Power For Life-The Holy Spirit & Healing

Power For Living- The Holy Spirit & Healing+

3/23/14 2 Kings 4:38-44 Acts 9:32-43

If you could have power to do something you really wanted to do today, what kind of power would you want to have?. Would you use that power to get some money, to get a promotion, to win a game, to heal someone’s body, to restore a relationship, to be set free from an addiction, to overcome a sin, or to reach a goal you have for yourself. Often times the difference between living and existing for a person is that, one is using power that’s available to him or her and the other one is not.

If someone were to ask you, just how much power do you have, what would you point to out to begin to measure your power? We are in this series entitled Power For Living, The Holy Spirit & Faith, Healing and Boldness. Jesus was one of the first to recognize that in order to be a follower of Jesus Christ, each of us would need to receive power. One of the last things he told us before going back to Heaven, was that “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.”

How big is the God you serve? Do you serve your God, or does your God serve you. When you pray, do you show up with instructions and a list of thing for God to do, or do you show up to report for duty expecting to receive an assignment. The amount of power we receive for living is dependent on who is our power source and what do we think is available to us.

If I told you, I want you to go to Atlanta and get there as quickly as you could and all I gave you was a bicycle and $400 for to use on the trip how many of you would immediately see that as unfair or too much of a burden? How many of you would see the bicycle as a quick way to get to the bus, to get to the train, to get on a plane to get to Atlanta. What we see as power that’s available to us will either cause us to step up to a task or shrink away from it.

The Holy Spirit is the third part of the Trinity. As Christians we believe in God The Father, God The Son, and God The Holy Spirit. They are not 3 gods, but one God that is perfectly connected to Himself, yet very distinct in His personality. We say that God is perfect love. Love requires that there be an object of that love. God has always been love, so there has always been something for God to Love prior to creation. The something that God loved was the divisions within God, with the Father loving, the Son, and the Son loving the father, and the Holy Spirit being the power channel through which that love flowed.

Jesus offers us the chance to plug into the power source of the Holy Spirit for what we need in our lives. The Holy Spirit can do things in and through us without us even knowing what He’s doing or how he’s doing it. God can work through any of us at any time, without us having met some special condition.

In our Old Testament Lesson, we saw the prophet Elisha. A famine was taking place in the land. Elisha was trying to hold a bible study lesson for a large group of students and they got hungry. He told one of the guys to put on a large pot of water and cook some stew for these men. Well one of the cook’s servants went out to collect some plants to cook, and he found a plant that looked good, and had some delicious looking gourds attached to it. He brought them back, and cut them up into the pot. This stew was served to the men, and they all started eating.

Shortly thereafter one by one, they must have developed stomach cramps and began falling over and throwing up. That good looking plant that had been found was obviously full of poison. Somebody went to Elisha and told him that there was death in the pot. The Holy Spirit came upon Elisha in a very non-dramatic way. He simply revealed to Elisha, what needed to be done to bring about a healing. Sometimes we receive power, simply from listening to God and doing what God says.

Some people may have expected Elisha to come and lay hands on them, rebuke the poison, and have him anoint them all with oil. But that’s not what God wanted to do in this situation. Doing things the way we always did it, may hinder us from receiving healing in a different situation. There is nothing in the Bible to let us know that Elisha was a medical doctor or a botanist, specializing in cures for certain poisons. The Holy Spirit however specializes in everything we face in life. He told Elisha to tell the people. Go get me some flour. He put the flour into the pot and said serve it to the people.