Ephesians 6:10 - Powered by THE Power

"For the rest, keep on being empowered in [the] Lord and in the strength of His might."

-For all these and for everything else, really... Every last facet of the Christian life is powered by Christ Himself.  Godly living is the life of God energized and unleashed in and through me.  Paul uses three different words for power here, all intended to drive home the truth that ours is a divine calling, a supernatural lifestyle which is impossible to achieve by any strictly human effort.  There is no earthly way we can attain to a life which even partially approximates the perfect everlasting love and goodness and mercy and purity and holiness of our heavenly Father.  But then we have that tiny little prepositional phrase - ‘in the Lord’.  ‘In Him’.  It can be rendered, ‘by the Lord’.  Powered by Him, by Christ.  By His strength, His might, His omnipotence.  The ability, the power to live this life, to run and win this race comes from above.  THE Ability.  THE Power.

-So many claims of power.  Powered by Intel.  Powered by Reebok.  Powered by Honda.  Powered by Microsoft.  Powered by Caffeine.  Powered by Energizer.  Powered by pork.  Pretenders, all.  Finite, flawed, falling short of even the barest minimum power required to raise a single soul out of spiritual death, out of brokenness and depravity and abject selfishness.  The power to faithfully love and nourish my wife and my kids and to love and serve and build up my fellow Christ-followers and to love my neighbors (not to mention my enemies), the power to pray and to do good in season and out of season and to rejoice always and pray without ceasing and give thanks in all things - the ability to do any of these things and all the rest does not reside in me, not anywhere in my dying carcass of flesh, $3.50 worth of chemicals animated by a soul insinctively hell-bent on serving the three-fold self.  And yet, if I am in Christ, if I have put my trust in Him - this One Who defeated sin and death - there is a new source of power coursing thru the veins of my soul, the same Power which created everything out of nothing and which sustains a billion trillion stars, limitless, inexhaustible, power to move mountains and love enemies and bring heaven down to earth.  Tap into just a tiny morsel of this divinely-powered stuff, and I have enough power to... do all things (Philippians 4.13).  Do we believe this?