Recharging Your Batteries

1 John 4:10 “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”

If you ever feel unloved, neglected, lonely, forgotten—go to the cross. If you ever wonder whether anybody loves or knows or cares—go to the cross.

If life is so hard and full of trouble that you wonder if God has forgotten you—go to the cross. Because there, the love of God is on full display in Christ.

3) And when your batteries need recharging, reconnect with God’s unlimited power.

I went to Haiti a couple of years ago with one of our missionaries. I had never done anything like that, but I thought traveling with Tom, an old hand, would be a good way to give it a try. As you may know, Haiti is probably the poorest, most economically deprived country in the Western Hemisphere, and the state of the public services bears that out.

It was hot when we were there, but at night it wasn’t too bad because you could open the windows and the house we stayed in had a ceiling fan so we could sleep fairly comfortably. But about a half-hour after we went to bed, the fan stopped and the outside lights went out and every other light in the house went out. The electricity was off, but that happens here, too, and besides, everything was back on and humming the next morning. The next night, the same thing happened, because they shut off the electricity every night, and sometimes it would go off during the day because with the state of their economy and their meager resources, they can’t afford to have power around the clock.

But they had a generator at the compound where we were staying, and whenever the power would go off, the generator would automatically fire up and provide power to the house and to the other buildings.

That’s a little bit like what God wants to do for you and me when it feels like somebody shut off the power. Look at how Paul closes this glorious prayer, “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us…”

According to what do you pray? How about “now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine?” Think about how much that is. I mean, we can imagine quite a lot, can’t we? Think about all your children can ask or imagine.

Katie Couric is the new anchor for the evening news on CBS, and there’s been a lot of discussion about how she should sign off at the end of the newscast. Walter Cronkite always said, “And that’s the way it is,” and everybody since has been trying to come up with something memorable.

Well, how about using verse 20? “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine…” Let’s talk and live and make decisions according to him. Let’s take our problems to him. Let’s take our weaknesses and our bad days and our tough choices and our failures and our hopelessness and our confusion and our fatigue and our weariness and our frustration to “him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine…”