Forces in Society #3 – Power
Ephesians 1:18—2:7
By James Galbraith
First Baptist Church, Port Alberni
August 26, 2007
Review/Introduction
So far we have looked at how two different forces in society influence our lives.
1. Fear in many different forms can grip us and lead us into despair,
God knows that this world is full of things to fear.
But when we reckon with and begin to enjoy the healthy and healing fear of God,
we can start to put our other fears into perspective and trust in him to see us through them.
2. Image is how we see ourselves in this world, and again,
many things around us are ready to tear down our self-image and make us feel low and unlovely.
God, when we let him, can restore us to the place where we once again reflect his own image, as he created us and desires to sustain us.
There’s much more to both of these, fear and image, and if you want to know more I’m certainly ready to review them with you sometime.
But for now, we are now going to look at another force in society that controls much of our lives – the force of power itself.
To do this, we’re working through a passage that has much to say about power:
how we can be slaves to the power of the world,
how God’s power can overcome the world’s,
and how we can actually be agents of God’s power,
if we let him work through us.
Because of the way the passage is set up,
we’re going to start in the middle and work toward the edges.
Victims of power/Slaves to power - 2:1-3
We are all subject to the exercise of power on a daily basis.
To illustrate how much power we are subjected to,
I’m going to use the picture of a house.
Imagine every part of your house,
and in some way power in being influenced over you.
First of all, we all live under many rules about what kind of home we’re allowed to have. If you’ve every tried to do renovations you find out how quickly the municipal government gets involved in the planning, making and taxing!
- Kitchen/Dining Room - we live under rules of what we may/may not cook and also what we may or may not eat.
- Living Room - we live under rules of what we may or may not read/watch and more recently, what we talk about!
- Gardens - may/may not grow
- Basement/work shop - may/may not make or store
- Bedroom – one of our former Prime Ministers once said that the government has no place in our bedrooms.
It’s a famous sound bite, but it ignores the fact that there are many laws that are meant to control how we act as mates, right down to the most intimate of issues.
- Garage’s - may/may not drive
And on and on it goes - and that’s only the power of the various levels of government.
Add to that the power of public opinion, power of wealth,
power of charisma, power of information, power of skill and
the power of the military, and we live in a system where we are influence by many sources of power!
We are also slaves to the power of sin, we are so captive to it that it takes our lives away and replaces them with mere facades.
People under addictions illustrate this,
they are real people with all the potential of anyone of us,
and yet they are being literally held captive by an outside substance
What we have to realize is that without Christ, we’re all that addict, and even with him, the only thing keeping us from that state in some sense or other is the fact that we’ve been recipients of his inestimable power.
Recipients of Power: 2: 4-7
Giving our lives over to Jesus Christ removes us from our slavery to sin, and the change that we under go as recipients of his power is as day is to night.
God takes us from as low as we can go and puts us beside his own Son so that he can pour his love out on us.
Explanations of how this happens become full of the words that we often tune out as exaggeration, but these words are the only ones that come close to the effect of God’s love on us.
Many of us have lead relatively calm lives,
no drunken rampages or midnight escapes from scary homes or unexplained crimes in our closets,
so seeing the change that takes place isn’t quite as easy as those who are saved from demon possession or multiple addictions.
But the Bible has ways of showing us the parts of our lives that we wish we never had, thankfully in a way that emphasises our new state as opposed to our old.
The phrase from verse 3, “Like the rest, we were objects of wrath” is a great equaliser.
It takes the most angelic-appearing “goody-two-shoes” and throws him right in with the most unbecoming rogue imaginable.
Our lives before Christ are simply not enough to appease a God who hates sin, and because of our own sin we are like that sin which God abhors - “Objects of wrath”.
It’s not the enormity or impressiveness of the sin that matters - it’s the mere presence. God is so pure and holy that all sin looks and smells the same - awful.
It’s like looking down on a city - from directly overhead all the buildings look like they are the same height.
That’s us before Christ - no matter how bad we may look to each other God sees us all the same - as objects of wrath in need of Christ’s power to save us from our sinful selves.
And that’s also us after Christ - ‘cause no matter what we’ve been saved from, we all get the same treatment after we take him seriously.
His power takes us and changes us - putting us back in connection with the God who made us and loves us and restoring our broken lives to one that is ready to experience the fullness of life God wants us to.
But we don’t just get fixed by his power,
we also become agents of his power to change the world around us
Agents of Power : 1:18-23; II Peter 1:3-4
SO we have all lived as victims of power beyond our control,
and in becoming Christians we can be recipients of a power strong enough to raise the Son of God from the dead.
But what about being agents of power,
those who use power rather than simply being subject to it?
We all use power on a small scale every day.
1. When you purchase something you use the power of your resources (or your ability to manipulate credit) to get what you want.
2. When you finish an assignment you are using the power of your mind and hands to accomplish a set goal.
3. When you guide a child through a day you are using your power of authority to direct the actions of another.
With these kinds of power we are all on different footings…
Some of us have more resources at our disposal, some of us more skill, other more authority, and on it goes.
But as people who take God’s power seriously,
we all have equal access to an entirely different, and infinitely superior, type of power: God’s power. There’s a great description of the enormity of this power in our first few verses.
But there’s another description that shows how this power can be a part of our lives, from 2 Peter chapter 1 -
His divine power has given us every thing we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him, who called us by his own glory and goodness - through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires
In other words, his power gives us power to be a part of what God is doing, and avoid that which he wants nothing to do with!
His power gives us what we need to live life to the fullest
and to avoid the pitfalls that God wants to steer us away from.
Now some people get carried away with this, and start expecting miracles every time they’re disappointed with the weather.
Or they claim that we have power of our own that’s merely untapped and if we just reclaim it we’ll move mountains.
That’s rubbish - God’s power is always his - we should never treat it like a commodity or slave to our whims. However, when we take God seriously and put ourselves into situations where his power is given a chance to make things happen - then things do happen.
Listen to this story…
There was a professor there that was a committed atheist. His primary goal for one required class was to spend the entire semester attempting to prove that God couldn’t exist.
His students were always afraid to argue with him because of his impeccable logic. For twenty years he had taught this class and no one had ever really "gone against him". No one would ever go against him because he had a reputation. At the end of ever semester, on the last day of class, he would say to the class of 300 students, "If there is anyone here who still believes in God, stand up!"
In twenty years, nobody ever stood up. They knew what he was going to do next. He would say, "Because anyone who believes in God is a fool. If God existed, He could stop this piece of chalk from hitting the ground and breaking. Such a simple task to prove that he is God, and he can’t do it."
And every year he would drop the chalk onto the tile floor of the classroom and it would shatter into a hundred pieces. All the students could do nothing but stare. Most of the students were convinced that God couldn’t exist. Certainly Christians had slipped through, but for twenty years they had been too afraid to stand up.
Well, a few years ago there was a freshman who happened to get enrolled in the class. He was a Christian, and he had heard the stories about this professor, but he had to take the class because it was required for his major.
He was afraid, but for three months that semester he prayed every morning that he would have the courage to stand up no matter what the professor said, or what the class thought. Nothing they said or did could ever shatter his faith , he hoped.
Finally the day came and the professor said, "If there is anyone in this room who still believes in God, stand up!" The professor, and the class of 300 people looked at him, shocked, as he stood up.
The professor shouted "YOU FOOL! If nothing I have said all semester has convinced you that God doesn’t exist, then you are a fool! If God existed, he could keep this piece of chalk from breaking when it hit the ground!"
He proceeded to drop the chalk, but as he did, it slipped out of his fingers, off his shirt cuff, onto the pleats of his pants, down his leg, and off his shoe.
As is hit the ground, it simply rolled away, unbroken. The professor’s jaw dropped as he stared at the chalk. He looked at the young man and then ran out of the lecture hall.
The young man who had stood up proceeded to the front of the room and shared his faith in Jesus for the next half hour. Three hundred students stayed and listened as he told of God’s love for them and of His power through Jesus.
This is not a true story, although it is based on one,
but it does illustrate very well what God can do when we give him a chance to show his power in our lives.
When we get into situations where the power of God can make a difference, and we trust in it, things happen.
They may not be as clean cut as this story, but things do happen.
It’s not predictable, like when we flip the light switch or turn the keys in our car, but it’s there. And we need to take it seriously.
Bob Dylan said once “you’ve got to serve someone - it may be the devil and it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve someone”
He had a pretty good perspective on power. We’re all subject to it.
In more ways then we’d like to think ,
and to more people than we may imagine.
We have to make a choice as to whom we’ll serve, and whose power will be exercised in us.
As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
Because he’s made a few promises ,
a promise to use his power to defeat the power of the enemy over my life
a promise to make me whole,
and a promise to use me in ways that’ll rock my socks off,
if only I will take him seriously.
