So, the trains of thought regarding the true life of the Christian, holiness, empowerment, and joy, continue to careen down the tracks. You are all invited to help keep them from derailing.
Current thoughts are as follows: We are given three methods for dealing with things and achieving goals.
The first is do-it-yourself. We are (albeit fallen) people living in an (albeit fallen) world. We were made for it and it was made for us. To a significant extent, we are called on to use our skills and ingenuity to solve problems and get things done. If you’re cold, light a fire (or turn up the thermostat) … don’t think it’s a problem that needs to be brought to God with thanksgiving and supplication.
The second is to pray about it. The Christian needs to spend a considerable amount of time in prayer: both dedicated time and that habit we should all have (but is so hard to form) of keeping a continual conversation going with God while we go about our everyday lives. The Gospels often talk of Christ spending time alone in prayer (and, quite often, fasting).
But the third is the one I am most interested here: exercising the authority that God grants all Christians. We have authority to invoke the power of God in our dealings with the world. This authority, I believe, gives us a power that is completely absent from the typical Christian life, and yet quite phenomenal in its potential. I have not yet begun to experience it, but do have a few thoughts that I would like to get out there. They, and your feedback, may bring me a little closer.
- This authority is over Spirits and the material world, probably largely constrained by the needs of our mission … but everyone’s mission needs a miracle at some point. I don’t know whether it can ever be directly over other people … I doubt it. Even God does not tamper with our free will.
- Achieving things through exercising divine power and asking God to do things are very different. Jesus spent a lot of time in prayer, but when performing miracles he rarely (if ever) asked God to intervene … usually he just stated what he wanted and, if anything, thanked God as though the outcome was a foregone conclusion. I believe that this is not because of his divinity, but that he was doing what any Christian could do. Sometimes, Jesus or the affected person performed specific actions (which often had a ritual quality).
- The exercise of authority must be learned. A person with years of experience will be more able to wield that authority in controlling an unholy power or influence than a novice. This works two ways, the Christian will recognize situations in which he/she has the ability to exercise authority, so not end up like King Canute, trying to order the oceans to recede. However, it may also be the case that Spirits will learn to recognize certain individuals, and respond more readily to someone they have seen successfully exercise their authority than to a newby. Acts 19:15 “Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are you?”
- In Luke 8:26–39 there is a very interesting story with the following chronology: (i) Jesus orders a demon out of a man, (ii) the demon doesn’t leave; (iii) Jesus asks the demon his name; (iv) Jesus makes an arrangement with the demons, in which they are allowed to possess a herd of pigs. This suggests to me that, in the matter of exercising authority, he was not just God being omnipotent, but a man calling on the Spirit of God just as any of us would have to, and in this case dealing with a very powerful adversary.
- Faith is typically identified as the necessary ingredient for the exercise of power. A typical saying of Jesus is something like: “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can tell this mountain to cast itself into the sea, and it will obey you.” This has never made a lick of sense to me, so to understand it I have tended to think of faith as some kind of hyper-concentrate, as in “Hey, man, have you met that new pastor? You should see his faith, it must be like 99.99% pure. I bet he could tell a mountain to go jump in the sea with just a half a gram of that stuff!” What if, however, we all have enough faith to do that, we are just not exercising the faith we have in our areas of competence / responsibility? A final word on faith: It is not a state of mind or emotion!
- Jesus knows that the woman who was hemorrhaging had touched him, and been healed, because he could feel that Power left him. I’m not sure what this means, but I suspect it’s important.
- Final point (I think). Because this is not about asking God to do something, but rather about exercising power he has given us, and because of things like the fact that we will never (in this life) be in a position of always knowing exactly the right thing to do, and the fact that, after time, Spirits will recognize us and, also being limited in their knowledge, perhaps not know what the limits of our authority are, they might defer when they don’t have to. So there can be a kind of bleeding, or leakage. What I mean is that this power might be exercised in ways that are (within limits) outside of the “best practices” for men and women of God. This might account for some of the more bizarre accounts in Scripture, like in Acts 5:1–11, where two people died for trying to mislead the local church or, more notably, in II Kings 2:23–25, when Elisha turned a couple of bears loose on a bunch of brats, with macabre results.
