What God Can Do
He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love. —Colossians 1:13
Our society doesn’t really have answers for all the problems we are facing in our country today. Ironically, our society seems to do everything it can to undermine the only one who can help us, and that is Jesus Christ.
There are people caught in our legal system as repeat offenders. There are judges who make the wrong decisions. There is the breakdown of the family. And all of these elements combined produce a society that can do very little to change a person’s heart, if anything at all. Rehabilitation efforts largely fail. In fact, the only real programs that seem to produce lasting change are faith-based, and more specifically, are being operated by Christians who are calling people to faith in Jesus Christ. Society doesn’t have the answers.
Jesus met two men whose lives had been controlled and ruined by Satan. Society didn’t have the answers. Enter the Savior, Jesus. What did He do? He sought them out in their graveyard and offered them hope. In fact, Luke’s account of the story tells us what happened to one of the men who was delivered: “Then they went out to see what had happened, and came to Jesus, and found the man from whom the demons had departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid” (Luke 8:35). Why were people afraid? They didn’t know what to make of it. He was so transformed it frightened the people. They couldn’t even imagine a guy like him could be changed in such a dramatic way.
It is such a glorious thing when Christ so transforms someone that you can’t even imagine that person being what he or she used to be. You realize that it is the power of a changed life. And that is what God can do.
Summary sentence: Only God can transform a person!
Tags: Power, Satan, transformation
Copyright © 2011 by Harvest Ministries. All rights reserved.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
If you have been following our daily devotional this year, thank you. I trust they have been a blessing to you. It is just one of the ways that, here at Harvest, our desire is to be there for you with relevant Bible teaching each and every day.
I have shared with you that the Christian life can be understood as running a race. In fact, I hope that through these devotions each day, you saw me as your running coach, encouraging you to “Keep going…You can run this race well…Hang in there…Stay with it.”
This year we have run, not walked, through doors of opportunity into territory that we have never been in before. We have taken steps of faith to expand our reach and impact, and it has been exciting to see the Lord honor and bless this work.
But it is not enough to just start a race, or just run a portion of the course…we want to finish the race and finish it well.
It might surprise you to know that upwards of 30% of our annual ministry support will come through the generous gifts made during the last weeks of December, making our ministry year a race that ends with a run straight uphill to the finish.
The last leg of our year-end race is upon us and the finish line is in sight. How we finish on December 31 will impact how bold we can be in the coming year through an unprecedented opportunity we are calling Harvest America. I will be sharing more with you about this in early 2012.
But today, in these last days of December, thank you for running to the finish line with us through your gift to this final challenge of 2011.
Called to the gospel,
Greg Laurie
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