Two weeks ago we began this series on the Holy Spirit and we asked the question, “Do you ever feel powerless?” Do you ever feel like you are powerless to change your marriage, to change the relationship between you and your spouse, and you’ve tried, but nothing seems to work? Do you ever feel powerless to change your relationship with your children, and you’ve tried, but you feel powerless to change that relationship? Do you ever feel powerless to kick an addiction, I mean, you’ve tried, but you couldn’t? Do you ever have issues with anger, where you just go off and you say things and do things that hurt people, and you’ve tried to stop, but you just feel powerless? Do you ever wish that you could change this dark broken world, but when you think about it, it’s so big that you feel powerless to change it?

Then we asked the next obvious question if you’re feeling powerless, which is, “Where does your power come from?” Because as an electrician, when someone called me and said, “I don’t have any power” I immediately knew where I would begin, I would immediately go to the power source, which is the panel in most homes. If there’s no power there, then there’s no possibility to have power anywhere in the house. If there’s power there is the possibility of having power everywhere.

Popeye drew his power from spinach; Sampson drew his power from his uncut hair, but where does your power come from? And we said, that’s not a normal question to ask people in the 21^st century. I know it’s a bit of an unusual question in our world, but do you ever feel like you don’t have enough power?

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Last week we started a new series on the Holy Spirit asking the question, “Where does your power come from?” We watched a video clip of Popeye and the spinach shortage, and we said that Popeye knew where his power came from. He knew that his power came from spinach, and when he didn’t have any spinach, he became weak.  But when Popeye had spinach he became strong, and we said that Brutas or Satan is a snake in the weeds and he wants to deceive us and steal our power from us. He wants us to be powerless. 

 When I was an electrician people would call me and tell me that they didn’t have any power. Upon arriving I would go to their power panel and see if they had power there. If they did, then they could have power that would run all over their home and do all kinds of amazing things that weren’t possible without it – that weren’t possible just a hundred years earlier. If there was not power at their panel, then they were powerless and I couldn’t do a lot about that.

If there wasn’t any power coming to their panel, all I could do was to make a call to the power company and tell them that something was wrong because the people of that home didn’t have any power.

Living without the Holy Spirit inside you is like having no electricity in your house. If you have the Holy Spirit in yo Read the rest of this entry »

Video Clip – Youtube – Popeye – “Spinach Shortage” -

“Do you ever feel powerless like Popeye without spinach?” Do you ever feel powerless to change your marriage? Do you ever feel powerless to change your relationship with your children? Do you ever feel powerless to stop an addiction? Do you ever feel powerless to stop angry tirades, and you just keep going off, though you’d like to stop? Do you ever feel like you’d like to make a difference in a person’s life, or in your community, or in your schools, or at work, but as you think about how big the problems are, you feel powerless to change to change anything, so you don’t even try? Do you ever feel powerless?

Popeye drew his power from spinach, but where does your power come from? Now I know that’s not a normal question to ask people in the 21^st century. I know it’s a bit of an unusual question in our world, but do you ever feel like you don’t have enough power? Do you ever feel like you’re powerless? Maybe the problem is at the supply?

The way that most people in our world answer the power question is they try to make more money, because we know that money is power. We think that if we just have more money, then our power problem will be solved, because we know that you can buy almost anything if you have enough money. Notice I said almost.

You can’t buy a better marriage. You can’t buy something that makes you a better parent. You can’t buy anything that will give you more time, when your time is up, your time is up. You can’t buy peace, or joy, or love. You can change how you look on the outside with money, but you can’t change how you feel on the inside with money. The power that I’m going to be talking about today, money can’t buy. Many of the wealthiest people in the world have died very lonely and very empty people because ultimately they couldn’t buy what they needed with money. They needed a different kind of power.

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