The Power We’ve Been Missing
There's a word that kept surfacing as I prepared this message. A word we use all the time, but maybe don't fully understand — especially when it comes to God.
Power.
We read it in Acts: "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you." We see it in Romans: "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope." We see it in Luke, where Jesus himself returns from the wilderness "in the power of the Spirit."
The word is everywhere. But I wonder if we've gotten the definition completely wrong.
What We Think Power Means
When most of us hear the word power, we think of authority. Titles. Corner offices. The ability to give commands and have them obeyed. Influence over people and outcomes. Control.
And honestly? That kind of power is seductive — even in the church. I've seen it. I've felt it. The pull to be the one calling the shots, shaping things according to your own vision of what ministry should look like. Power can feel like the fast track to getting things done.
But then I look at Jesus.
God in human flesh. Empowered by the Spirit. Ruler and Creator of all — the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. And the power of the Holy Spirit in his life didn't lead him to stadiums or throne rooms. It led him to dining room tables. To washing feet. To being beaten and spat on by his own creation. To a cross.
So maybe we need to be more careful about what we're asking for when we pray for power. And maybe — just maybe — we've misunderstood what God's power is actually for.
The Holy Spirit is not here to make you a superhero. He's not here to build your kingdom or your platform. He is here to empower your pursuit of Christ, strengthen your faith, and move in and through you for the benefit of others.
What the Research Actually Shows
In 1966, psychologist Julian Rotter developed a concept called the Locus of Control. His idea was simple: people who feel in control of their own lives — who have what he called an internal locus of control — experience greater fulfillment. For decades, this held up. The most "successful" people, by conventional metrics, were those who exerted authority over their environment.
But then researchers started studying deeply committed Christians — people who believed God led their lives, that outcomes were ultimately in His hands, not theirs. By Rotter's original theory, these people should have shown signs of helplessness and anxiety.
Instead, they showed the opposite.
Psychologist Kenneth Pargament found that Christians who lived collaboratively with God — fully engaged, bringing their whole selves, yet releasing the outcome to Him — showed lower depression, lower anxiety, greater resilience, and higher life satisfaction than any other group studied. They had the psychological profile of someone fully engaged and fundamentally at peace.
Pargament identified three approaches Christians take:
Self-directing — God is real, but I'm the primary agent running my own life.
Deferring — God is in control, so I wait passively for a sign before I act.
Collaborative — God and I are in active relationship. I bring my full effort and will, while releasing the outcome to Him. We move together.
The collaborative approach outperformed every other style on every measure. Not because those people had more worldly power or influence. But because they had something better: a life filled with the presence and leading of God.
A Valley of Dry Bones
The prophet Ezekiel had a vision. God took him to a valley — and it was full of bones. Not just bones, but very dry bones. Bones that had been dead a long, long time.
It was a picture of God's people. Defeated by Babylon. Hopeless. Convinced that God was finished with them.
God asks Ezekiel: "Can these bones live?" And Ezekiel, to his credit, gives the only honest answer: "Lord God, only you know."
Then God tells him to prophesy to the bones. And something extraordinary happens — the bones begin to rattle and come together, sinews and flesh forming on them. A valley of bones becomes a valley of bodies.
But they're still dead.
So God says: prophesy again. This time to the breath — the Ruach, the same Hebrew word used for the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit who hovered over the waters at creation. And the breath comes from the four winds and fills those bodies, and they live.
Two things happened in that valley, and I think they matter for us today:
First, God assembled the bones. He brought His scattered, broken people back together. That's what the Spirit does in a church — He gathers the dry and distant and brings them into one body.
Second, He breathed life into them. Not just existence. Life.
But the most stunning part of the vision comes at the end. Throughout the Old Testament, the Spirit of God came upon people — on judges like Samson and Gideon, on kings like David and Saul. The Spirit would rush over someone for a task and then move on.
But Ezekiel receives a different promise:
"And I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live." (Ezekiel 37:14)
Within. Not just over or upon — within. No longer confined to a temple or given to a select few. God was promising to put His Spirit inside His people.
That promise finds its fulfillment in Acts 2, when the church is born in fire and wind. And Paul echoes it to the Corinthians: "Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?" (1 Corinthians 6:19)
Why We've Settled for a Ceiling Fan
The Greek word for power used throughout the New Testament is dunamis — the root of our word "dynamite." That's what was on the scene in Acts 2.
Not a gentle breeze. Not the predictable hum of a ceiling fan we can control with a remote.
"Without warning there was a sound like a strong wind, gale force — no one could tell where it came from. It filled the whole building." (Acts 2:1-2, MSG)
A violent tempest blast. The floodgates of heaven thrown open.
And here's what I think we have to be honest about: we often read Acts 2 as a nice piece of church history and miss the fact that the same Spirit is available to the same church today with the same power.
So why do we walk into Sunday services expecting a gentle breeze?
Because a gale-force God is inconvenient. A gentle breeze is predictable. Gale-force wind doesn't care about lunch plans. It doesn't fit neatly into a 75-minute service.
We've traded the dunamis power of God for a dimmer switch. We've replaced the rushing wind with a ceiling fan we control. And then we wonder why our lives — and the church — feel powerless. Why the world sees the church as a museum rather than a movement.
The Holy Spirit hasn't changed. The wind hasn't stopped moving. Sadly, many of us have just shut our windows.
The Pinwheel
Here's the thing about wind: you can't see it directly. Jesus said as much to Nicodemus — "The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes."
But you can see what the wind does.
A few weeks ago on a walk with my boys, we came across some pinwheels in a neighbor's yard. My son lit up. I leaned over and blew on one, and both boys burst into laughter — the simple, pure joy of watching something come to life.
I can't control the wind. I can't see where it comes from. But I can tell when it's blowing.
And I can tell the Spirit is blowing here.
Since last January, we've seen 38 people come to faith. Our kids ministry is overflowing. Our youth are on fire and bringing their friends. A college ministry running out of seats. Our largest-ever Sunday attendance. New believers starting a class together this month.
I can't fully explain it. I didn't engineer it. I just get to watch the pinwheel spin.
But here's what I keep coming back to: what we've seen is a gentle breeze. What if the Spirit has been waiting for a church willing to throw open the windows and beg for the mighty rushing wind?
What would that look like?
An Invitation
Maybe you came in today tired of the dimmer switch version of God. Maybe you've been living with a ceiling fan when what your soul is really starving for is a gale.
The Spirit of God — the Ruach who breathed creation into existence, who filled Ezekiel's valley with the living, who showed up at Pentecost like a violent tempest — that same Spirit is available to you. Not to make you powerful in the worldly sense. But to fill you, move through you, and make you alive in a way that nothing else can.
Throw open the window.
God, come from the four winds. Spirit of God, come and rest on us. Breathe on us.
That kind of hunger is what the Holy Spirit has always honored.