Power
There is this one house in our neighborhood. The homeowners are young and inexperienced. These homeowners make a lot of mistakes, and they don’t know there are unwritten rules to owning a home. In life, there are a lot of problems that take a couple of tries before you figure out how to handle them.
Case in point, about a week ago, they still needed to cut their front lawn. It had become a jungle of vegetation reaching almost a foot in some areas (not that I actually measured it). They did what any new homeowner would do. They went out and bought a lawnmower. Then, they went out and bought a new electric mower. These new mowers are great, but due to the grass’s depth and the yard’s size, the mower’s new battery was drained relatively quickly. When you buy an electric mower, you typically only get one battery; these batteries cost approximately $150-250, depending on the Ah (ampere-hour or amp-hour) or how long the battery will last while operating under normal conditions. The resulting situation was a lawnmower stuck in a sea of grass while waiting for its only power source to recharge.
I don’t fault the new homeowners; that is simply a mistake that you only make a few times. We have all been there; we have overextended ourselves. We have bitten off more than we can chew. We drove too far on a half-tank of gas. We’ve all had these moments where we are stuck in the middle of a problem, having run out of power.
Romans 1:16, 20 NASB20 – “16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. … 20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, that is, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, being understood by what has been made, so that they are without excuse.”
This word power is more significant than we can imagine. And yet it is something that I don’t think we take advantage of to its fullest extent. In both verses, the power is from God, and it is impossible to downplay the immense power of God. He created the heavens and the earth and spoke light into existence. The Greek word for power in these verses is δύναμις dýnamis; it is from this root that we gain our word dynamite. We have access to a power that is explosive and sustaining. The gospel and the world’s creation were affected by and through the same power. It is this same power that lives in every one of us. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians that this power keeps us going and supports us.
2 Corinthians 4:7-12 NASB20 – “7 But we have this treasure in earthen containers, so that the extraordinary greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves; 8 we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; 9 persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed; 10 always carrying around in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. 11 For we who live are constantly being handed over to death because of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our mortal flesh. 12 So death works in us, but life in you.”
Paul makes the case that even though we may encounter every hardship, including the expiration of our physical bodies. The element that makes all of this possible is not our ability or fortitude; it is from the same power that created the universe that raised a body from the grave that loves the unlovable. This is the power that propels us. This is the power that picks us up when our lawn mower stalls in the front yard. The question is how to keep from getting run down. We must keep plugging into the power that comes from above. We must tap into the real and lasting power that comes from above.