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I Corinthians 4.20 (NIV)
For the kingdom of God
is not a matter of talk but of power.
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| Words pertain to the kingdom, but they are not its power.* |
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When I worked in the church office, one of my weekly duties required that I get a preview
of the preacher’s sermon outline. That outline is just a piece of
paper – and some 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. Who needs a perfectly organized outline?
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.”*
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.
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| The kingdom of God occurs when persons are ruled by God.* |
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