1 Corinthians 4:19-20 “But I will come to you shortly, if the Lord wills, and I will know, not the word of those who are puffed up, but the power. (20) For the kingdom of God is not in word but in power.”
Sadly, over the centuries Satan’s influence achieved a greater and greater dominance in the church as more and more believers abandoned the doctrine of living by faith in God’s power, because of which we have had whole generations in the church that have never experienced God’s power and therefore do not know how to exercise biblical faith toward God. And even today many of the Lord’s ministers continue to do a huge disservice to the church by proclaiming a gospel that is devoid of any power. These ministers deny the reality of God’s power today by falsely proclaiming that God only demonstrated His power through the apostles that wrote the New Testament, claiming that the reason He did that was so that people would recognise their authority to write the New Testament. These same ministers go on to claim that now that the New Testament is complete, apostles and prophets are no longer needed in the church, along with the power that they demonstrated, for now that the church has the word of God they no longer need His power. And so we see that these ministers have fallen into the same trap of the Sadducees, in that they do not know how to rightly divide the word of truth and they also know nothing about the power of God. This false narrative is not something new in the church however, for as we can see from the above quoted passage of scripture the apostle Paul had the same problem with arrogant ministers in his day, and his response to them was simply that the kingdom of God was not in word but in power. Paul went on to warn the church about some that would infiltrate the church in the last days, having a form of godliness but denying its power, and he warned the church to avoid such men (2 Timothy 3:5).
Michael E.B. Maher
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