God Wants Us All to Live a Life of Power

God wants our lives to be strengthened and grounded in the power of His Spirit. God wants our actions, our efforts on behalf of the Kingdom, our ministries, and our everyday lives as fathers, as husbands and wives, as workers or professionals to be grounded in the energy, the power, the authority that only His Spirit can give.

The Word of the Lord is clear that we, as children of God, cannot move forward on our own strength or intelligence alone; we need something that can only come from above. On our own, we are lost. The world is too heavy, and the forces against us are so powerful. The power of sin, the power of the world, the power of darkness is so strong and so destructive that if we try to live the fruitful and vigorous life God wants us to live on our own, by our own strength and wisdom, we will never be able to do anything worthwhile in the Kingdom of God. We will never succeed in our personal efforts; we will never have an impact in our ministry unless we do so with the energy of the Holy Spirit.

The Word of the Lord is very clear about this. That is why it is so important for every Christian to know, first of all, that this is God’s plan: that we live a life filled to overflowing with the Holy Spirit. We must also know how to turn to that Spirit of God, how to gain access to that power and energy that God wants to supply to us and wants to flow through us continually.

Believers who learn to live by the power of the Holy Spirit will be far less worn down; they will experience fewer failures, receive more illumination from the Lord, renew their strength more easily, and be able to endure longer in the ministries and projects they undertake than those who live only by religious energy, or simply by spiritual, religious piety, or by any other kind of energy that is not the energy of the Holy Spirit.

That is why it is so important, brothers and sisters, that we understand this great truth. God wants us to be filled with the Holy Spirit. God wants us to learn to go to the waters again and again and drink of that power of God.

And through these next meditations we will see that this call to live in the power of the Holy Spirit is not something new that occurred to God only in the Book of Acts or in some other parts of the New Testament. Rather, from the very beginning, in the lives of prophets, kings, and people God used in the Old Testament, that principle of living, moving, and ministering in the power of the Holy Spirit was always there. The thing is, in the Old Testament this truth is sometimes not explained or developed as clearly as we see it in the New Testament. But it is a truth God has always wanted His people to know: to live lives of power and effectiveness, to do great things in the Kingdom of God, and to prevail against the powers of darkness that always seek to destroy us and bring us to failure, we need the anointing of the Holy Spirit.

And one of the texts that shows the work and importance of the Holy Spirit is found in the Book of Genesis itself, in the first chapter, at the very moment of creation, where it says: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God”—mark that—“and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.”

As we see in this passage, even at the very beginning, before God began the process of creation, His Spirit was already playing a creative role. What this passage from Genesis shows us is that there was a time when everything was empty. None of the objects, the principles, or the things that make up creation as we know it existed. It says that the face of the earth was empty; there was only desolation. All there was was mere potential. But the Spirit of God was moving over that chaos, over that potential, those waters that represent the life yet to emerge.

In fact, scientists know—even those who talk about Darwinism and say that creation, or rather, that nature arises on its own and not through God—that life began in water. And here it says clearly that the Spirit of the Lord was moving over the waters. That is, when there is something empty, when there is something chaotic that is mere potential in our lives, what brings forth life is the presence of the Holy Spirit.

What we see here is that God was preparing to create, to bring order, to lay the foundations for all the creation we enjoy today, and we see the Spirit of the Lord moving and preparing to do what had to be done.

I would say this teaches us that all creativity in us must come through the Holy Spirit. What turns our emptiness, what turns our potential, what sometimes turns the chaos within us, the disorder, into creativity, into life, into action, into order is the presence of the Holy Spirit.

In a sense, just as the Spirit of God hovered over the waters before beginning to create what would become nature and creation, He must also hover over our lives, our ministries, everything we are, and bring forth the creativity God wants to arise in our lives. But for that we need the anointing, the fullness, the presence, the moving of the Holy Spirit in our lives and our ministries. We will continue this meditation later. May the Lord bless you.