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Filled with Power By June Perry

One of these days I think a convention speaker will write a book on the things that people say to you after you've spoken.
There was one lady at a convention in New Zealand who came up to me afterwards and she said, well my dear, she said, I'll say this.
She said, it's so nice to have a speaker we can look down on.
I must have majored rather heavily on my failures, I think, in that particular talk.
Anyway, I said to him, my dear, you can look down on me anytime you like.
Someone once said, you can never out-give God.
You can never out-give God.
And certainly this weekend we seem to have feasted on all the things that God has given us.
He's given us power.
He's given us pardon.
He's given us perseverance.
He's given us peace.
He's given us potential.
All these jolly peas, all the sweet peas of the Bible that He's given us.
And Joy said yesterday, she said, let God work a miracle.
And there's no doubt about it, each one of us, we really do need Christ in that kind
of a way, in our own lives, if we're going to be effective in the way that He wants us
to be.
You know, we women, we talk a lot about dieting.
I don't.
I mentioned yesterday about weight.
I shouldn't have mentioned it, ladies, because it's one of those things, I mean, I could
share with you all my particular hang-ups, but I'm one of those people, I can eat as
much as I like.
It's so unfair, isn't it?
Grossly unfair.
I just add this though, although I shouldn't be saying it because I don't believe I should
be when it's not a problem with me, it's not something I've had to battle with so far anyway.
But I will just mention this, by the way, put it into brackets.
My husband is a medical doctor, says this, and I know for many of you it's a real, real
problem.
He says it's only the Christians, he says, within my practice who really overcome this
weight problem.
Those who can actually say, well, God, you know, I can't resist, but you can, stop me
going from the fridge, thank you very much, and allow him to take over.
This is what he actually says.
Just put that into brackets, by the way, but as I say, I have no right to say any of these
things in a sense to you, but that could be one way in which you could really prove Christ
working in your own life.
I wonder whether anybody has ever come up to you in your Christian life and said to
you, do you need power in your life?
And you know, they may have caught you just at the right moment, you know, on one of those
sort of a days, you say, oh boy, do I need power, you know, do I need power?
It's a very dangerous thing for somebody to say to you really and truly because each one
of us, if we're honest, yes, we do need power in our own lives.
If we do look within ourselves, we know jolly well there's so much of our lives that it's
really not the way God wants it to be and we need power within our Christian lives to
live the way God wants us to live.
And it's a very dangerous thing for somebody to say to you because at that point you could
actually be led over the hills and far away into some kind of incredible spiritual experience.
I don't know what it's like in Australia, but over in New Zealand you could feel electrical
charges going through your body and you can finish up with a funny look in your eye and
it really is quite hair-raising, the way in which as Christians we'll shop around spiritually
for some kind of a spiritual experience because we want God's best in our life and we're only
too aware of our own inadequacies.
God doesn't own some kind of a great big supermarket, you know, whereby you can go along each week
and get a large economy sized box of power.
It doesn't go that way at all.
Unless you have grasped a certain spiritual principle within your own life, then you'll
always be looking for more.
Your Jesus will never be big enough, he'll never be big enough.
Christ will never really be sufficient for you and this will encourage you to shop around
for yet more within your own life.
Paul said in Ephesians 1 verse 3, he said, God has, and you know it's very, very important
when you study scripture always to look at the tenses, God has, past tense, blessed us
in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.
When you came to know Christ, God gave you the lot when you first received him into your life.
You may not realize all that you have in Christ.
I know for me it took quite a long while before the penny began to drop that Christ
actually lived within me.
I didn't really grasp it.
I don't know that I entirely, fully understand it even now.
Just the thought of it, you know, the fact that Christ who lived 2,000 years ago lives
within you, lives within me, makes me go pretty sort of boggle-eyed, you know, I can't entirely
grapple with it, but nevertheless, God's word does say that he has blessed us in Christ
with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.
We had a negro speaker in New Zealand a little while ago.
I didn't actually go and hear him myself, but somebody told me what he said, Tom Skinner
from the States.
He apparently said to some great auditorium full of people, he said, hands up, he made
people put their hands up, he said, now hands up.
He said, if you have actually within your own Christian life asked God for power, hands
up if you've asked him for peace because you've needed peace in your life.
And so he began to list all these things, you see, and he got all these Christians to
stick their hands up.
And then apparently he threw back his great big negro arms and he looked at them and he
shook his head, he said, that was a dummy prayer, that was a right dummy prayer.
Because obviously they'd never grasped all that God had given them.
You don't ask for something that you've already got, but you do need to know how to use what
you've already got.
And Paul says in Colossians 2 verse 9, he says, for in him the wholefulness in Christ,
the wholefulness of the Godhead continues to dwell in bodily form.
And then in verse 10 he speaks to us and he says, for you are in him, made full and
have come to fullness of life in Christ, you too are filled with the Godhead and reach
full spiritual stature.
In other words, when I was born of God's Spirit, when I was born again, when I came to know
Christ, when I thanked him for his death upon the cross, when I admitted what a dead loss
I was and how much I needed him, when I thanked him that he would come into my life, God the
Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, the three in one, came to indwell me.
God didn't say, right, well, we'll give you Christ and come back later for the Holy Spirit
and wait a while for some kind of a second blessing.
Father Son and Holy Spirit came to indwell me at that point.
I didn't understand it, I didn't realize all I had, it would probably take a whole
lifetime fully to discover and appreciate all that we have in Christ, but nevertheless
the resources of the Godhead indwell us if we have Christ in our life.
And just at the end of my talk yesterday I touched on Paul's prayer to the Christians
at Ephesus.
And remember he said, I do not cease to give thanks for you, always thanking.
His prayers were always packed full of thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving you know and joy always go hand in hand.
He said, I never cease to give thanks for you, for I always pray that he may grant you
a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the deep and intimate knowledge of him, having the
eyes of your hearts flooded with light.
It'd be great to spend a bit more time actually on those verses, but we can't.
And then to go on he just quickly summarizes in this way, he says, firstly, he says, I
pray that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you.
And remember yesterday I touched on that verse in Thessalonians where it says, faithful is
he who's called you, and yesterday we were called to persevere, and today we're called
to be filled with his power and he will do it.
He will do it.
That just means I have to give him permission to come and do that which he's longing to
do in my life.
Secondly, he says, that you may know what are the riches of his glorious inheritance
in the saints.
In other words, when I came to know Christ, God may be very, very rich, incredibly rich
in himself, but each one of us here sounded a bit like it yesterday with the $44,000 missionary
offering, but each one of us here in fact are spiritually millionaires, that you've
got an enormous wealth of spiritual resources on which you can draw.
The sad thing is of course that most of us as Christians, most of the time, most of the
day just don't, and we struggle along in our own little self-effort, scratching around
in the dust, failing to realize just what we have to draw on.
And then thirdly, Paul says that you may know what is the immeasurable greatness of
his power in us.
Paul says, I pray that you'll come to know what you've got in Christ.
And he says the greatness of his power could never be measured in your life and mine.
It's an immeasurable greatness of his power within.
It's an extraordinary thing that he wrote that because it's a paradox in a way because
you could jump into his epistle in the Romans and wonder whether he had a bit of a bad day
when he wrote a certain passage in Romans because he says, I don't do what I wish.
I don't say what I really want to say, in fact I say the very things I loathe saying.
I've got the best intentions to carry out the things that God wants me to carry out
and that can be particularly so after a weekend of this kind.
We can have all the best intentions in the world.
We've had a weekend, we've become spiritually charged.
We've taken off into spiritual orbit, we'll drive our families mad when we get back home
because we just are oozing all that we've learned with the very best intentions of the
world.
But you know Paul can say really and truly I've no power to do just that.
I don't accomplish the good that I set out to do but the evil I don't really want to
do I'm always, I'm always doing.
When I read that yesterday that word always struck me and I thought well you know this
is the great spiritual giant Paul speaking that as a Christian he always had right estimation
of himself.
Sometimes you know you hear Christian testimonies and they say you know what a dreadful life
they lived before they came to know Christ but now they say and the wings are sprouting
and the halos never at a jaunty angle you know.
Now I've arrived but Paul said I am the foremost of sinners, not I was I am.
I'm still a dead loss, I still realise that it's very much Paul dominating my life.
But of course we don't stop there because if we did we jump off the bridge.
And then with regard to power for speaking Paul says this he says in Corinthians he must
have had a bad day then because he said you know I was with you in weakness and in much
fear and trembling.
My speech, my message were not implausible words of wisdom.
That is I came to you with knees knocking, felt an absolute nervous wreck quite frankly.
And then he goes on to say but all this because of the way I am was actually a demonstration
of the spirit and power.
That your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the very power of God.
In other words Paul with all his failings and all his difficulties and all his inadequacies
and the very fact that he stuttered and he didn't really feel that he could speak fluently.
Nevertheless through his life they came to realise that it wasn't Paul, it wasn't Paul
being the great man at all but it was the very presence and the power of the risen Christ.
Never underestimate the very fact that we each one of us have that presence and power
of the risen Christ within us.
And then of course at the end of the chapter in Romans he says but thanks be to God through
Jesus Christ our Lord.
Having said you know who's going to deliver me from the way that I am then he collapses
in a great bekeep and his full thanks be to God through Jesus Christ.
Moment by moment realisation that it just had to be Christ and if one were to sum up
all of that I think one would say well talking of spiritual power, power isn't a sort of
an ingredient that we get within our Christian lives but power is a person.
It's not me it's Christ.
The power that I have says Paul it's not me it's Christ.
I have no power at all.
That power is definitely of Christ.
What were Christ's famous last words to the disciples?
In Acts 1 verse 8 he says you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you
and you shall be my witnesses.
The amazing thing was you know that those early disciples you might think well perhaps
that some of them felt that kind of a power you know that kind of a wumpf.
I wish I'd got that sort of a wumpf then I'd really go places spiritually speaking.
If you look very carefully in the Acts of the Apostles they were still very much aware
of their own inadequacies and even after they performed a miracle people started rushing
around them and saying wasn't it terrific, what's happened, isn't it fantastic what you've done.
You see them taking two places back with them they say well it wasn't me, it wasn't me and
they point to the risen Christ.
It's a great comfort that scripture never glosses over the way in which the characters are.
But in Exodus chapter 4 if you want to do a good Bible study get a concordance and look
up the buts of scripture, the number of times people say to God but.
And Exodus 4 starts off with a great big but when Moses answers to God.
I've started a little exercise this year.
I found a spare diary knocking around and I thought well what shall I use that for.
And it suddenly came to me that I'd start writing psalms.
So I started writing psalms of June.
Couldn't show you them, couldn't read you them, far too personal for that.
But you know it's an interesting exercise, it's one you might like to try yourself.
Some of them I start off complaining bitterly to God.
And if you write really freely and you know no one else is going to read them and no one
else is going to see them.
They kind of have a bit of a twist half way through and you find God sorting you out.
And I don't know it just seems to help me anyway putting it down into words in that way.
You might like to try writing psalms of Ethel or psalms of Winnie or whatever your name
happens to be.
Give it a go.
David wrote psalms and it was his way of speaking to God and he was a man of tremendous emotions.
I identify with him greatly because I think we can as women.
He went to the very heights, he went to the very depths.
It comes through in his psalms.
And we can use his psalms as prayers, as our prayers to God too.
But in Exodus 4 Moses starts off with that great big buck.
God said look we're going to do this, we're going to do that, we're going to do the other,
you're going to have my presence and so on.
I'm going to give you power, verse 20 of chapter 3.
And God having told him all that, and maybe God having told you and me, myself included,
all this, all this weekend that we've discovered together, Moses answered and he said but.
And then in verse 10 he says another big but, starts off another sentence with but.
But Moses said to the Lord, oh my Lord I am not eloquent, either heretofore or since thou
has spoken to thy servant that I am slow of speech and of tongue.
It's hilarious because it was the most eloquent, one of the most eloquent verses we could trip
into really in the Bible, either heretofore, I don't know how it comes through in the Hebrew
but it's quite a mouthful in the English.
And then God said to him, who's made your mouth?
Who makes him dumb or deaf or seeing or blind, is it not I the Lord?
Now therefore go and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak.
Verse 13, but he said, oh my Lord, send thy praise someone else.
He thought of every excuse he could rather than actually being used of God that God might
speak through him.
I made every excuse I could think of not to come to this convention and the phone rang
and it was Grace Collins and she said, we've printed the brochures.
I said, oh God, you're going to send someone else.
He said, all we need are mouths, we've all got mouths.
And then he said, as you go along, so I'll teach you what you're to say and how you're
to speak to people.
Sometimes I go out with the students on a Friday night on outreach and we go into Queen
Street, which is the big street in Auckland, and bowl up to complete strangers and share
our faith in Christ.
It's a, you know, it's almost an odd sort of thing to do.
I don't know how you'd feel, I often wonder how I'd feel, you know, if somebody came up
to me.
Sometimes when it's happened I've had them on a bit, you know, and pretended not to be
a Christian, very naughty.
And they're not listening, they're not really listening to what I have to say at all and
they've got their little spiel already, you know, and off they go, take off into spiritual
orbit and I'm having them on a bit.
The husband's really ashamed of me when I do that.
But you know, every time we've been it's always been worthwhile.
That's the amazing thing.
Sometimes you'll walk up in the street, up and down the street for half an hour before
you'll actually approach somebody.
But always when you do talk to somebody and you start sharing Christ and you start listening
to them and what they think about it and you hear their opinions and so on, they'll often
thank you and say, well, you know, I really enjoyed that, that was terrific.
I want to talk to you more.
And yet trying to get me there is one of the most difficult things.
You know, my knees are knocking and I'm trembling and I don't really want to go and I can think
of a thousand and one things I'd rather do.
But once you're there and you're in the situation and you've opened your mouth, that's when
the power, that's when you start appreciating this power.
You see, we can't appreciate spiritual power just sitting here on our chubs.
You can't experience spiritual power in a sense, it's only when you start getting going.
And then in Romans chapter 1 verse 14, Paul says, I'm under obligation to everyone to
share my faith in Christ, to the Greeks and to the barbarians, to the educated and to
the uneducated.
Well, you might say, well, I'd like to go to Greece, I'd like to be under obligation
to the Greeks, I've always wanted to go to Greece.
That we're under obligation to the varsity types, we're under obligation to the dummies
of this world, we're under obligation to the old, we're under obligation to the young.
We're actually under, we're in people's debt to share the life of Christ.
You know, I feel very ashamed when some people say, why hasn't anyone ever told me this before?
Have I had that said to you when you share your faith in Christ?
It's a terrible indictment upon us Christians.
And you may say, well, you know, I mean, I could speak to that type of person, but definitely
not that kind of person.
But the life of Christ within is, His life is spontaneous and it's flexible.
And the very person that you're speaking to, he knows all about them anyway.
He knows what makes them tick.
And that's when we have to depend so heavily upon Him for the right words to say.
And another thing that really intrigues me about these verses in Romans is that when
Paul wrote it, he was an old man.
But it's written with all the vitality and the vigor of youth.
And I'm just going to put this little bit in brackets for a moment, you ladies.
There's no such thing as growing old, spiritually, if you're a Christian.
Spiritually, there's no such thing as growing old.
I think we probably saw that in Mrs. Chambers.
We can talk about her because she's not here yesterday.
You know that vitality and sparkle and sense of humor that can come through in an older
person that you don't feel any age gap at all.
You feel so much at one with them because it's the very life and energy and enthusiasm
and strength of Christ that's coming through that person, the vitality and the joy and
the great fun to be with.
So there's no such thing as growing old.
And it certainly comes through in that verse because Paul says in verse 15, I'm eager.
I'm really eager to share Christ, to preach the gospel to you in Rome.
And then verse 16, he says, I'm not ashamed of the gospel.
Some of us are a little bit ashamed of the fact that we are Christians and put us into
a cocktail party and we wouldn't dare mention it to anybody, in fact, we wouldn't even dare
go.
It's great fun, you know, when you do hand over a situation like that to Christ and say,
well, God, do you really want me there?
It's actually, you have a tremendous advantage as a Christian because people loosen up at
a cocktail party and they start talking and sharing all sorts of things about themselves
that they wouldn't otherwise.
It's a great place for talking, tremendous place for talking and witnessing and very
quietly sharing Christ in the normal, natural way, not Bible bashing them or anything like
that, but getting to know them, befriending them, meeting people that you wouldn't otherwise
meet.
Because how many non-Christian friends have you got?
How many Christian friends have you got?
You know, our lives should be full of non-Christians because that's why we're here.
And that's why God didn't yank us off to heaven the moment we were converted.
He left us down here.
And Christ Himself, when He walked this earth, He was always amongst the down and outs, wasn't
He?
He was right in the very thick of it.
He was in situations that you and I wouldn't touch with a barge pole.
And it's the same, Lord Jesus Christ who lives within each one of us now.
It's a bit scary when you say, well, God, you know, I'll hand myself over to you and
you just take me and use me where you want me to.
It's awfully scary in a way.
But I promise you this, it's heaps of fun.
It is heaps of fun.
You have to pinch yourself and think, what am I doing here?
You know, what's He put me here for?
But we should have masses and masses of non-Christian friends coming and going in and out of our
homes.
Our spare rooms never spare if we're really available to Him.
He says that the gospel is the power of God.
And that word I understand, although I'm no scholar, I understand that word power comes
from the word dynamite.
So that the power that He's given us of the gospel is the good news that we have to share
in Christ, that we have good news for everyone, we're all sick to death of bad news, is actually
dynamite.
I expect many of our friends look at us and they think, well she needs a bit of dynamite.
But the life of Christ is that strong, is that powerful, in point of fact.
And then I'll just finish by reflecting back on the verses that we had in our reading because
they're fantastic verses.
In Isaiah chapter 40, we'll just think about them, we'll just meditate on them at the end
of this session.
How it says of God, He doesn't faint or grow weary, His understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint and to Him who has no might.
He increases strength.
Even you shall faint and be weary.
Your grandchildren and your kids are going to find it hard to keep up with you if it
really is the life of Christ flowing through you.
Now I tell you this, you may be awfully busy but we should, I don't say we are, but we
should be relaxed in the midst of our busyness, if it really is of Him, if it really is His
life.
And then verse 31 intrigues me, it says, but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their
strength.
Now don't get that wrong.
You know, some people who say to them, what are you going to do in your life or something,
I'm waiting.
I'm waiting on the Lord, as if you're in a big queue, you know.
And He's the managing director and He's got a great pile of things to deal with before
He gets to you, but you're waiting.
Understand that word, wait, means in the sense of being a waiter.
Now I guess we all love going to a really top restaurant, don't we?
You've made a great fuss on, and having that waiter put the napkin on your lap and your
chair under you and so on, yet it's fabulous, isn't it, to be treated in that way.
He's got His eye on you all the time and He's utterly available to your every need.
They go to enormous lengths to please you and so on.
And that's the kind of service that we each one should have for the Lord Jesus Christ.
So we're the waiter, if you like.
We're utterly available, we're completely at His disposal, that we might be used and
serve Him in just the way that He wants.
And it says that we shall renew our strength.
And that word renew, I believe, means exchange.
We're going to do a bit of an exchange here.
In other words, I come to God and I say, well God, you take me with all my weaknesses and
all my failings and all that I am, and I'll swap it over and thank you Lord.