Receive God's Power

Picture a garden in desperate need of weeding. Consider how overgrown it would look and how much work it would require to make it a thriving garden again. Now imagine you have a set of garden work gloves. What were these gloves created to do? They were made for work! Imagine if you marched out to the garden, tossed the gloves into the weeds, and demanded that they get to work pulling out those intrusive plants.

What would happen? Absolutely nothing. While it is true that the garden gloves were made for work they can do nothing apart from a hand filling them and working through them. As Christians we are like gloves. While we were created to do good works for God and His glory (see Ephesians 2:10), we can do nothing of eternal lasting value apart from God working in and through us. Just as the glove needed to be filled with a hand and have the hand working through it, so we as believers need to be filled with the Holy Spirit to be able to live the Christian life.

In Luke 24:49 Jesus commands His disciples to tarry in the city of Jerusalem until they were “endued with power from on high”. Apart from the Holy Spirit filling them, the disciples would have been powerless to fulfill the commands Christ had given them, including the great commission. They needed to receive God’s power. Just like a hand filling a glove, God used them in a mighty and powerful way and did great works in and through them.

We as believers are totally dependent on receiving God’s power for living the Christian life. A car would sooner drive down the road without an engine than we would be able to live out the commands of Christ apart from Christ’s divine, enabling power. In John 15 Jesus gives the picture of Him being the True Vine and us being the branches. Just as a branch must abide in the vine and receive the life of the vine to bear fruit, we must receive God’s power and rely completely on Him to produce His fruit in our lives. (See John 15:5)

While we have to see and acknowledge our utter weakness and inability to live the Christian life on our own, we must also acknowledge God’s mighty power is more than enough to enable us to do it! Philippians 2:13 tells us: “For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” Let us receive God’s power and rely on Him to do in and through us what we could never do on our own. What will the result be? God will be glorified! Just as a glove can’t take credit for what a hand does through it, so we cannot take credit for the work God does in and through us. He alone gets all the glory!