GOD’S POWERFUL VOICE
Bob Stiles

In early January of 2006, CIA officials believed an audio-taped message threatening the United States was from al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who warned that plans for terror attacks were under way - and also offered a “long-term truce.”

” … The war against America and its allies will not be confined to Iraq,” the voice on the tape said, adding that “Iraq has become a magnet for attracting and training talented fighters”…. “It’s only a matter of time,” the voice said, referring to attacks. “They are in the planning stages, and you will see them in the heart of your land as soon as the planning is complete.”

It seems to be big news around the world each time there’s a new terrorist tape identifying the voice as that of Osama bin Laden. His voice is authenticated and the world-wide attention proves that his voice is still a powerful one.

Psalms 29:1-9: “Give honor to the Lord, you angels; give honor to the Lord for His glory and strength. Give honor to the Lord for the glory of His name. Worship the Lord in the splendor of His holiness. The voice of the Lord echoes above the sea. The God of glory thunders. The Lord thunders over the mighty sea. The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty. The voice of the Lord splits the mighty cedars; the Lord shatters the cedars of Lebanon. He makes Lebanon’s mountains skip like a calf and Mount Hermon to leap like a young bull. The voice of the Lord strikes with lightning bolts. The voice of the Lord makes the desert quake; the Lord shakes the desert of Kadesh. The voice of the Lord twists mighty oaks and strips the forests bare. In His Temple everyone shouts, “Glory!””

What does today’s Scripture teach us about the power of God’s voice? The cedars of Lebanon were giant trees that could grow to 120 feet in height and 30 feet in circumference. A voice that could split the cedars of Lebanon would be a truly powerful voice - the voice of God. All that was impressive to people was under God’s complete control. Psalm 33 says that when He spoke, the world began! It appeared at His command. Let everyone stand in awe of Him!

You see, there is a voice - more powerful than any earthly one- the voice of the Almighty God, the only true God, which has been authenticated through the Holy Spirit, as revealed to us in the Bible. The awesome thing is that God wants to speak His powerful voice into our lives! Jesus said, “I will not leave you alone, I will come to you…. I will give you another Counselor who will never leave you! And when He comes, He will guide you into all the truth, for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come. You can believe in and trust the voice of God. He is real! Take a couple of minutes to praise God. You might want to read today’s scripture aloud as words of praise. Thank Him for His ultimate power and control. Tell God what you need in your life…..now listen for His voice. Every day this week, take a moment to meditate on the truth that God’s voice is the most powerful.

Bob Stiles is the Worship Pastor at Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Grove City
www.gcvineyard.org

Power to Be an Eye-Witness
Tom Pauquette

Acts 1: 4, 8: On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about… 8 you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

Good news – it looks like there’s going to be food in heaven!! Can you imagine? In the passage above it starts by saying that Jesus, risen from the grave and on His way back to the Father, was eating with His disciples. I like that.

Then Jesus gave them a strict command: “Wait!” He told these excited disciples to hurry up and wait. What were they to wait for? They were to wait for the “gift” of the Holy Spirit. They were commanded not to go off and try to save the world, speak in His Name, or even conduct a simple “Bible study” until they had first been empowered to do so. They were commanded to wait for the Holy Spirit to come on them.

Verse 8 tells us why. It says that they were guaranteed of one thing if they would wait for the Holy Spirit to indwell them – power! They would have the power they needed to live (and die) as eye witnesses to the movements of God Himself. They would not be preaching about the Gospel, they would be living and preaching the Gospel itself.

Believer, being indwelt by the Holy Spirit is not an optional experience reserved only for the enthusiastic. Being filled, immersed, apprehended, and guided by the Holy Spirit is at the essential center of our walk with the Lord. The truth is that we have a job to do. But it is a job we can not do. Only the Holy Spirit can do it through us. It will only happen through us if and when we give ourselves to being filled once and freshly filled again with God’s Holy Spirit.

Are you living your life in the Holy Spirit? That’s where the power is. Are you holding still and submitting yourself to God in such a way that you can be indwelt by His Spirit? Set aside a time right now when you will clear away the world and enter in to the Lord’s Presence for this very purpose. If you have experienced this before, then you will be glad to do so again. If you have not yet had this experience then buckle up and hang on tight.

Have a power day!

Tom Pauquette is the Senior Pastor at Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Grove City
www.gcvineyard.org

THESE COMMANDMENTS
Scott Pontier

Deuteronomy 6:4-9: Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

Most commentators understand the phrase “these commandments” to allude to a number of things; specifically the commands given in this paragraph, more broadly to include the commandments in Deuteronomy, the Torah and, even more, all of the Biblical text. That’s a whole lot of commandments and can seem to feel very stifling and restrictive.

Christians have struggled with the idea of salvation for centuries. Common to our understanding is that our salvation could never come under our own power. There is nothing we can do to earn favor with God to the point of salvation. We have been able to come to God, quite simply, because of His own grace, His free gift of His son, Jesus. Through his blood we are saved. So what’s up with all these commandments?

Christianity as a whole runs a wide spectrum on how they approach this question, most often we hear words from Ephesians 2, “it is by grace we have been saved.” Citing this text often helps us understand that we cannot earn favor with God – He gives it freely. If we are not careful, however, it can lend to thinking that tells us, “obeying commandments is not as important as simply loving or worshipping Jesus,” or “people who work so hard at obeying God’s ‘rules’ are just trying to earn their way to heaven.”

Keep reading in Ephesians 2:8-10. There is a reason we have been saved and we have been saved in order to do “mitsvot” – a word meaning “good deeds” as well as “commandments” or “teachings” as we see it in Deuteronomy 6.

When a teacher like Paul uses the phrase “good works” in his books, anyone reading them in the first century would have understood mitsvot from Deuteronomy. Read Deuteronomy 5:33. A central understanding to being a Christian is that we are saved by God’s grace and His grace alone so that we may participate in God’s heart, his mitsvot. What is God’s heart? Feeding the hungry, caring for the poor, taking care of the orphan, the widow, the stranger in your land. God’s heart is for the good deeds of taking care of others – loving our neighbor.

God is looking for partners – people who will do the mitsvot and become co-creators with God, making the world the kind of place God originally intended it to be. it is by doing the mitsvot, these commands, these good deeds, that we help repair and restore this broken world.

How have you written the mitsvot on your heart?

How can you impress them on your children, talk about them when at home and on the road?

Where would God have you help restore his world today?

Colossians 3:12-17

Scott Pontier is the Student Ministries Pastor at Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Grove City
www.gcvineyard.org

Worship = Power!
Tom Pauquette

Luke 5.17: One day as [Jesus] was teaching, Pharisees and teachers of the law, who had come from every village of Galilee and from Judea and Jerusalem, were sitting there. And the power of the Lord was present for him to heal the sick.

Interesting. In his account of this passage, Luke felt compelled to point out that the power of the Lord was present for [Jesus] to heal the sick. Wasn�t the power of the Lord always present? Was the surrender of His divine attributes so complete (see Philippians 2.5-11) that Jesus was dependent upon certain circumstances in order to be able to demonstrate His full power?

The opening verses of Mark 6 are a record of Jesus in His own home town. I think we all know how hard it can be to go home. The Bible says that Jesus took His disciples back home and on the Sabbath stood up in the synagogue and began to teach. You can kind of feel the tension mounting, can’t you? The passage says that a few were amazed at what Jesus was saying. That’s good since amazement is often the beginning of faith. But more people, it seemed, were actually offended that “little Jesus” was lecturing them. They knew Him as the son of Joseph and Mary, not the Son of God. They knew Him as the brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon, not the Chief Shepherd of all the brothers of the Church. They knew him as the kid who played Little League baseball and sold candy bars to go on a school field trip. When He stood up to bring them the Living Word of the God, the Bible says that “they took offense at him.” As a result of their choice to be offended, verse 5 says that Jesus could not do any miracles there. Not that He would not, but that he simply could not.

A thousand questions about God, the nature of Jesus, and other things may be racing through your mind. Under what possible circumstances is Jesus Christ, the very Son of God, simply not able to express His full power? The climate that simply prevents the Lord from expressing His power is simple: rejection. His own people simply rejected Him for who He really was. When the full nature of Jesus Christ is somehow limited and ultimately rejected by the Church, then the power of the Lord will not be displayed. When our concepts of the Risen and Ascended Jesus are reduced in any fashion from being fully divine, then we should not expect to see His power, and thus His glory, revealed.

The opposite of rejection is, obviously acceptance. The ultimate expression of acceptance is worship. When we choose to humbly, authentically, and exuberantly worship the Lord for all that we understand Him to be, then we should expect to see His power readily displayed among us. As the Church, the present expression of the Body of Jesus Christ in the world today, we must set aside every thought and teaching that would cause us to see Jesus Christ as anything but the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son of God, The Incarnate One now Glorified. In so recognizing Jesus Christ in the fullness of His nature then we must worship Him. And we must worship Him with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Nothing more is possible, and nothing less will do. When we worship the Lord in the full expression of His revealed nature, then the power of the Lord [will be] present for him to heal the sick.

Have a power day!

Tom Pauquette is the Senior Pastor at Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Grove City
www.gcvineyard.org

POWER OF THE RESURRECTION
Bob Stiles

Earlier in the week I came across this newspaper story about an amazing basketball shot that helped win a Minnesota high school championship game! The story from the Minnesota Star Tribune went like this:

“It was an absurd shot. Taken out of desperation. With almost zero chance of going in. Yet Hoffarber swished it, lying on his back on the three-point line late Saturday night at Target Center with his legs and arms up, looking a lot like an upside-down turtle. The shot, taken just before the buzzer sounded to end the first overtime of the Minnesota Class 4A boys’ basketball championship game, merely tied the score at 58. Yet it proved every bit as devastating as a game-winner..

The Royals, amazingly given a second chance at victory, outscored Eastview 13-2 in the second overtime to win 71-60. The reaction of longtime high school basketball followers to Hoffarber’s incredible shot was universal disbelief.

“I still don’t believe it,” said Louie Mitteco, the former Totino-Grace boys’ basketball coach who has attended the state tournament since the mid-1940s. “… It’s a shot you will never see again.” David Stead, the longtime executive director of the Minnesota State High School League, said he too had never seen a shot like that. “Do you believe in miracles? That’s what happened on a basketball court [Saturday],” Stead said.”

Luke 24:1-12: “1But very early on Sunday morning the women came to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. 2They found that the stone covering the entrance had been rolled aside. 3So they went in, but they couldn’t find the body of the Lord Jesus. 4They were puzzled, trying to think what could have happened to it. Suddenly, two men appeared to them, clothed in dazzling robes. 5The women were terrified and bowed low before them. Then the men asked, “Why are you looking in a tomb for someone who is alive? 6He isn’t here! He has risen from the dead! Don’t you remember what he told you back in Galilee, 7that the Son of Man must be betrayed into the hands of sinful men and be crucified, and that he would rise again the third day?” 8Then they remembered that he had said this. 9So they rushed back to tell his eleven disciples–and everyone else–what had happened. 10The women who went to the tomb were Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and several others. They told the apostles what had happened, 11but the story sounded like nonsense, so they didn’t believe it. 12However, Peter ran to the tomb to look. Stooping, he peered in and saw the empty linen wrappings; then he went home again, wondering what had happened.”

I’m sure those who were in attendance at that Minnesota basketball game will talk about that unbelievable shot for some time to come. I can imagine them trying to explain and describe the unbelievable shot they had witnessed to someone else. Unless you had been there and seen the shot for yourself, it was probably hard to believe. The next best thing would be to watch a “replay” of the shot on video. As I thought about this story, it got me thinking about Christ’s resurrection. After reading today’s scripture, does it make sense why some people have a hard time comprehending the resurrection of Jesus the first time they hear about it? Or at least until they see some evidence? Just like the disciples, many people have to go through various stages of belief: At first they may think it’s a fantasy, impossible to believe. Then, like Peter, they may check out the facts but still may be unsure about what happened. It’s only when they encounter Jesus in a personal way will they be able to accept the fact of the Resurrection. Then, as they commit themselves to Jesus and devote their lives to serving Him, they will begin to understand and experience His resurrection power and the reality of His presence with them.

Your life and words (if they are Christ-like) may be the evidence that someone else needs in order to believe that the miracle of the Resurrection has the power to change a person’s life. Thank God for His power which raised Christ from the dead! Ask the Holy Spirit to prepare your heart and mind this Easter for experiencing the “unbelievable miracle” of Christ’s resurrection in a fresh way in your life. Pray every day this week for God’s Spirit to help you focus on the truth of Christ’s death and resurrection. Pray for the opportunity to talk to a friend, who needs Jesus, about the “unbelievable miracle” of Easter. Ask God’s Spirit to enable you to live like Jesus, so that someone else will see a “replay” of Christ’s life-changing power.

Bob Stiles is the Worship Pastor at Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Grove City
www.gcvineyard.org