Faith Activates God's Power

Galatians 3:2-5 “This only I want to learn from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? -- (3) Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?  (4)  Have you suffered so many things in vain--if indeed it was in vain?  (5) Therefore He who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you, does He do it by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?”

The Lord’s apostles and prophets in the early church understood the doctrine of faith toward God, and were therefore constantly teaching the disciples how to exercise their faith in God’s power. For example we have the detailed teaching that the apostle Paul gave to the churches on the gifts of the Spirit and how the saints were to operate in them (1 Corinthians 12 & 14). As a result of their teaching we have numerous examples in the New Testament of ordinary church members being filled with the Spirit, operating in the various gifts of the Spirit and experiencing the power of God. To name just a few, the book of Acts records several examples of the saints being baptised with the Holy Spirit and in each example given, the scriptures describe the saints encountering the tangible power of God and responding by speaking supernaturally with other tongues. There are also numerous accounts of ordinary saints operating in various gifts of the Spirit, such as the account of Phillip’s four daughters prophesying in the church (Acts 21:8-9). We also have the account of numerous churches operating in words of knowledge, as the saints warned Paul by the Holy Spirit about what would happen to him when he reached Jerusalem (Acts 20:22-23). And we have the account of Stephen the deacon performing great signs and wonders among the people (Acts 6:8). And so we see that because the Lord’s apostles and prophets taught the churches how to operate in the gifts and power of the Holy Spirit, it became common practice for the saints to experience God’s power in the early church. The above quoted passage of scripture highlights that truth to us as Paul reminded the churches in Galatia how they were initially filled with the Spirit through the exercising of their faith, and how that same faith activated the gifts of the Spirit and the working of miracles among them. But as we can also see from this passage, even then Satan had begun to influence the church to abandon their faith in God’s power and substitute it for following the ordinances of men and works of the law, rather than living by faith in the tangible and transformative power of God.

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).

Luke 9:1-6 “Then He called His twelve disciples together and gave them power and authority over all demons, and to cure diseases.  (2)  He sent them to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick.  … (6) So they departed and went through the towns, preaching the gospel and healing everywhere.”

We will end this section by looking at the very clear biblical example in the above quoted passage of scripture, of how much easier it is for saints to exercise their faith in God’s power once they have been exposed to it. In this passage we see the Lord Jesus sending the twelve disciples out on their own for the first time, to preach the gospel while at the same time healing the sick and casting out demons, for as we have already mentioned, that is the New Testament pattern for proclaiming the gospel. This passage declares that the disciples did exactly that, i.e. they preached the gospel and healed wherever they went. And so on the surface that outcome seems pretty straightforward, for Jesus told them what to do and they went out and did exactly that. It is only when we examine this account in a little more detail however, that we begin to understand what actually transpired on this occasion. This incident took place approximately midway through Jesus’ earthly ministry, and so the disciples had been with Jesus for well over a year by this time and had personally witnessed the Lord Jesus healing thousands of people and casting demons out of many of them. And so they had been fully exposed to God’s power being manifested through the Lord Jesus. But nevertheless before this time none of the disciples had healed any sick or cast out any demons themselves, for Jesus had never instructed them to do so. We know that to be the case because at a later stage the Lord sent out a further seventy disciples to do the same as the twelve, and afterwards they came back excited by the fact that the demons were subject to them in His name, which clearly indicates that this was a new experience for them (Luke 10:1-17). So why were the disciples quite comfortable to go out by themselves to heal the sick and cast out demons, when they had never done anything like that before? It was not because Jesus gave them faith to carry out His instructions, because they already had faith, but rather it was because as stated in the above passage, Jesus gave them access to God’s power for the first time, which resulted in them being able to exercise their faith in that power and thus go out to heal the sick and cast out demons. And so we see that when the scripture tells us that Jesus gave them power, the disciples would have physically experienced God’s tangible power coming on them thus causing them to recognise that they now had the same power that Jesus had to heal. And so that was the reason why they could quite easily go out on their own to heal the sick and cast out demons because they had finally been exposed to God’s tangible power for themselves. Thus they had full assurance (faith) that when they laid hands on the sick that God’s power would flow from their hands into the sick and heal them. Very clearly it was very easy for the disciples to exercise their faith in God’s power once they had personally been exposed to it. That same principle applies to all saints today, not only the eighty two disciples that the Lord sent out during His earthly ministry.

Michael E.B. Maher

Faith Toward God

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