Worth Repeating - May 4, 2017

I Corinthians 4: 20 For the kingdom of God is not a matter of talk but of power. (NIV)

Words pertain to the kingdom, but they are not its power.*

In my part-time job in the church office, one of my duties involved my getting a preview of the preacher’s sermon outline each week. That outline is just a piece of paper – and some weeks (make that most weeks), I couldn’t see how he was going to make a sermon out of it. But every Sunday, the Spirit speaks through my preacher and he delivers a powerful message.

We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to say just the right things in our witnessing. It is important to prepare ourselves – you have to study for the test and my preacher has to prepare his outline; but a person could be accurate, fluent and profound and still be “spiritually useless.”*

  

Sometimes the power of words lies in the listener more than in the speaker. Someone else characterized the phenomenon this way: “I probably should apologize to preachers for the hundreds of times that the main point that I took in from their sermon was not the one they intended to make; please know that I was listening – your voice was a conduit for another voice.”*

Talk is cheap. It’s not about what you say – and it’s not about how you say it, either. It’s about being empowered. I pray over these words as I write them but they are just words. Without the Spirit, the Bible itself is just words. The Spirit makes the words powerful.

The kingdom of God occurs when persons are ruled by God.*