Quotes about Power

The amplification of the word faith in Colossians 1:4 is "the leaning of your entire human personality on [God] in absolute trust and confidence in His power, wisdom, and goodness" (AMPC). I love this

I wonder how much of our mental time is spent worrying, reasoning, and fearing—possibly more than is spent on anything else. Instead of meditating on our problems, let's choose to meditate on the "alls" of God. He says you can cast "… [all your anxieties, all your worries, all your concerns, once and for all] on Him, for He cares for you…" (1 Pet. 5:7). Let us realize how unlimited His power is and trust Him to do what we cannot do.

I encourage you to begin pondering the truth that every word you speak holds some kind of power and to start praying and asking God to help you speak words filled with life and hope.

If you apply God's word to your life, you will find that it works exactly as He says it will.

The Word of God is powerful. It has the ability to calm you down, cheer you up, give you hope, and stir your faith up!

Words can poison, words can heal. Words start and fight wars, but words make peace. Words lead men to the pinnacles of good And words can plunge men to the depths of evil. —Marguerite Schumann

The fact that Jesus weeps and that he is moved in spirit and troubled contrasts remarkably with the dominant culture. That is not the way of power, and it is scarcely the way among those who intend to maintain firm social control. But in [John 11:33-35] Jesus is engaged not in social control but in dismantling the power of death, and he does so by submitting himself to the pain and grief present in the situation, the very pain and grief that the dominant society must deny.

Pharaoh is clearly a metaphor. He embodies and represents raw, absolute, worldly power. He is, like Pilate after him, a stand-in for the whole of the empire. As the agent of the "empire of force," he reappears in many different personae.9

The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation. This is not a cry for traditionalism but rather a judgment that the church has no business more pressing than the reappropriation of its memory in its full power and authenticity.

The wonder of the Exodus narrative is that the role of pharaoh continues to be reperformed in many times and many places. "Pharaoh" reappears in the course of history in the guise of coercive economic production. In every new performance, the character of Pharaoh makes claims to be absolute to perpetuity; the character is regularly propelled by fearful greed; the character imposes stringent economic demands on a vulnerable labor force.

The church has a huge stake in breaking the silence, because the God of the Bible characteristically appears at the margins of established power arrangements, whether theological or socioeconomic and political.

The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation.