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What Power Pales in Your Life?
What Power Pales in Your Life?
“Even when I am old and gray, O God, do not forsake me, until I declare Your strength to this generation, Your power to all who are to come.” (Ps. 71:18). God is power. No one is stronger or greater. In Acts 8, we meet Simon the Sorcerer. Long had he astonished people with his magic arts. The multitudes called him “the Great Power of God.” (Acts 8:11). Yet he had never seen true power until he met the apostles. When he saw the power they had to impart miraculous ability through the laying on of hands, he knew he only had pseudo-power, not the real deal. Desperate for a taste of real power, he offered Peter money and begged for that ability! Peter retorted, “May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money!” (Acts 8:20). God’s power could not and cannot be bought!
Fast forward twenty years later. Paul is in Ephesus, a city obsessed with magic. The city teemed with astrologers and magicians bent on gaining power from the spirit world. Magic back then wasn’t about pulling rabbits out of hats, witchcraft wasn’t about broomsticks and brews, it was about harnessing the power of angels and demons. They used incantations, charms, and amulets to ward off evil spirits, fight diseases, and bring down curses on their enemies. In fact, the “Ephesian Letters” were a well known set of incantations which, if pronounced properly with the correct intonation, could cast out demons. Yet notice what happened when people in Ephesus became Christians: “And many of those who practiced magic brought their books together and began burning them in the sight of everyone; and they counted up the price of them and found it fifty-thousand pieces of silver.” (Acts 19:19). One silver piece was a day’s wage. They burned books worth 50,000 days’ wages — you’d have to work 136 years and spend every penny you had in order to afford the amount of books they burned. Why would they do such a thing? Because they knew it was not real power. God is power. The next verse is fitting: “The word of the Lord was growing mightily and prevailing.” (19:20). The power of magic arts paled in comparison to the power of God.
What power pales in comparison to God’s power in your life? We may not assign power to magic, but do we assign power to what others think of us? Do we assign too much power to our past to keep us stuck? Too much power to sin to keep us unforgiven? Too much power to Satan to defeat us? Too much power to circumstance to keep us hopeless? Too much power to what others say to and about us? Let’s burn it all! Let’s sell it all! It’s all power that pales! It’s power so weak it begs to know the real power of God. It’s time to stop giving power to the powerless. It’s time for God’s power to grow mightily and prevail in you!
