Forgetting the Past, Perceiving Our Future: “Perceiving God’s Power.”
A sermon delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, June 3, 2007
Thomas J. Boone, Ph.D.
Isaiah 43:15-19; Romans 1:16-17

As Christ’s followers we live with the constant battle between knowing what we ought not to do, and succumbing to the temptation to do it anyway. And there’s a lot of reasons why this happens, but the good news I’m going to be focusing on this month is that you can experience transformation. No matter what you’ve done, no matter what bad choices you have made, no matter how much pain you’ve caused people, you’re not too unworthy to experience God’s transformation of your heart. That’s the good news you’ll be hearing this month. And today the good news is the most wonderful news of all: God’s powerful enough to transform you. But, before there can be authentic change, we must submit to the fact that we are powerless without God. Before there can be authentic change within a child of God, one must accept God’s ability to do the impossible. Before transformation, we must be able to trust our lives into the hands of the One guiding the process.

If you struggle with handing things over to God for fear that you won’t be able to control what happens, this message is for you. If you fight against primal urges that rise from deep within, tempted time and again to give into that baser nature while knowing that what you’re about to do is wrong, this message is for you. If you’re in need of a reminder that your God is a God of awesome power and might who makes miracles happen every day, this message is for you.

Its easy to forget God’s power, which is why the Old Testament is filled with story after story about it. In a life that is marked by toil, our focus easily shifts from the eternal to the mundane. When bills make your monthly balance read red, faith can get muddled in the translation between reality and divine providence. When health issues press in on you from every side and make even shifting weight from one side to the other a burden, or when your loved one is stricken with a care-takers disease, like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, fighting the body can easily annihilate a fickle assurance in God. When pain from our childhood clouds our choices about adult relationships its terribly easy to define God as the author of pain rather than goodness. Yet, it’s from situations like these that the most remarkable testimonies of God’s power come to life. How tragic it is then when we give in to the temptation to turn tragedy into still more tragedy.

Pain comes in a myriad of forms, but our choices in how to deal with that pain can be summed up more simply: either choose to let God grow you through the pain, or let the pain kill you. Dr. Laura Schlessinger recently published a book titled, Bad Childhood, Good Life, that deals with the subject of transforming childhood pain into positive results as adults. She found, by surprise, that the most significant factor among people who had experienced this transformation wasn’t therapy, but their personal relationship with God. I found one quotation particularly insightful to what I’m talking about this morning. “God is forgiving, so the stupid things I’ve done and said because of my own hurt…God forgives me, but has the expectation that I’m going to do better, that I’m not going to hurt other people out of my own pain, that I’m not going to do damage to myself and others because I’m so self-absorbed.”

True change of heart comes only by God’s help because of His power to recreate, restore, and renew. When the heart is at its depth of depravity, God can transform it. This is the constant testimony of a prison ministry called Kairos. People who find Jesus through Kairos are at the depth of their depravity. And from this depth of depravity come incredible stories of how God’s power turned their lives around. One inmate who can’t talk due to the violence he suffered to his jaw, wrote the following: “Our minds get lost when it comes to Jesus. We think, ‘How can Jesus control all of creation simultaneously and take care of me at the same time?’

“I will give you a glimpse of Jesus’ power to create and control and take care of us simultaneously: We can see that men and women create states, countries, and nations. Jesus creates light-years...We can look up into the sky and see two hundred million galaxies, and each of these galaxies has one hundred billion stars, and each of these two hundred million galaxies is a hundred thousand light-years across. And there’s more space after these two hundred million galaxies.

“This is just a little of Jesus’ power to create and control all of His creations. For Jesus to take care of us is nothing. Jesus wants us to have more of this power. Jesus created us with a little power and gave us the plan how to use this little power to do His will.”

Not particularly well educated, and having committed crimes sufficient to give him a long-term sentence, this inmate gets it. God is power; and His ability to recreate, restore, and renew us goes far beyond our miniscule minds to comprehend.

It wasn’t beyond God’s power to give Abraham and Sarah Isaac when they were nearly 100 years old, and then from him fulfill his promise that they would be the progenitors of the nation of God’s children. It wasn’t beyond God’s power to take a ruddy looking, skinny David who tended sheep and guarded them with a slingshot and transform him into the one king that set the standard for all of Israel’s kings. It wasn’t beyond God’s power to take this same David when he was making horrible decisions out of sin and turn him into a man after God’s own heart.

One man who served on the Kairos team in Lompac, CA, wrote, “Before I gave my presentation to the men, three inmates who had previously experienced the Kairos weekend prayed over me. They prayed with an incredible vitality and beauty that can only come from those who are filled with the Holy Spirit. Here I was in a closed room with three men: a white man many people would describe as a skinhead, a Latino many people would describe as a gangbanger and a black man who has been in prison for more than 20 years, and I never felt safer and closer to God than I was when I was in their hands.”

If you think heaven’s going to be filled with people who have occupied church pews, served on Sessions and committees, dressed up for church, and done volunteer work then you’ve got another thing coming. Heaven’s going to be filled with people who have experienced radical transformation through the power of God to do the impossible in their lives.

It wasn’t beyond God’s power to divide waters of the Red Sea so that God’s people could escape from the Egyptian army, the same water that would drown each of the soldiers when they tried to cross the Sea. It wasn’t beyond God’s power to bring down the well-fortified walls of Jericho with nothing but a sound of trumpets. It wasn’t beyond God’s power to enable Gideon to defeat an army of 10,000 fighting men with only 300. It wasn’t beyond Jesus’ power, as God, to withstand a torture that no human could ever survive and give up his life by his own will.

When Isaiah wrote, “Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior; they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick,” Isaiah knew the power of God. Do you know what it’s like to experience the power of God? What would your testimony be if you needed to give an account of God’s power in your life?

One couple I know and trust told me a story to relay to you once they heard I was preaching on this topic. Their first three children arrived without incident, but such was not the case with their fourth. Without explanation something happened at the 32^nd week to make the water evacuate prematurely. The birthing process had begun and no amount of medicines could arrest the birth so the physicians told my friends that they’d have to deliver their baby preterm. Their minister came into the room and touched her feet with a prayer for God’s intervention. She felt her body rush with an intense heat, and didn’t think much of it at the time. Twenty-four hours later the womb had refilled with water, and carried the child just enough to avoid a delivery that could endanger the child. The doctors had no explanation. God’s power? I believe so.

Another story comes from a missionary friend of mine who worked in Spanish-speaking countries and was based out of Spain. She told me of a time when she and a friend were heading out to eat at a restaurant she frequented on Saturday nights. On this Saturday night, however, there was a long line because they had left two hours late, so they decided to try a different restaurant. It had been 18 months since she had changed her Saturday night routine. So they sat at another restaurant complaining about the situation, the food, the service, and the noise. Evidently they had heard some loud bang they thought was from the kitchen. Exiting the restaurant after the meal, they noticed fire trucks, police, and bomb squad vehicles at the restaurant where they had wanted to eat. The problem was that there was no restaurant anymore, as it had been leveled by a bomb planted by one of the local terror groups, and everyone inside had died. God’s power? I believe so.

One of my friends in London has a daughter who on the infamous September 11 reported to work at her stockbroker firm in the World Trade Center. No runners were available so the task fell to her to take a document to midtown, which is a good distance from the Towers. At that time of day traffic in Manhattan is annoying so it wasn’t a particularly delightful task. Since we all know what happened that day, there’s no need to describe her father’s conviction that God’s power intervened miraculously in his daughter’s life that day.

What’s your story of God’s power? There’s enough collective experience in this room to blow any one of us away with how God has done amazing things, both large and small. The passage we’ll be applying this month is about transformation of our hearts; its about the new stuff that God’s doing in your midst right now. But, the question that it keeps before us is, “Can you perceive it?” In order to perceive what God is doing, we must know Who’s doing it. God is the Lord, He’s the Creator, He’s the One to whom all other powers bow. Mend brokenness? That’s easy stuff for God. Change a circumstance? No problem! Change a heart? Already doing it.

God’s power reaches beyond our feeble imaginations. Philosophers have never figured out the dimensions of God’s power, causing some to throw up their hands and just say that He must not exist. The more technology improves the more light is shed on the miraculous power of God who created everything to work in the finest of details. And when problems arise in our lives that’s when the veil is lifted so we can see that God’s working. Paul’s veil was lifted and experienced a powerful transformation of heart. That’s why for him the heart of the gospel is not about our decisions and condition, but it’s about the power of God to transform death into salvation. Speaking for myself, it’s when I’ve been at my deepest of despair that God has shown me His power to bring peace and stop the war in my heart. I’ve learned that there’s a fundamental truth to the power of the gospel to recreate, renew, and restore my brokenness and make something completely new from it. “The new thing” begins with God’s power, but can you perceive it? May God’s Holy Spirit help you reflect on this today and this week because your transformation depends upon it. Hallelujah. Amen.