ. It is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.

When the apostle moves on in his writing and pens the letter, which actually probably historically came first to the Christians at Corinth, he makes reference to the gospel, to the message of the cross. And he says in the opening chapter in the 18th verse, 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. And he goes on and repeats exactly the same thing in a later verse, perhaps putting it across even more strongly.

You see the point and the reason why I'm bringing you to these scriptures, and I could give you many more. The Christian is a person who is born into power. You can't be regenerated without that.

You experience God. You cannot be saved merely by a deduction from a text. You believe that Jesus Christ is Lord.

Yes, I believe Jesus Christ is Lord. You believe that you need your sins forgiven. Yes, I believe I need my sins forgiven.

Well, take your sins to Jesus. I've done just that. All right, you're saved.

No. That's the ascent of the mind. But it goes beyond that.

You need to know the indwelling of the Spirit, the entry of the Spirit of God into your life. And without the Spirit of God, you can't be saved. You are born by the regenerating power of the Holy Ghost.

That's what makes the Christian a different person than anybody else. That's what makes Christianity different from any other philosophy. It's the very life of God being planted in the soul.

A great preacher, to whom I'm going to be making reference on several occasions this evening, by the name of George Whitfield, when he was a student at one of our major universities, was given a book by that name, The Life of God in the Soul of Man. He read that book and he said, I want this. He spent days and nights wandering around the streets of his university town, pleading that somehow he might have his sins forgiven.

And the day came when God flooded his heart and cleansed him. Whitfield was born into the Christian church in power. Now, if we're a powerful community, at least ideally speaking, then the life of the community shall be marked with the power of the Holy Spirit.

And where would you expect to read of this, to feel this very power in the New Testament? Well, obviously when you take up the story of the church. And that means that you turn to the fifth book of the New Testament, the Acts of the Apostles. And at the beginning there, you find the words of our Lord Jesus directed to the disciples.

And he tells them to go to Jerusalem and to wait for the promised Holy Spirit. And in his own words, he says, 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.

They'll go to Jerusalem and there they will be brought into a living experience of the third person of the Trinity. They will be linked into the circuit and the power of God will start to hum. And I tell you, if you've got sensitive ears, when you read the Acts of the Apostles, you can feel, you can detect the generating power of the Spirit.

It hums across every page. So we move to the third chapter and there we discover Peter and John. They're going into the temple, they're going to pray.

There's a man, he's a beggar, typical of so many in his unfortunate condition in the temple precincts. He asks for money from these men. Alas, they've got no money.

But what they do have is faith in the living God. And they pray for the man and he jumps to his feet. And a crowd gathers as a result.

And they inquire as to what Peter and John have been about. And they respond, men of Israel, chapter 3 and verse 12. Men of Israel, why does this surprise you? Why do you stare at us as if by our own power or godliness we have made this man walk? By deduction you discover they're saying that the power that has been released has come from God who has invested them with such dynamic.

You move on to the fourth chapter and there you find a picture of the church at prayer. The 32nd verse, all the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own.

But they shared everything they had. And with great power the apostles continue to testify to the resurrection of the Lord. And much grace was with them all.

You move on to the sixth chapter of the Acts. And there they have a particular task to do, those early Christians. They're concerned about widow women who have come into the fellowship.

These are days when there weren't such things as pensions and social security. The church looked after its poor and they needed men to handle the finance. This was a responsible position.

So what did they do? They chose seven men, seven almoners, like deacons in effect. And we discover this description of one who was selected for such a useful ministry. They chose Stephen, verse 5 of chapter 6, a man full of faith and of the Holy Ghost.

And it indicates in the eighth verse that he is full of God's grace and power, doing great wonders and miracles and signs among the people. You move on in the Acts of the Apostles. And you find reference in the tenth chapter to the ministry of Jesus.

Peter is preaching in the household of a Roman soldier. And when he refers to the Lord Jesus in the thirty-seventh verse, he has this to say, or rather verse 38, we tell you how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power and how he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil because God was with him. Now this idea of power that hums, as I say, throughout the whole of the Acts of the Apostles, it's also there in the epistles which Paul and Peter and others write.

The fifteenth chapter of Romans, for example, Peter is referring to his successful ministry as he establishes churches for the Lord Jesus. I read to you from the eighteenth verse of Romans 15, I will not venture to speak of anything else 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 Holy Spirit. And when you go to an earlier verse in that fifteenth chapter, you find that Paul includes all the Christians at Rome in a prayer that they too might know the dynamic of the Spirit.

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. All right, I'm into Romans, I could take you into Corinthians, into Thessalonians, I can take you into Peter, I can take you right to the last book of the New Testament and we would be substantiating my main contention before you, that the early church was a church of power. It was born into power and it was the power of God released through the church that made them to be so successful in their witness so that at the end of the first decade even pagans and therefore unbelievers stood by in utter astonishment and they said, these men, they've turned the world upside down.

Now this is remarkable, they didn't have any advertising media, there was no television, there was no printing press, there was no way at the human level in which a bunch of men and some ladies too in an upper room in Jerusalem could suddenly move out into the rest of Palestine and around the known world and preach the gospel that they'd learned from a carpenter and be utterly successful without recognizing this. They had tapped a source of power and nothing could withstand them. And I want to say, my friend, today that the only way in which we can penetrate a sinful world is as we appreciate experimentally what Paul meant when he prays in the Ephesian epistle twice that the Christians there may be full of the power of the Holy Ghost.

You cannot convince a person of the truths of Christianity unless you are a living example of the Christian faith itself. And to be a living example, and here I address my senior friends in this tabernacle including myself, it is not sufficient to have commenced in power, we must go on in power. Initiation is one thing, continuation is another thing.

The great men of God, and oh, that the Lord would give you a passion and a desire to read history and all that God has done through his church in the centuries that have gone by, the great men of God who were used to bring thousands into the kingdom were men who had an utter and an increasing reliance on the power of God released through the indwelling of the Spirit into their ministries. I know that we are in the area of controversy as to where you pin certain terms such as the baptism of the Spirit and the fullness of the Spirit and the sealing of the Spirit, which is a phrase Paul uses earlier in this letter. But I tell you, as I mentioned last week, that I have gone beyond the desire merely to be theologically accurate and to dot all the I's and cross all the T's as though academic perfection was my chief objective in understanding something of the power and the fullness of Almighty God in my life.

I will not cross swords with those who in this area differ from any theological construction that I might be sympathetic towards. The main question which needs to be asked is simply this. Do you know the power of God? Do you know it in your life? Do you know it as an overwhelming experience? Are there times when you are so aware of God that everything and everyone else in this world takes a secondary position? This is what Paul knew.

He has such an awareness of God and such a love for Jesus that there are times when Paul engaged in the most complex and profound piece of theological reasoning tells us that Jesus loved him and died for him and Paul is overwhelmed at the thought and he leaves his argument and he engages in a hymn of praise to the Lord as with a soul that's overwhelmed he pours out his love to the living God. And I'm asking you, younger friend and older friend, do you know this experience or experiences from time to time and indeed increasingly? There are those who seem to suggest that the idea of the fullness of the Spirit and power with God is something that we mortals in the 20th century, we Christians have entered into or certain branches of the church as though these great men like Calvin and Luther, great theologians like John Owen and Jonathan Edwards and Flavel and a host of others that I could marshal before you never knew anything of this. Whitfield who went to Bristol and preached with Wesley to the collierers as they came up out of the mines with their sooty, dirty, grimy faces.

He was responsible under the Lord for the release of the convicting power of the Spirit to the extent that onlookers saw the clean little rivulets that were formed by the tears of the miners as under the conviction of the Spirit of God they called out and asked that God would forgive them their sins. And Whitfield knew the power of God in his life. He writes in his journals of a significant occasion when God moved in upon him and God became all and all to him.

One of the greatest men who ever lived as far as intellectual ability is concerned was a man by the name of Jonathan Edwards reckoned by some to be the greatest philosopher since Socrates. And this is what Jonathan Edwards had to say and he's a man who's not exactly an emotional man like John Wesley, a man who's in the area of logic and legal things, a man who's not going to be caught along by any psychological element in a meeting, a man who's not going to have any psychological experience induced into his personality. Well, here is Edwards, the great theologian, this great lawyer, and he's in America.

It's in the 18th century. And he refers to what happened to him one day as he makes a journey from one point to the States to another. I felt an ardency of soul to be what I know not otherwise how to express, emptied and annihilated, to lie in the dust and to be full of Christ alone, to love him with a holy, pure joy, to trust in him, to live upon him, to serve and follow him, and to be perfectly sanctified and made pure with a divine and heavenly purity.

Jonathan Edwards was never the same. After that experience, he wasn't a man caught up in an emotional cloud. He was a man who wrote a book against cosmetic, counterfeit experiences of the spirit, but he was a man who knew God himself.

Take another, a man by the name of David Brainard. Brainard goes to witness to the Indians in North America. He's a man who has a passion for God.

It turns him out of his bed at night. Sometimes he seems to be almost a fanatic. In the icy cold of the northern parts of the States, he'll spend hours in prayer, seeking, hungering with a passion for Almighty God.

And the day comes when God meets Brainard, and Brainard's ministry penetrates the Indians. He'll read his diary, read the story of what happened as a result of Brainard releasing the power of God amongst the Indians. Let me bring you forward a century.

These notes, I've got a little jottings of the experiences of great men of God that I've listed down. Here's D.L. Moody, the turn of the last century. He needs to know the power of the Lord.

And he's in New York City. He's between campaigns, yet he's still feeling powerless. He still realizes that there's a lot more of God for him to experience than he's known before.

I began to cry, says D.L. Moody, a great evangelist. I began to cry as I've never cried in my life. The hunger increased.

I felt that I did not want to live any longer. If I could not have the power for service, I kept on crying all the time that God would fill me with the Spirit. Well, one day, in the city of New York, oh, what a day! I cannot describe it.

I seldom refer to it. It is almost too sacred an experience to name. I can only say that God revealed himself to me, and I had such an experience of his love that I had to ask him to stay his hand.

Let me give you another testimony. A Welsh preacher. Got a strange Christian name.

Christmas Evans. Great preacher, despite the strangeness of his name. He, again, is between two points in his ministry.

He sets off, and he's going along one of the northern mountain ranges in Wales, and he says, Having begun in the name of Jesus, I felt as if my shackles were loosening. Here is this preacher. Can you see him perhaps on horseback as he's in the idyllic countryside of northern Wales? The old hardness begins to soften, just like, as I thought, the mountains and frost and snow is dissolving and melting within me.

This engendered confidence within my soul in the promise of the Holy Ghost. I felt my whole mind relieved from some great bondage. Tears flowed copiously, and I was constrained to cry out aloud for the gracious visits of God by restoring to my soul the joy of his salvation and that he would visit the churches in Anglesey again that were under my care.

Why do I bring these illustrations to you? Well, I do so as a corrective and as a stimulus. A corrective to those who feel that the whole business of the fullness of the Spirit and entering into the presence of God and knowing his power is something rediscovered. And some of us may question certain aspects of the rediscovery in the 20th century.

My friend, Whitfield Wesley, these great men of God, I could have told you of Howell Harris, of Daniel Rowlands, and a thousand more, well, certainly hundreds more. They knew. They knew the power of God in their lives.

What did it do? What was the effect of that power? Well, it had remarkable effects upon them. For a while, they were exuberant depending on the variation that there was in their personality. There were some who were caught up into an ecstasy before the Lord.

There were some who were quietly moved in their innermost being. There were some who felt they could sing and dance before the Lord. But most of them, indeed all of them, came out of the experience, or the experiences with a great concept of the holiness and the majesty of God.

Listen to Dr. Lloyd-Jones, a Puritan of the 20th century, as he evaluates some of these experiences. A man may sing or may dance for a while, but that does not persist. It is temporary and due to weakness of the body, but what is permanent, what proves genuineness, is that a man is filled with a sense of awe.

He has been near the majesty of God and is of necessity humbled. Great men of God rarely spoke about it. There was no boastfulness.

What had happened to them was almost too sacred to be mentioned. It leads to humility and to a love of God and a rejoicing in Christ with a joy unspeakable and full of glory. I find myself saying amen to that to the extent I brought the quote because I could not preach it with the eloquence or with the perception of Lloyd-Jones.

Do not tell me that this tabernacle, its pastor, its elders and deacons, stand for a stuffy academic intellectual apprehension of the gospel. There is nothing more I tell you, God be my judge, that I want in my life, that I want for you precious young people and you older friends too, than a knowledge, an increasing knowledge of the fullness of God himself. And when that happens, God becomes so great in our estimation, we recognize his reverence, his majesty, his person, his holiness, those great and glorious attributes.

We're caught up in conflicting emotions. At one point we want to fall down. Our reaction is that of Peter the fisherman.

Depart from me, for I'm a sinful man, O Lord. You're all that I'm not. I revere, I honor your holy name.

And then there's that other element. In which we recognize that this God is a great, delightful heavenly Father who loves the uninhibited praise of his children and we want to bless and adore him. We want to sing.

We try to find words in the human language to express our praises and find that it's a beggarly medium of worshiping the living God. And sometimes in his infinite grace, he resolves that problem by giving languages that have never been learned. You see my point, my friend.

This is what I'm saying. That the increase of the knowledge of God and his power in my life, it changes me. It makes me realize something of how great he is.

And I want to worship him. I want to love him. I want to serve him.

There are some experiences that I have in marriage that I would not publicly refer to. And there are some experiences that a Christian can have with the great God of glory that are so delicate that he or she finds themselves like Moody. Somewhat hesitant in relating them.

I'm always put off by the person who seems to wear his religious experience on his shirt cuff. The man who has a knowledge of God doesn't need to tell you. You know.

You feel it. One of the things I shall miss on the departure of Wilfred Mortimer was sometimes when he prayed how one felt the closeness of the Lord. That man could intercede before God like a leaf that quivered when the wind of the Spirit blew.

And I want to know more and more of that in my life. What are the effects of knowing the power of God? Well, if I had time I would take you into two long excursions. But I won't.

I'll do it in summary fashion. Which outline the fact that when God moves in upon the soul in an increasing fashion it changes the person internally and it has certain external effects. What do I mean by that? Well, internally, so to speak it gives him a tremendous assurance of salvation.

Romans chapter 5 and verse 5 uses language which resembles Acts 2 the latter referring to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and when Paul in Romans 5 employs that terminology as he speaks about the pouring of the Holy Spirit he says, hope does not disappoint us because God has poured out His love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom He has given us. And later on in the 8th chapter with the same topic in mind, speaking of the Spirit he says, the Spirit causes us to cry out to the Lord Abba Father. In other words, we have a great assurance that we belong to God because of the indwelling Spirit and we need to know more of the power of God in our lives to convince us of this.

To know that if all Christian fellowship was stripped from us all Bibles were banned and burnt we were entirely on our own. We belong to God because the power of God by the indwelling Spirit brings this sense of assurance. That's what I mean when I say it has an internal benefit.

What's more it gives a tremendous sense of joy when Peter the fisherman is writing to the Christians who, Christian Jews who have committed their lives to Jesus Christ in the opening letter that bears His name. He says in the 8th verse of chapter 1 Though you have not seen Jesus, you love Him. And even though you do not see Him now you believe in Him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy.

Now I ask you, my friend older friend and younger friend do you know this? Don't water this down. Here is an inexpressible joy not a cosmetic smile, not just a grin this is a joy that's deep down in the soul but it surfaces and people can recognize the fact that there's something different internally you're changed, you have this assurance that you belong to the Lord you have this joy unspeakable and full of glory to quote the language of the authorized version this is one of the byproducts of knowing the power of God the sealings of God's Spirit upon your life. What's more there is within the soul created a passion for the lost a passion for the lost this was a thing about Whitefield Charles Spurgeon, you may have heard I've referred to that man once or twice in this pulpit Charles Spurgeon reviews the life of Whitefield now Spurgeon's life was crammed with activity to the extent he died prematurely in his early fifties but when Spurgeon reviewed the life of Whitefield he said, I believe that most men are half dead but Whitefield was full of life you always found him as an activist he was always doing something, what was he doing? he was preaching the gospel every fibre of his being was invested in this every cent, every pound of his money was invested in this he has a passion for the lost Wesley is asked which his church is and which his particular piece of ground where he evangelizes is in Anglican terms, what's your parish, Wesley? and Charles says, the world's my parish I think that big and if you'd looked at Wesley and Charles trying to keep up with one another these remarkable brothers, you saw them tramping across England, on into Scotland across to the Americas you do the same as I say with Whitefield, here he is, he's in London you shut your eyes, he's not in London, he's in Edinburgh you shut your eyes, he's not in Edinburgh, he's in Glasgow he nips up to a place called Cambuslang, he starts to preach and remarkable things happen, hundreds of people come and listen to him, the power of God falls upon his ministry but you can't keep him down that's exactly the case with Danny Rowlands and so many of these great men of the past I plead with you, read the history of the church now, you have power you say? all right, thank God, I believe that this power is available to us today on the same basis as it was on the day of Pentecost but if you've got the power, then show me the passion for souls thank God there are many in this church that have a passion for souls and a power for the Lord but they must go along, you see you shall receive power after the Holy Spirit has come upon you that you may have an ecstatic experience, that you can sing a chorus for the 20th time and get little shivers up and down your spine that may be a psychological analysis of some religious experience, that it could be valid or invalid I don't know well then, and here I come to wind up what I've wanted to share with you for so long what can you do about receiving more of God's power of knowing the outworking in your life of Paul's plea for the Ephesians to be filled with the power of God, with the fullness of God what can you do take the Bible at its word believe that when Paul was praying this, he really meant it he's not engaging in some theological speculation it is a concept that goes beyond full understanding but in basic principles we can grasp what he's saying that there is something about God and His ability within our lives that He can do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine according to His power that is at work within us do you believe that? and then you're to seek to seek constantly and daily for a greater measure of God's life within you so the evangelist Luke tells us recording the words of our Lord in the eleventh chapter of the gospel that bears His name when he's speaking of the infilling of the Holy Spirit there was a great Puritan writer who, referring to the sealing of the Spirit says, sue God for it, sue Him come before Him and ask Him more and more that you shall have the power of God in your life that you will have in actuality what is there for every Christian, potentially what do I mean by that? well look, let's imagine that you leave me ten thousand pounds and I leave it in the bank potentially I'm rich actually I'm not I would never be a rich man as far as that amount of money is concerned until I went to the bank and took it and used it Apostle Paul says in Ephesians that all spiritual blessings belong to us, Ephesians 1, 3 in Christ Jesus, they all belong to us potentially we're so rich the desire to make your potential actual and then to remember the sovereignty of God you see, we're in a state of preparedness we cannot induce blessings from the Lord we can't induce a supply of power people have tried this and it becomes the most clumsy and the most ugly thing when people endeavour to induce spiritual experiences indeed, they're not spiritual, religious experiences they can be harmful, they can be counterfeit but you see, within the sovereignty of God as we make ourselves available the potential for service, the potential for power is infinite and so we are to keep in a state of absolute preparation Colossians 3 and verse 5 tells us that we're to using the language of the A.V. which someone pointed out to me I know more by heart than the language of the N.I.V. mortify the members of your body what does that mean? well here's the N.I.V.'s updated translation put to death whatever belongs to your earthly nature sexual immorality, impurity, lust evil desires, greed which is idolatry put away these things, discipline yourself day by day, I find that so hard oh does that sound a terrible confession that the man who preaches at the tabernacle for a decade who followed great preachers, who previously occupied the pulpit confesses to several hundred people he finds it hard to put to death all the earthly nature, but I do I wish I could tell you I was 101% sanctified but you ask my wife I've got a long way to go in the school of sanctification I have to work at it every day I have to determine what I'm going to read, what I'm going to look at the conversation I'm going to engage in how I'm going to spend my money, how I'm going to relate in various situations, every moment of the day it's a fight, but when you do that or try, and heaven knows I fail often enough you're in that condition where God in his sovereignty can come down upon your life, and take you up into heavenly places in Christ Jesus and fill you with a sense of his power and his peace, and give you that assurance of soul that you really belong to him I continue also to read his word Whitfield, Wesley, Luther, Calvin Spurgeon, Campbell, Morgan Martin, Lloyd-Jones, have you ever read their books? their minds saturated in scripture I knew Dr. Lloyd-Jones conducts seminars for hundreds of ministers in London, sometimes the most abstruse, the most complicated theological subject was up for debate, and he'd sit there and he'd not have a bible in his hand, and he'd listen to these great minds as one man got up and gave his view, and another man got up and gave his view, and just as though he had an invisible bible that had been implanted into his brain he could tell a person, turn back a page in your bible, read chapter 5 and verse 14, and there you'll find the answer to the point that you're making, and discover that your premise is completely unfounded a man, admittedly, with a remarkable brain but that's not the point, I'm not even talking about remarkable people, I'm talking about the likes of you and me and you can't get less remarkable than I am saturate your mind in God's word so it becomes a very part of your mental fabric and apparatus, look when Paul says to the church at Ephesus I want you to be filled with all the fullness of God, he wasn't talking to the pastor or pastors, or elders or deacons alone, he was talking to the youth fellowship, he was talking to the widow people, he was talking to the rich and to the poor, to those who'd gone to an academy to those who were slaves, filled with the fullness of God knowing power and it's still the same it's still the same today we were born in power we were made for power and Christian people are to go out in power Amen