Biblical Theology for Transformation - 4th Posting

6/12/08

Ephesians 1:19 “And what is the immeasurable greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His great might.”

We can sometimes feel so weak in our Christian lives. Our feelings of inadequacy and inability to perform our Christian service keep us from making further attempts at serving Christ. Thoughts of self-doubt and self-worthlessness can often accompany the walk of a follower of Jesus. We look down on our own attempts of service and begin to tell ourselves that we are useless in this fellowship of believers. The result is Christians who do not serve and believers whose lives do not reflect the work of Jesus and His saving grace. I suppose by this time you are expecting me to hand out the encouragement you are being set up for. In your mind you might be expecting some sort of self-motivating scripture and an explanation of how we are supposed to get up in the morning, look ourselves in the mirror and say, “I’m smart enough, I’m good enough and gall-darnit, people like me!”. This is the sort of thinking our culture and world have imposed on those seeking a purpose in life. They want us to believe that real joy and peace come from within. This is where the downtrodden believer gets caught in the snare. If thoughts of self-doubt, self-worthlessness and inadequacy surround your mind, the last thing I want to do is tell you that is wrong. You should doubt yourself. You are worthless and you are completely inadequate to do anything on your own. This is the problem with American thinking, we try to convince ourselves that we are not these things and when we continue to fail at getting away from these downfalls, we think we might as well stop trying and we give up on serving Jesus.

Now that I have completely squashed your hopes of ever accomplishing anything in the name of Christ, the encouragement is this; Jesus is your confidence, Jesus is your worth and ONLY Jesus is adequate. We have to veer away from this self reflecting mentality and start doing some Jesus reflecting. Stop trusting in ourselves and start letting the power of Jesus take hold of our lives and our service. David says in 1 Chronicles 29:14, “But who am I, and what is my people that we should be able thus to offer willingly? For all things come from You, and of Your own have we given You.” David realized that His service to the Lord was not of his own power and strength but that the Lord worked through David to serve Him.

Ephesians 1:19 gives us great insight on why we need to stop trusting ourselves and start trusting Jesus. You will notice that I put in italics four words; power, working, great and might. These four words, though different in English and also in the original Greek, all mean the same thing: POWER!!!! The original word for power is dynameos. From this word we get our English word “dynamite”. Like dynamite, Jesus’ dynameos is an explosive power. The original word for working is energeian, which is where we get our English word “energy” from. These four different words show the immeasurable greatness of the power of Jesus. Notice that these words are attributed not to YOU, but to Jesus. However, His power is directed towards us. He invests His power into His believers for service to Him so that He may be glorified and magnified. Also notice that of these four words, they are all of immeasurable greatness. That means the magnitude of Jesus’ power goes beyond measure and cannot even be fathomed by our futile minds.

Your encouragement is this; stop the pity party and stop trying to find the answer inside of yourself. As I tell my kids all the time; you are not as cool as you think you are. When we look into ourselves for the answers we will only be disappointed and discouraged. It is when we realize the immeasurable greatness of the power of Jesus at work in us that we can begin to unravel the twisted mess of self-reliance we weaved for so long. Begin every morning with a simple recognition that Jesus is your strength (2 Corinthians 12:9, 10). If your service to the Lord is powered by your own will and power you will end up spinning in a spool of legalism trying your hardest to please God by your own power. YOU CAN NOT DO IT!!!! Jesus is the one who possess the power to do great things and we possess Jesus. Find your power to serve Him, in Him!