Saturday 31 May 2008

The working of His mighty power

…and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, - Ephesians 1v19-20

I mentioned yesterday that Paul was always praying for the believers in Ephesus. I made an application then about how important praying for each other was. Today we are going to see exactly what Paul was praying for. The preceding words are powerful. “that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints,:

There is more to this Christian life than meets the eye. There is a wisdom, a knowledge, and understanding, a hope, and riches that we often never grasp. We get into a situation that we just can’t handle. So what do we do? We try to handle it on our own. We tend to be really good at depending on our own ability.

When that happens we are really missing something. If we are not careful we can go through our entire life without ever “getting it.”

Just how powerful is God’s power to get us through? How great is God? How strong is He? How much of His strength is there for us?

The answer is almost more than I can grasp – “the power which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead.” I cannot imagine a power greater than the power to raise Jesus from the dead.

The problem is that we far too often limit the power of God to work in us because we have our own solution, or our own agenda. The greatest even in human history was the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The greatest power made it possible. And we have that power working is us!

1 comment:

Candi said...

This is good to see how Paul prayed. A friend recently shared another prayer of Paul's from Col. 1, and she and I are praying as he did for our children and other people too. Here it is from The Message - not a literal Bible translation, but it paints a good picture of another thing we can pray for each other: "9-12Be assured that from the first day we heard of you, we haven't stopped praying for you, asking God to give you wise minds and spirits attuned to his will, and so acquire a thorough understanding of the ways in which God works. We pray that you'll live well for the Master, making him proud of you as you work hard in his orchard. As you learn more and more how God works, you will learn how to do your work. We pray that you'll have the strength to stick it out over the long haul—not the grim strength of gritting your teeth but the glory-strength God gives. It is strength that endures the unendurable and spills over into joy, thanking the Father who makes us strong enough to take part in everything bright and beautiful that he has for us."

Like you said, I want God's "glory-strength" - not doing things in my own "teeth-gritting" power.