More Of God's Power In Your Life

More of God’s power in your Life

James 4:8 (NLT)

8 Draw close to God, and God will draw close to you. Wash your hands, you sinners; purify your hearts, you hypocrites.

Quite a while ago, there was an article in the Denver Rocky Mountain News described various web sites to which people can submit prayers. Perhaps u have heard of this one site, Newprayer.com, says, "Simply click on the ’Pray’ button and transmit your prayer to the only known location of God." The site claims "that it can send prayers via a radio transmitter to God’s last known location, a star cluster called M13 believed to be one of the oldest in the universe." Crandall Stone, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, engineer and freelance consultant, set up the site last winter after a night of sipping brandy and philosophizing with friends in Vermont. The conversation turned to Big Bang theories of creation, and someone suggested that if everything was in one place at the time of the explosion, then God must have been there, too. "It’s the one place where we could be sure he was," Stone said. "Then we thought that if we could find that location and had a radio transmitter, we could send a message to God." After consulting with NASA scientists, the friends settled on M13 as the likely location. They chipped in about $20,000, and built a radio- wave-transmitting Web site. Stone reports that they transmit about 50,000 prayers a week from seekers around the globe.

Wow! This tells me there about 50,000 people each week who have computers, are desiring communication with God, but seeing as their best hope broadcasting a prayer into outer space via cyberspace to the "last known location of God." But what about those who don’t own computers? There must be millions others who are trying to touch the God of the Universe. It seems most are desperately desiring to sense God’s presence and power, but they see God as distant, removed, hidden perhaps unapproachable. Have you ever had the feeling that God was distant? That He just wasn’t there?

Kinda feel like the lady who told her neighbor “My husband’s a do-it- yourself man. Whenever I ask him to do anything, he says ‘Do it yourself’.” Is pursuing God, or spirituality really just do it yourself job?

The feeling of God being distant even affects those of us who have a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ. I cannot begin to recount how many times in my years of full-time ministry since 1991 that I’ve heard this line, "I just don’t feel close to God right now." Or, "God doesn’t seem very real to me right now." To be frank, I can’t begin to recount how many times I struggle with that as well. Are my prayers just bouncing off the walls? So, what can we do about it? How can we overcome those feelings? How can we get to the point of experiencing and enjoying God’s presence and power consistently in our daily life?

What, then, does it mean to feel God’s power in your life? I think there are three key words for feeling God’s power in your life.

1. APPROACH: as the Bible says: “Draw close to God.”

Yeah, right? How? When I dunno if He’s there, can’t see, smell nor touch Him. If you look in the Bible, it seems to say we can begin to feel God’s power by having a sense of confidence. The apostle John wrote these encouraging words, "We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us" [1 John 4:13-16]. John says that we can know, not assume, not wish for, not hope for, not long for, but rather know and then rely on the love of God. How by having faith in Jesus, who is tangible, real people have seen touch him. They have heard Him speaking, moving, the Bible says He tabernacled among us in John 1:14 – that God became flesh. So we are not left with mystical OOM to connect with the divine, but a real flesh and blood personality. His name is Jesus. This very Jesus said:

6 Jesus told him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. 7 If you had known who I am, then you would have known who my Father is. From now on you know him and have seen him!”