Devotions

As Jesus lay silent in the grave after his crucifixion, Satan and his hordes gloated. They thought they had won an irreversible victory but all along, God’s foreordained plan was being put into action — a plan for resurrection life!

The Lord sent his Holy Spirit down into the very bowels of death and there he quickened the body of Jesus, raising him from the dead. Then out of the grave stepped our blessed Savior, right through the thick stone. And he emerged with this testimony:

“I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen. And I have the keys of Hades and of Death” (Revelation 1:18). Christ was saying here, “I am the one who has eternal life. I was dead, but look, I’m alive, now and forever. I hold the very keys to life and death in my hands!”

The moment Jesus walked out of death’s prison, he became the resurrection and the life, not only for himself but for all who would believe on him from that day on. He has brought forth to us a resurrection life totally beyond death’s power.

Because of this, there is no longer any reason for a Christian to fear death or to see it as an enemy. Our Lord has conquered it completely: “Whom God raised up, having loosed the pains of death” (Acts 2:24).

If you have received Jesus as your Savior and Lord, then he resides in you as a mighty power of resurrection life. And the same resurrection power that brought him up out of the grave will sustain you, as well. “Test yourselves. Do you not know yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?” (2 Corinthians 13:5). You have within your being all that is in Christ, a powerful life-force that Satan cannot destroy!

If you tell the world that Jesus is your Lord and Savior, a God who can perform the impossible, they will watch to see how you react in impossible situations. And the devil looks on, too, hoping your faith will fail.

The Psalmist writes, “Oh, how great is Your goodness, which You have laid up for those who fear You, which You have prepared for those who trust in You in the presence of the sons of men!” (Psalm 31:19). What is this great goodness that God lays up for those who trust in him through trying times? It is an impenetrable, glorious testimony to the world that your faith can survive any situation.

We see this kind of testimony in Daniel. His jealous co-governors devised a plot against him, convincing King Darius to ban prayer for thirty days. Daniel was fully aware of the penalty for continuing to pray, yet he knew the Lord would see him through. Just as his peers predicted, Daniel disobeyed the ban and kept praying three times a day.

Although King Darius respected Daniel, he was forced by his own decree to cast this devout man into the lions’ den. The king assured Daniel, “Your God, whom you serve continually, He will deliver you” (Daniel 6:16). Yet, that night the king couldn’t sleep (6:18).

We know how God responded to Daniel’s faith — he shut the mouths of the hungry lions! In the morning King Darius was up early, anxious to see if God had answered Daniel’s prayers. You can imagine the king’s joy when he heard Daniel’s voice praising God (6:21-22).

Because of this great demonstration of God’s keeping power, King Darius wrote a decree that impacted an entire kingdom: “Men must tremble and fear before the God of Daniel. For He is the living God” (6:26-27).

The world still longs to see a testimony of God’s great power in the lives of those who proclaim his name — those who believe what they preach and never doubt his Word.  

Beloved, God is searching for a people who will trust him fully. The Lord did not save us so we could bask endlessly in his goodness, mercy and glory. He had an eternal purpose in choosing each one of us and that purpose goes beyond blessings, fellowship and revelation. The fact is, God still reaches out to lost humankind, searching for a believing people he can shape into his greatest evangelistic tool.

God was searching for such a people in Gideon’s day. When Gideon issued a call for volunteers to fight the Midianites, thousands of Israelites responded. But the Lord told Gideon, “The people who are with you are too many for Me to give the Midianites into their hands … Proclaim in the hearing of the people, saying, ‘Whoever is fearful and afraid, let him turn and depart’” (Judges 7:2-3).

God was telling Gideon, “If anybody is afraid, tell him to go home now. I will not allow my army to be infected by fear.” God was actually turning away volunteers for his army; at one point, some 22,000 doubters were sent home. Gideon eventually reduced the number of volunteers to 10,000 but God told him there were still too many and the Lord finally settled on 300 battle-tested soldiers. 

This ought to tell us something. As the Lord seeks gospel messengers he can send out to the world, he is not going to recruit churches whose pews are filled with fearful, doubting, untested people. He will not look for powerful, efficient religious organizations or highly educated seminarians. God uses organizations and the highly educated, of course, but in themselves none of these has the resources needed to be God’s tried and tested messengers.

So, what is needed to reach a lost and hurting world? God is seeking those who are willing to be tested, tried by fire, those whose faith he can refine and bring forth as pure gold.

In the Sermon on the Mount (Luke 6:20-22), Jesus gives a list of characteristics or activities for which one will be blessed. He speaks of blessing those who are meek, those who are poor in spirit and those who are peacemakers. This list has come to be known as “the beatitudes.” However, the beatitudes did not include, “Blessed are the disruptive, for they shall not be paralyzed.”

Being “disruptive” is an attitude that Jesus encourages in us and one that he lived out himself; he was not only meek and mild, but he was radical and wild. On more than one occasion, Jesus was disruptive to the norms of the religious. He also was disruptive to the kingdom of darkness.

Jesus’ powerful life in prayer was constantly and effectively a thorn in the side of evil. When he prayed, kingdoms were moved, powers of darkness fled, and a great work of God was released on earth. He was even disruptive to those who chose to follow him, constantly upsetting their comfort zone. When they lacked this disruptive spirit, he came and awakened them to their need for vigilant, aggressive prayer, asking them, “Couldn’t you fight in prayer for even an hour?” He disruptively turned their world upside down. 

There are times in our lives when the battles we face, the tasks at hand, and the missions to which we are charged need more than casual, comfortable prayers. Comfort and ease in the sweet hour of prayer may be fine for morning devotionals, but when we are charged with a holy mission that seems totally hindered by the adversary, our true hope is found in radical, disruptive praying. Rather than a sweet hour of prayer, we often need hours of prayer.

Many Christians are so paralyzed that people look at their lives and see nothing atypical or peculiar about them. But we are called to be a peculiar people and when we are disruptive for the kingdom of God, we will appear peculiar, indeed.

On the Day of Pentecost, Peter preached, “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ” (Acts 2:38). In other words, “Put off your old way of living and all your own attempts to be holy in your own strength. Put off the façade of being a Christian, and put on Christ. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, for the promise is for you!”

According to the Scriptures, three thousand souls were added to the Church that day — three thousand religious people who had been doing the best they could to be godly in their own strength; three thousand who were perhaps tired of learning about God and His former power; three thousand who noticed that there were people who actually possessed the power of God!

So what must you and I do in order to get this power of God today? After all, we will surely need it in order to confront the days ahead of us.

First, we must return to the full purpose that God intended for our lives on this earth: to be living witnesses of who He is, which requires humility, for we will be mocked and ridiculed. Yet, regardless of what the world may think, there must be a resolve in our heart that says, “I don’t care what it will cost. I want this new life, this strength to go with God, and I will not settle for being lukewarm.”

This is a choice you and I must make. Remember, the promise of the Holy Spirit is to you, to your children, to the young, the old, the educated, the uneducated, the strong, the weak. Do you really want it — and the lifestyle that accompanies it?

If you are willing, I encourage you to go before the Lord in humility and ask him to fulfill his great promise to you. He will surely be faithful to his Word. And then as his Church, we will return to the power of God in these last days!

Carter Conlon joined the pastoral staff of Times Square Church in 1994 at the invitation of the founding pastor, David Wilkerson, and was appointed Senior Pastor in 2001.