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For I will not presume to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me, resulting in the obedience of the Gentiles by word and deed, in the power of signs and wonders, in the power of the Spirit; so that from Jerusalem and round about as far as Illyricum I have fully preached the gospel of Christ. (Romans 15:18-19)
This is the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel, saying, Not by force or by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of armies. (Zechariah 4:6 BBE)
I am coming to the part of Romans where Paul begins talking about his travel plans and the next chapter is mostly spent giving greetings to a great number of people by name. I am not saying that these are not important, but they are not of the same kind of instructional intensity that the rest of Romans has been. For the past few days I have been perusing over this last part of Romans but today I wanted to come back and visit the last few verses of what I have been meditating on for the last few weeks.
What I see again is a reminder of the stark difference between what most religious people get addicted to and God's ways of dealing with people – the issue of power. And because most people get sucked into the lies about God that cause them to believe that He uses His power abusively just as sinful religious (and non-religious) people do, hence has been promoted all the tragic and distorted belief systems that have been pawned off as truth about the God of heaven.
Many of these lies and the truths that they counterfeit revolve around the issue of power. Our very concept of what is meant by this word is heavily influenced by how pervasive these lies have infiltrated our thinking. When we read a verse like the one above from Romans we often assume that miracles and the gift of the Holy Ghost are given to us to force people to come to God in some way. Too often we utilize the carrot-and-stick approach to evangelism and corrupt the true gospel of God by mingling in a degree of fearful intimidation if our initial invitation to surrender to God is not effective enough.
What we don't realize is that most of the time what we call “surrender to God” really means surrender to the control of our church or local religious group. We assume that since God has entrusted His people on earth with authority (another word seriously misunderstood) that we have the right to control other people's lives whom we are bringing into the church. We also operate on the assumption that our church is the body of Christ and tend to exclude from our thinking of that body anyone who thinks too much outside the box – our box that is.
The bottom line is that we want to promote our agenda in the name of God and we believe that God is on our side and that He is supposed to vindicate us by using miracles to attract/intimidate others into joining us so we can dominate their spiritual life in the name of training them. I know this sounds rather harsh and that most people would not believe that this is what they do, but in the eyes of heaven I think our spirit and actions toward each other are starkly different than what we are used to perceiving about ourselves.
But what I sense in Paul's words here reveals a different spirit and disposition than the popular religious ones today. Paul had come to the point where he refused to participate in anything that would feed into the pride inherent in sinful flesh and corrupt the reflection of God's character through his life. Instead Paul was obsessed in radically altering the picture of God typically held by most people, Jews and Gentiles alike, by demonstrating and promoting the overwhelming attractiveness of the real truths about God.
In that context the word “power” takes on a whole new dimension and drops off its negative connotations. No longer is power to be viewed as something to promote forcing people to do what we want them to do in the name of religion. God's kind of power is so radically different that what we think of power that it would almost be useful to come up with a completely different word. But God uses our language and so we need to be careful to reexamine the real meanings behind all the words that He uses so as to discern how they have been hijacked by Satan and begin to use them in their true sense once again. Only as we do this do I believe we can begin to benefit more effectively from our study of the Word of God.
In the context of a proper understanding and usage of the word “power”, this verse takes on different implications than what we might initially assume. When signs and wonders and the power of the Spirit are not viewed as things to be used in the wrong way, to promote our brand of religion or bring people under our control, then it will be seen that these are things that are intended to reveal the true attractiveness of God's true character and to draw all people into trusting in His unconditional love for them. This is the essence of the true gospel and was the burden of the preaching and teaching of Paul as he pushed himself to share it in as many places as he could think of.
I want my life to be reflective of the true meaning of this word “power”. I want the incredible attractiveness of God to glow through my words, actions and spirit and to draw people to want to become more intimate with Him. I am painfully aware that much of the time that is not the case in my life. But that is also why I am bent on becoming so absorbed in knowing Him better at the heart level that my unconscious attitudes will be transformed to reflect His goodness more consistently. I want to have the relationship to him that was seen in the servants in Jesus' story in the first part of Luke 17 so that I will have much more faith. I trust God to continue to lead me into that kind of genuine relationship with Him, to cleanse me of false ideas about Him and to fill my life with the kind of power that is never abusive but is overwhelmingly attractive to draw others to His heart.
