The Power at Work Within You
(based on Ephesians 3:14-21)
A number of years ago when I was the
pastor of a small church in Leetsdale I organized a presbytery wide Youth
Mission Trip to Alaska. Being the pastor
of a small church, we didn’t have the size of a youth group that could organize
a trip by ourselves. And I knew lots of
other small churches in the same situation.
So, we thought that if we pooled our resources and asked all the kids
from these small churches we could get a larger group together.
It took a year to dream, research, get permission and
organize. However, at the end of the
process we had 21 kids and adults signed up to go on our first trip to
Alaska. That first trip was probably the
most exciting trip I’d ever taken. In
all, we took four YMA (Youth in Mission to Alaska) trips. Today’s sermon is mostly about the second
trip, which was just as exciting with 16 kids and adults. In the months that ensued after the first
trip and planning the second, I realized that this was a more manageable
number.
During the second trip we spent a week on the only Indian
Reservation in Alaska, which is on Annette Island in a town called
Metlakatla. We had 94 kids attend our
Vacation Bible School program. It was
somewhat overwhelming to meet that many new kids in a week’s time, but
nonetheless was a rewarding experience for all of us to get to know the young
children and the teens on the island.
The Metlakatla Presbyterian Church is
one of the oldest Presbyterian Churches in all of Southeast Alaska and is a
fine facility. It is a huge church campus, serves as the town center for
recreation, education, and social gathering and therefore had much to offer the
community including basketball courts, tennis courts, an entire Christian
Education facility, a full, commercial kitchen, and a separate banquet hall. But conditions on Annette Island are
depressing at best. We found out that
there is an 85% unemployment rate, and that suicide is the number 1 cause of
death. The week prior to our arrival there
had been two suicides in the church family alone.
Listening to the children’s stories
about their lives and watching their interaction with one another made us
wonder about the prospects they have and the future that they have to look
forward to. After leaving Annette Island, our group prayed nightly for
the children of Metlakatla and for their island’s future. We prayed for God’s blessings upon them, we
prayed for the biblical stories to take root in their hearts, we prayed for
them to have hope for the future, we prayed for them to learn personally of
God’s great love, mercy, and grace. It
was an eye-opening experience for many of our youth to be faced with such
depression and difficulties.
Back home, most of the youth that had applied
and gone on these YMA trips came from affluent families and communities, so it
was truly a life-changing experience for many of them.
Each person that applied and went on
our YMA trips signed up for different reasons.
Each person was asked to think about their goals for the trip, what they
wished God would show them or what their expectations were for the trip. Each person was challenged to listen for
God’s direction and insight for their own lives and through the trips duration
and afterward to find ways that God had changed them because of the experience.
These goals and expectations weren’t
restricted to just the teens that went on the trip, but for the leaders as well. For me, besides making a huge leap of faith the
first year in order to organize and take a trip with a large group of teens and
well-seasoned adults to a place I’d never been before, my goal was to become a
better leader. To learn more about my
own leadership skills, especially under unknown circumstances. It’s one thing to be a leader in areas of
comfort, about things you know, but it’s quite a different thing to be a leader
in an unknown setting, in less than perfect situations, with unknown variables.
To be honest, after returning from the
first year’s trip, I was disappointed in God’s lack of work in me. I didn’t feel that God had really done
anything to make me a better leader, in fact in many ways, I felt let down by
God because there were many problems behind the scenes, particularly among the
adult chaperones that I did not handle well.
And I ended up feeling that God had not listened to my own personal
prayers at all.
I actually left for the second year’s
trip with some trepidation. Yes, I’d
been to Alaska before, but we were going some place different, with a different
schedule, and a totally different group of people – this time, none of whom I
knew personally. My own personal prayer
wasn’t to become a better leader, but rather just to come home safely and not
let anything I couldn’t handle happen on the journey.
As the trip commenced and the weeks
wore on, I realized that my prayer from the previous year had actually been
heard by God and that God’s power had already begun working within me and I
didn’t even know it.
For the trip, we put together a
directed journal for each of us to use in our devotion time. Each night as I wrote in my journal and
looked back on the day, I saw God’s great handiwork in my life. I looked back at the problems that occurred
during the day, and they were numerous on this trip. I looked back on my mounting anxiety in the
beginning of the trip when the first problem occurred and I looked back later
in the week, as new problems arose and my lack of anxiety. I was handling problems left and right as if
they were minor decisions that needed to be dealt with efficiently and with
ease.
At the end of the trip I looked back
over the whole of what I had written and went through each day in my mind and
found that God had done a remarkable thing in my life. God had made me a better leader and I hadn’t even
noticed. And it wasn’t just about
problem solving, it was about including people appropriately in decision making
or making executive decisions appropriately.
It was about choosing the right option at the right time or even knowing
what the appropriate options were. All
of these were things that I never felt that I was very good at.
I’m not sure that I would have noticed the changes in me as
easily if I hadn’t been keeping a journal and hadn’t left this year’s goals and
expectations open for God to fill in for me.
After all, it took me a year to see God’s work in my life.
So we come to the passage in scripture
that today’s message is drawn. Paul
wrote, “Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish
abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine…”
As a Christian, there is this power
working within you. There is this
unbelievable power that you may not even be aware of. There is this unsettling, immeasurable,
more-often-than-not, untapped power currently working inside of you. Can you feel it? Do you know of it’s presence? Do you know what it means for your life?
God has given you the ability to
accomplish unmatched and unbelievable things.
Maybe to the world’s standards they’re nothing, but on a personal level
they may mean everything.
I knew that God gave us blessings, I
knew that God answered prayer, I knew that God walked beside me or even carried
me when I had not the strength, but this verse and my recent experience gives
me a whole new meaning for God’s work in my life. But because I finally got it and started to
see the power at work within me, I also started to see it in others. It wasn’t just me that God was pouring out
his power and working on, but it was others, too. God was working on the inside of other people
on the trip. I saw the changes in
them. I saw God take some pretty
immature Christians and made them strong in their beliefs and strong in their
faith. I saw God change attitudes. I saw God create new beings out of a bunch of
mismatched and bedraggled characters.
God is also able to accomplish in you,
because of the power at work within you, something beyond what we could ever
imagine, something abundantly far more than we could ever ask or imagine.
And what power is this? It is the power of the Holy Spirit that is,
right now, working in you in ways that you aren’t even aware of.
How do you tap into that power and
become aware of it? That’s the real
question. Not, if it’s there or what it is?
But rather how do you access it?
First, pray about it. What is God doing with your life? What new things are you learning about
yourself? What ways is God using you and
blessing you? Second, perhaps you should
start keeping a journal. I know that
I’ve mentioned this from time to time.
And I also know that for those who have never done it, or only done it
from time to time, it’s a daunting task.
What do you write about? I guess
when I first started keeping a journal, I thought that I needed to have
everything spelled correctly, worded just right, it had to have a theme going,
as if I was writing some kind of novel for publication. But guess what?
A journal is just for you. You can write anything you want to
write. It’s not meant to be understood
by anyone except you and God. It can be
a great tool in beginning an open channel to God. Write down your biggest fears. Write down your most important
blessings. Write down what horrible day
you had. Write down the dream you often
wish for. Write down your anguish over
unanswered prayer. Write down your anger
at God. Write down your biggest high for
the day. Write down your biggest low or
disappointment. Write down what a great job
you think you did today on something.
Write down something that you did that wasn’t so great. Write it all down. Over time, you’ll be surprised at how easily
it is to have that channel open to God and what power God is pouring out
through you.
When you look back at what you’ve
written in a week, month, year, you’ll be surprised at how much God has truly
blessed you and how much God has made significant changes in your life.
Now to him, who is able to do far more
than we could ever ask or think, to him who by the power at work within you is
able to accomplish all things, to him be the glory and honor and praise.
AMEN.
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