THE SPIRIT AS POWER

Acts 1:8

Morning Meditation 1/9/15

"But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth."

Tozer says, “Some good Christians have misread this text and have assumed that Christ told his disciples that they were to receive the Holy Ghost and Power, the power to come after the coming of the Spirit.” Then he adds by way of explanation, “the coming of the power and the Spirit are the same.”

Our text says, “Ye shall received power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you.” By those words our Lord raised the expectation of His disciples and taught them to look forward to the coming of a supernatural power into their natures from a source outside themselves.

This was to be something previously unknown to them but suddenly to come upon them from another world. It was to be nothing less than God Himself entering into them with the purpose of ultimately reproducing His own likeness within them.

I quote Tozer again: “Here is the dividing line that separates Christianity from all occultism and from every kind of oriental cult ancient or modern. These all are built around the same ideas, each with its own peculiar set of phrases and apparently varying only in minor details. They each advise, 'Get in tune with the Infinite,' or, 'Wake the giant within you,' or, 'Learn to think creatively,' or, 'Tune in to your hidden potentialities.' Whatever may be said in its favor, it most certainly is not Christianity.”

When the power came it was an endument of Divine energy. It affected every department of the believer's life and will remain with him forever. It is not physical power nor even mental power though it may touch everything both mental and physical in it outworkings.

How does this power operate? At its purest it is an unmediated force directly applied by the Spirit of God on the spirit of man. The blessed Holy Spirit preforms His work by direct contact with the regenerated human spirit.

Again I quote Tozer: It would be less than accurate to say that the power of God is always experienced in a direct and unmediated form, for when He so wills the Spirit may use other means as Christ used spittle to heal a blind man. But always the power is above and beyond the means. . . In the light of this it will be seen how empty and meaningless is the average church service today. And the means are in evidence; the one ominous weakness is the absence of the Spirit's power.”

One meaning of the word “power” is “ability to do.” There precisely is the wonder of the Spirit's work in the Church and in the hearts of Christians, His sure ability to make the spiritual things real to the soul. This power can go straight to its object with piercing directness; it can diffuse itself through the mind like an infinitely fine volatile essence securing ends above and beyond the limits of the intellect. Reality is its subject matter, reality in heaven and upon earth. It does not create objects which are not there but reveals objects already present and hidden from the soul. In actual human experience this is likely to be the first felt in a heightened sense of the Presence of Christ. He is felt to be a real person and to be intimately near. Then all other spiritual objects begin to stand out clearly before the mind. Grace, forgiveness, cleansing take on a form of almost bodily clearness. Prayer loses its unmeaning quality and becomes a sweet conversation with Someone actually there.”

(Most of this has been taken from the book THE DIVINE CONQUEST By A.W. Tozer.

May the Lord bless these words to our hearts.

In Christ

Bro. White