Easter Makes Everything NewSample

The World’s Ways Won’t Do

If the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is living inside us, giving us His life, why do so few truly born-again believers realize what He can do through them?

We read about the apostle Paul or about all the people getting saved in the early church, and we think, “Look at the way they lived for God!” Or we read church history, like Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret. “Oh, Hudson Taylor, he went to China, and God used him in amazing ways!” But this kind of power and faith isn’t just for a special few or for great heroes of the faith. Jesus rose from the dead so that all of us could live on another level. So why don’t we?

The world has invaded the church.

We look at people’s credentials, but God doesn’t. What was so special about the people God has used greatly? It wasn’t their training or intellect. Jesus picked twelve common people—fishermen, tax collectors, political zealots—and put them in charge of the entire movement of Christianity throughout the world. Why? He was never looking at their talent or ability! He was thinking, “I’m going to put My Spirit in them, and whatever they do will bring glory to God, because everyone will know that no great thing could come from these people.” It’s like Zechariah 4:6 says: “‘Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the Lord Almighty.”

More degrees do not mean more fruit. In fact, many theological seminaries today have become spiritual cemeteries. People earn degrees, but they don’t live in the power of the Holy Spirit. They write that off as emotional fanaticism. But look at the shape that Christianity is in now. In one country where I’ve been, they say, “No, you can’t have just one PhD to be a pastor. You’ve got to have two.” Where would anyone get that from the Word of God? No, God chose the foolish things and the weak things to shame the strong (see 1 Cor. 1:27).

The world has so affected our way of thinking. When Christians come to church and want to grow, we don’t press them to pray and open to the Holy Spirit so that Jesus’ new resurrection life can come out of them. No, we try to fix the old: “So what happened to you when you were eleven? When you were eighteen?”

But that old life is gone! Isn’t that what the Bible says? “The old is gone; the new has come” (2 Cor. 5:17). God doesn’t want to work with Jim Cymbala’s old life—with my alcoholic father and all the bad stuff that happened when I was growing up. He says, “I’m going to lift you way above all that. I’m going to give you a new heart and a new spirit.”

We mean well, but we’re trying to use natural weapons to do spiritual warfare.

We can’t. It’s God or bust.