Restoration 2012: Restoring Power

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Restoration Ministry

John Bradshaw

Fully Charged

Father in heaven, thank you that we can come to you tonight in the name of Jesus.

Here in this place and people joining us by television all around the place who have been telling us they are being blessed, Lord, join with every 1 of us please.

You have given us life and now through Jesus you offer us life more abundantly.

So tonight dear Lord come close to us, let your word be clear, Lord have mercy on me, that I might be nothing other than a channel through which you might work.

I pray that you would not be stymied by the weakness of fallen humanity, but that you might take occasion to show your power by speaking through even the most faulty of instruments.

I pray that our hearts would be touched, our minds would be made alive, that we'd be blessed tonight.

We thank you for your presence with us and we pray in Jesus' name.

I think everybody's had this happen at least once, maybe more than once, depending on your makeup.

The child is about to do something great, getting ready to take his or her first steps, learning to ride a bicycle, singing up front in church for the first time and you say, oh we can't miss this!

That's why we bought that camcorder and you run to the camcorder and you do whatever you do with the camcorder and you get ready to film and you realize that when you press the button there's no response because the battery was flat.

Now do you remember, just I'm digressing now, do you remember back in the good old days when we used to put film in our cameras?

I remember being in a very scenic place with my father and taking all kinds of wonderfully scenic photographs and thinking well I'm sure there were 24 photos on this roll of film but we must be 36 kept on going kept on going no film in the camera You don't have to worry about that anymore because of digital cameras.

But now with digital cameras you've got to make sure you've got batteries on hand.

You know you run, oh great, this is the moment, that's the sunset, this is the event, we can't miss it, it's graduation, it's my grandson's fifth birthday, and you grab the camera only to find out that there's no juice, no battery.

You're supposed to charge it up but instead you run for the camera or the cell phone or you get your laptop out and oh no you want to use it for an hour or 2 and up comes the warning that says you've only got several minutes left and that's that.

When we were getting ready to leave the East and travel West to live out here in the West but in another part of the West, about a week and a half before we left, maybe 2 weeks, we were sitting in the car and wanting to back out of the driveway, turned the key, nothing, the thing was dead, we couldn't believe it.

So no problem, we just called the neighbor or a friend or somebody and they pulled up with their vehicle and you get the jumper cables out and boom and off you go and so we thought oh well that was no problem We are good to go and didn't even give it another thought until, and I mean this literally, literally, we had loaded the moving truck and it was gone.

Some very kind friends helped us to get the house cleaned out because we wanted to leave it clean, you understand.

And we washed and we cleaned and we packed and we put the very last things in the car, the very last things.

And we, you know, you dump stuff and you do your thing.

All that's left is for us to get in the car and head west.

And we got in the car, ready to head west, and I think everybody had gone, right?

It was just us and the house, it was just us.

And we're sitting in the car and dad says, alright, let's pray, and we prayed and we thanked the Lord and we asked for his blessing and we were gonna make it 3 or 4 hours that night and so we turned the key, nothing.

Of all moments literally at the point we were backing out to leave, this thing chose to quit yet again and so thank the Lord for cell phones that store telephone numbers and we called someone or maybe we had a church directory and over they came we repeated the process and bought a new battery.

Clearly we got the battery going a week and a half or so before, but somehow I guess it wasn't fully charged.

You know, you need to have batteries in the appliances.

No good seeing that thin red line telling you that you're about to crash as far as your phone goes.

Whether it's your iPod or your laptop or camera or camcorder, you want it to be fully charged.

Without power, it isn't any good to you whatsoever.

You've learned that most likely by experience, Some of it bitter.

You never did get photos in Hawaii because the battery was dead or something like that.

You know the Christian life is in a way pretty much the same.

There is a need for us to be fully charged, plugged into the source of all power at all times so you are operating with a maximum amount of power coursing through your spiritual veins the Bible teaches us that when we are connected to Jesus we are connected with the source of all spiritual power we've been told in the Word of God that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes.

The wonderful message about Christ and the experience of Jesus is that you can have the power of God in your life and Jesus is powerful.

He said all power in heaven and earth is given unto me.

And so when we're connected to Jesus, all the power of heaven and earth is connected to us.

When temptation comes, friend, you've got to know that there's power there.

You've got to know that there's power so that you can call on the power to deliver you from that temptation.

You've got to know that there's strength there, juice in the batteries, so that you can overcome instead of being overcome.

So let's talk about how we might be able to experience the power of God constantly.

Let's remember some things that by now ought to be foundational.

If you've heard it already then you'll just nod and say amen.

In the Christian experience the power doesn't come from ourselves.

If you want to bench press X amount of weight, even if you're a 90 pound weakling, you go to the gym and you start bench pressing smaller weights, and you build up, and you build up, and you build up, until eventually you become strong enough to do what you couldn't have been able to do before it's not quite like that in the Christian life the unfortunate thing for our psyche is that it's similar to that it is similar to that if you want to misunderstand it but to understand it correctly and appropriately and accurately, the power isn't from us.

Remember Saul, Saul the Pharisee became Paul the Apostle.

As a Pharisee he was a member of a sect of Jews that were very rigid, very careful in their observance of law.

They were concerned with correct forms and right methods and appropriate practices.

I was told, and I can only imagine that this is true, that there were some of these fellas who when they walked around town they would wear kind of like what horses wear, like these blinkers.

So they could only look straight ahead, so that even if they wanted to, they couldn't look this way or that way, so it would protect them from the temptation of looking on a woman to lust.

And you know, frankly, I hope that what I heard is not true, but I can imagine these people being so rigid about their observances that they would say, look how righteous I am.

They'd get around like this, and it would be clear, man, this is a righteous person.

If you saw Pastor Bradshaw with these things on, you would say, wow, holy man, he's making sure he doesn't slip.

And so you'd wear this type of thing as a badge of honor.

They were very careful to observe and to do.

They believed very much in righteousness, but when Saul became Paul, he found out that all of that was only self-righteousness.

There wasn't anything that could really help him.

It wasn't any kind of measure or badge of strength.

He discovered that he was not really so righteous and that what he thought was righteousness was really an indication that he wasn't really so strong on the side of God after all.

He discovered that what he had was self-righteousness and what he needed was God's righteousness.

If you are something of a bum, and I'm just using that word, and you've got all kinds of problems and issues, and you've got all kinds of dysfunction in your life, you could be in a better place spiritually than some seasoned church member who has checked all the boxes and observes all the forms and does all the right things.

Because at least if you're in the gutter, so to speak, you might be cognizant of the fact that you need God in your life.

But if you look right and sound right and smell right and do right and touch right, and taste right and eat right and think whatever, you might be in the place where you think that you're pretty good.

And that could be a very, very dangerous place to be.

A very interesting thing in the book of Revelation, and I'm frankly surprised we haven't gone there yet, and perhaps I'll save the most of this for later and perhaps I won't, but If you look in Revelation chapter 3 where Jesus speaks to the church of Laodicea, I've been taught by Bible teachers that this Laodicean church represents God's church in the last days.

The word Laodicea means something like judging of the people or a people judged.

If we understand this correctly, we're living in the time of heaven's final judgment.

So the contemporary church, and I mean the church of today, would be the church of Laodicea.

And God says, I might as well look there.

Revelation chapter 3, and God says something fascinating.

He says in verse 15, I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot.

I would thou wert cold or hot." Have you ever stopped to think about what he's really saying there?

Someone who is hot, spiritually speaking, you would say that would be someone who is in relationship to Jesus what?

Fully Charged

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