Power? Yes, please.
Feb 13th, 2008 by Amanda
Before the batteries in my iDog died, I was listening to the next podcast by Rob Bell in his series on Phillippians (Grace and Peace was the first).
Wow. He digs in deep and pulls out some great stuff. What you’re about to read comes from only the first 6 or 7 minutes of the message (and this may come across as disjointed because it’s hard to paraphrase a sermon sometimes and I don’t want to just write verbatim what he said).
Philippians 1:3-6
I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
There are certain phrases in these verses that would have automatically been recognized by Paul’s Jewish audience. Key words: began, good work, completed. These words have significant meaning… where do they first occur?
Genesis 1
In the beginning God created…
God began something.
In vs 10, vs 12, vs 18, vs 21, vs 25 - in all of these verses, God saw that “it was good.”
Chapter 2:1
“Thus the heavens and the earth were completed…”
So something that was begun, that is a good work, that is completed… see where I’m going?
The Jewish readers of the first passage would have recognized Paul’s phrasing and associated it with Genesis. Why would Paul want them to make that connection?
1 Corinthians 4:6
For God, who said, Let light shine out of the darkness, made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.
Let light shine out of the darkness. That’s another image from Genesis. Why is Paul making the Jewish people think of the Creation account?
The same God who let light shine into the darkness of the universe, the same God who is in control of the universe, has taken the light and has shined it into your hearts so that you could see things as they truly are.
So when Paul begins Philippians, he says:
…being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
And I love this next thought. I had to listen to it a few times because, quite honestly, it blew me away.
There is this creative dynamic propulsive nuclear energy that brought the universe into being. There is this power, the kind of power that made the solar system, the grand canyon, the oceans, and when you said “Yes” to the grace of God, that power was unleashed in you.
When we say yes to the grace of God, the explosive creative energy that brought the universe into being is unleashed in us.
How profound. Seriously. That’s a lot of power.
What if people lived with this kind of awareness? What if we approached everything in our lives with the awareness that we have access to the same power God used to create the oceans and the mountains? It would change how we do life!
Great thoughts here. I can not imagine if we really tried to focus on that power given to us what life would be like. I sure would not be freting about finances, health and all the other things that tend to get me down.
I like what you have been sharing the last few days, keep it up!
Yeah, Carl’s right, your posting has been so uplifting and powerful lately!
So, what does it look like to live up to our faith? What does it mean to live embracing that power God puts within us?
These revelations-after you having just returned from the conference in CA, how do they go to together for you?
I am in a similiar place, and a place of realizing that the power we go after, especially our western culture, to attain a name and reputation and belonings and popularity and power over people, etc-are really the things that bog us down daily.
What if we shed all that for becoming who He really created us to be, western-trappings be damned!??
FREEDOM! Light! life! Power!
Why is this sort of life so easy to write about, yet so difficult to practice?