Heart Thoughts 7/28/10
Power. It’s a word that has meaning for everyone, and particularly so for those who are His. We see it’s demonstration all through His Word, whether directly through the actions of the Father in creation, as He led His people out of Egypt, and throughout the lives of the Old Testament prophets. We see it in the life and miracles of Christ, where He made the crippled walk, gave sight to the blind, and raised the dead. We observe it in the life of the early church and through the lives of the apostles, Paul, Peter, and John. The Bible connects such power with the right hand of God, it being the symbol of this kind of power, and a truly wondrous power it is. We who follow Him long to see such displays of power, and pray much for Him to move in it. This is not wrong, yet the great Reformer, Martin Luther spoke of another kind of power, one that is much less exciting, and I think, much less sought. He called it “lefthanded power.”
Luther called this lefthanded power, “The quiet demonstration of power in people to stir up an appetite for God in another, no matter what was happening in the life of the one who possessed it.” I think this is the kind of power John was speaking of in I John 1, where he writes, “This One Who was life from God was shown to us, and we have seen Him, and now we testify and announce to you that He is the One Who is eternal life.”
John goes on to invite his readers into fellowship not only with himself and his fellow believers, but with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as well. The invitation comes not only in words, but in the power of a resurrected life, that dwelt in the presence of and with all three. For me, I think perhaps the clearest demonstration of this is found in Acts 7, when Stephen, after preaching to his Jewish listeners, is stoned to death. In the midst of their hatred and anger, verse 55 reads, “But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed steadily upward into heaven and saw the glory of God, and he saw Jesus standing in the place of honor at God’s right hand,” His listeners killed him for his message, yet among them was a young man named Saul of Taursus, and there can be no doubt that what he saw in the life and death of Stephen had much to do with preparing his heart to encounter Christ on the Damascus road. Saul, who became Paul, did not see a mightly deliverance for Stephen, nor was Stephen raised up after he’d been killed. Yet, what he did see stirred his heart, and through the “lefthanded power” of Stephen’s life, God’s grace pierced his hard heart, and I believe it was there, that the Damascus road journey truly began. A journey that one day would take him into the third heaven, where he would see wonders no man had ever seen.
We, you and I, may long for a great demonstration of God’s power today, and maybe He’ll bring us just that, but I think, more and more, I’m longing to walk in the kind of lefthanded power Luther spoke of. Power that is able to impact the stoniest heart, awaken it to the beauty of Christ, and draw it to Him. A power that, even in the midst of all the stones of hell being hurled at it, is able to gaze upward, and see the glory of God. A life that quietly, but steadily, draws someone else to Him.
Blessings,
Pastor O
