Moments of the Spirit’s Power

“For the Lord is the Spirit, and wherever the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”

—2 Corinthians 3:17 (NLT).

The trouble of the world is upon her shoulders. Struggling with a ballooning hip line she tries in vain to control her appetite through sheer willpower alone. She’s done this before; by hook or by crook those kilos are coming off!

Not so fast… anyone who’s read the above snippet knows the perils. They’ve either personally tried willpower before (and failed) or they’ve seen others do it—willpower is highly overrated!

We’re talking spiritual warfare here; the blocking of goals like we’ve never seen before—the beating of a person into the submission of their own defeats, time and again. The Devil loves it when we lose all hope.

The very real spiritual danger that’s very much alive to us when we’re not resting upon the Spirit’s power reminds us constantly of both the pain of missing out on things i.e. the way life was regarding those ‘enjoyable things,’ and the pain of the very thought of giving up on our goal i.e. the fear of failure—we quickly find ourselves in a spiritual no-man’s-land; the thoroughly joyless existence ensues.

Stop right there! That’s not the way home. Enter the Spirit’s power which is biblically available every moment we seek it:

“God’s Spirit doesn’t make cowards out of us. The Spirit gives us power, love, and self-control.”

—2 Timothy 1:7 (CEV).

The blast of cogent truth is this. This Spiritual power that is only of God speaks aggressively against willpower i.e. the achieving of our goals in our own strength, relegating the Spirit’s strength to null.

Willpower speaks very actively of fear, and fear we know is not from God. Willpower brings on timidity (cowardice); it intuits an overt focus on self and the power of loss—and the negative length of the journey which we detest.

The Spiritual power which is from God, however, gives us a strange sort of confidence that we simply can’t explain. This power from God has us looking joyfully forward—not bothered at all about the length of the journey—to the achievement of the goal and the joyous acceptance of every step along the way.

It reduces the fear of failing to nothing—it’s no longer relevant to those with love, power and self-control.

And what of the process to experience this Spiritual power? This invisible power which is paradoxically majestic and miraculous is had by faith—and that by obedience—and that, still, by faithfulness—to God.

Faith alone facilitates this experiencing of the Spirit’s divine and incomprehensible power. This is one of the most powerful testimonies to the existence of God in our present time.

Achieving our goals is only ever easy with the Spirit’s abiding power.

And all this Spiritual power cannot be experienced without a relationship with the Almighty… underpinning, as a process: faith—obedience—faithfulness. Give it a go!

© S. J. Wickham, 2009.