The Power Of His Presence Series

God doesn’t need eloquence to reach people. He just needs a voice, your voice, with a living, vital connection to Him in prayer.

I like the way Luci Swindoll once put it. She writes: “A friend of mine was caught in an elevator during a power failure. At first, there was momentary panic as all seven strangers talked at once. Then my friend remembered the tiny flashlight he had in his pocket. When he turned it on, the fear dissipated. During the 45 minutes they were stuck together they told jokes, laughed, and even sang. [The Bible] says we are that flashlight. Just as the flashlight draws power from its batteries, we draw power from Jesus. As light, we dissipate fear, bring relief, and lift spirits. We don’t even have to be big to be effective. We just have to be ‘on.’” (Luci Swindoll, "Heart to Heart," Today’s Christian Woman; www.PreachingToday.com)

We just have to be connected to Jesus, and He does all the work through us.

If you want your life to count for something, then 1st, answer His call to be with Him; 2nd, answer His call to preach.

And finally, answer Christ’s call to receive power. Respond to His invitation to accept His ability and His authority to drive out demons and to overcome the forces of evil in our world. For you see, as we spend time with Christ, we not only speak His Words, we exercise His power.

Pastor Mike Breaux, pastor of the Heartland Community Church in Rockford, Illinois, talks about the time his daughter, Jodie, answered God’s call to go into missions work.

When she graduated from high school, she said, “I don’t think God wants me to go to college right now. I want to take a year to go to Haiti, and I want to serve people in a medical mission down there.” Her dad wasn’t so sure about his daughter moving 3,000 miles away from home to the poorest country in the western hemisphere, which is also AIDS-infested and controlled by the voodoo religion, but he supported her in her decision.

He says, “One of the hardest days of my life was putting my little girl on an airplane and watching it lift off, not knowing whether I’d ever communicate with her again.”

Then one night he gets an e-mail from Jodie. She wrote: “Dad, tonight has been the most remarkable night of my life. I got called out to this hut to deliver a baby. Dad, I’ve only delivered one, and that was with somebody. I’d never done this by myself, but I was the only one around. They called me, and I get to this hut, and there’s this naked, screaming lady on the dirt floor. I got a flashlight, and I’m thinking, Here I am, 18-years-old, and I’m in a hut in a third-world country with a naked, screaming, pregnant lady. I have a flashlight, and I don’t know what I’m doing—but I’m here. To make matters worse, this lady from the voodoo religion walked into the hut, dressed in her red and blue voodoo garb, and began to chant some voodoo incantation in Creole. She put some kind of oil on the lady’s head, and when she started to walk away from me and the woman, she stopped at the woman’s belly, put some other kind of saave there, and walked the opposite direction—all while chanting this Creole spell. I didn’t know what to do. She stood at the head of this woman and stared a hole through me. When I was getting ready to deliver this baby, I just looked back at her, and I started singing. I knew she didn’t understand English, but I just started singing: ‘Our God is an awesome God, he reigns from heaven above, with wisdom, power, and love, our God is an awesome God.’”