Sermon Notes – August 29th
Sermon Title: “The Power From On High“
Pastor Dennis Martin
Many of us are looking for the power from on high – but God is saying when He sees us take good care of our own, then He will give us more. God will make sure every investment comes to its expected end, this is why He hastens to perform His Word – not us. Anything God gives us like Hannah is better than what we give back to Him. God allowed Pastor Dennis to have children, he put these kids back into the Lord’s hands. Our help and strength is in the Lord. As we come into the text, we see Jesus has come and risen again. Three things we recognize Jesus do before He sends the power from on high. He says behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you (Luke 24:49). In that simple verse, this tells us so much. The disciples weren’t aware of this promise. There are some things God promised us that we aren’t aware about. But they are there. It is through the power that is on high, through the Holy Spirit, we have intelligence for what God has for us. The Holy Spirit is a higher awareness. The fact that the enemy knows we are part of the family of God, this causes our life to change. There are things that will produce a challenge because we have an adversary. There are promises as well that we are oblivious of. What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived the things God has prepared for those who love Him (1 Corinthians 2:9). Save by the Holy Spirit we are not aware of these things.
It is for us to have the benefit of knowing what God has laid up for us. Why? So we don’t waste time looking at other people and what they have. When we know that what God has for us is for us, it is an assistance. If we didn’t know that God had called us to be leaders, we’d be conducting ourselves differently. We conduct ourselves differently because we know what God has in store. It will allow us to reject certain things on our journey of life. So when we are working on our becoming, exercising the power against, when we are good at protecting our own, God will give us His. It is the next version of yourself that unlocks the door for you to receive it. When Pastor Dennis’s son gets his driver’s license, he can drive the car wherever he’d like. Many of us are asking God for things but we aren’t paying attention to the version we are. This is where we get the power. This is how we get the power – w “wait”. It is through spiritual technology that waiting allows us to move faster. When we wait upon the Lord, that enables us to run (Isaiah 40:31).
The Holy Spirit is telling us to wait. A Christian that cannot wait is like a dog without teeth according to Pastor Dennis’s grandma. It is critical for us to wait. The Bible says that they were tarrying in the upper room for a certain period of time. The focus was that they had to be of one accord in the waiting. The unity allowed the Holy Spirit to come. If we were only just to be unified together as the body of Christ – imagine all we could accomplish! The tower of Babel was a bad idea but it almost worked. The only reason why it almost worked was because the people were unified. Any plan – as long as you are in it together – it works. And, where there was a person not 100 percent invested, that’s where the mistake comes in.
As Pastor Dennis becomes the person he needs to be, he realizes he doesn’t have to ask God for stuff anymore. Immature Christians say, “God fill my cup” – that’s the song – but not scripture. God anoints our heads with oil and then our cup runs over. Our life overflows based on what is going on in our head. We are anointed. It is through the anointing of our mind that our cup runs over. We can endure the process and tarry for the power because we know what is involved in the waiting. While waiting, we ought not be anxious. Jerusalem – the meaning of this location breaks down to being situated in a peaceful place. They were called to wait in Jerusalem, to tarry for the Holy Spirit. While we wait, Jesus tells us what to do and how to wait where. Wait in a place of peace without being anxious. It is not on God to move fast but for us to become the person we need to be. We ought not be anxious about life – the vanity of other people receiving things should not cause us to be anxious. We have to be able to wait. God is saying that this is a prerequisite to receiving this power from on high. We need to be patient. When things are going wrong, we must be patient. We must allow the Word of God to teach us how to respond to things. We ought not react. We ought to respond after we think. Jesus says tarry – then He tells us what to do. You don’t rush here. You won’t eat a bloody steak, or an undercooked steak. Why do we ask God to give us things that we aren’t even ready for? This message of the power from on high hinges on us; the power from on high comes after the power to come against and before we receive God’s power, we must perfect this.
The disciples were doing great things. Little by little, hour by hour, Jesus is taking steps back from them. The promise God has for us hinges on Jesus stepping back to allow us to be led by the Spirit. The most powerful One on earth is the Holy Spirit. Jesus Himself said He needs to get out of the way. Jesus has empowered us with the power from on high – the Holy Spirit – to function in our lives. When we look at our lives, and say it doesn’t look like what the Word says, where are we in the process of becoming? How many things have we successfully rejected? These things will contaminate us and will disturb what God wants us to do in life. God has given us a responsibility so that our waiting process looks like us becoming, and rejecting what is not of God. This waiting process, is a process where we begin to work on ourselves. The Bible says He is the Lord our God who sanctifies us. In our own personal lives, we should be a co-laborer with God.
Some of us have become covid-tired and covid-lazy. There are some things Pastor Dennis used to do that covid messed up on the whole. We ought to go through our processes with honour. We ought to stop complaining and murmuring. We are about to become something we’ve never seen before; God has empowered us to go through this process. When we leave this place, we ought to work on ourselves because the devil is going to be working against us. When we work on ourselves, the things that worked against us won’t work anymore. The traps the devil has against us won’t work against the new us. The devil catches us because he knows our patterns, he doesn’t know our future or our dreams. He assigns familiar spirits to follow us. If we really believe in God, we must know that the devil is real too. If God is working, then the devil is working too. We have to know his voice and set against him just as we know God’s voice. My sheep know my voice and a stranger’s they will not follow (John 10:5). God is protecting us by allowing this power to become to confound the enemy. There are some things that the enemy laid as traps for us but because the Holy Spirit is working on our becoming, the enemy is not finding us there. Endure your cross and endure your process. We have to accept that we have to wait, we have to wait on God. Pastor Dennis doesn’t know our dreams or aspirations, as individuals or families, but he does know that a pastor can only go so far. They can’t care about our dreams more than us. Has there ever been a time in a Christian walk where we felt like God was not as close as He should be? It’s because we’ve become familiar with how He’s moved in the past. This is what it was like when Jesus was leaving; the disciples were like, “What are we going to do?” They didn’t have power previously – they had functioned on authority. They entered into a time that the Holy Spirit would function from within. God sees a masterpiece in the process of becoming. Who is it that we need to be right now?
If you know you are waiting on God to do a thing, don’t say God is taking too long. He is waiting on you. Are you the version of yourself that can move forward? Work on you. When you become an individual that God can endorse, God will then now release power upon you. This is why when Pastor Dennis builds ministries, he doesn’t look at what servants did in the world; it’s not about being used according to our strengths. We need to become someone God wants us to be. In His house, we will find ourselves doing what He requires us to do. Peter and Matthew had a pedigree for working with money, and yet, Judas was the one to handle the money. This is why we wait on God. In the process of waiting, we work on ourselves. We work on ourselves in a peaceful place – the place of Jerusalem – we are not anxious about anything.
In our process of becoming, we need to know well what are the things that we are doing out there and what are the things that we are doing in the church. We need to focus on what we are doing out there and wonder what God wants us to do out here. The business man didn’t handle the money. Note that all of the disciples of Jesus were nazarites save Judas who came from Judah. God knows the difference between a Judas praise and a Judah praise. Woe be to the people that pay a price just to get somewhere and sell out Jesus. Judas sold out Jesus for bus fare. We will learn that so much hinges on how we behave. And, there is a certain degree that hinges on what we believe. But, if we aren’t the individual that God can endorse, deliverance will come from someone else. See Esther. If we want this power from on high, we have to be able to wait. When we wait upon the Lord, we renew our strength and we run – this is the spiritual technology God gave us. When we wait upon God we run. The fastest way to get something done the first time is to do it right. Leave this place knowing who you need to be. God is saying, “How well are you ministering to your own spirit?” The Holy Spirit is God. God in three persons. He won’t just dump Him on you because He promised. The question should be, how am I behaving myself knowing that there is a promise from on high? How are we going to behave ourselves so we receive Him?
At 21, a child will inherit a great degree of wealth. A child raised in this way will be raised so that the wealth won’t be wasted. Become the individual you need to be because the Holy Spirit is power. Before we get this power, we need to know how to conduct ourselves in a certain manner. Work on you. Think in your head about five things we need to work on. Search me oh God and know my heart (Psalm 139:23). It doesn’t matter what God has promised you – be the individual to receive it. How are we as a mentee – are we individuals that can be trusted? We need to work on these things. God wants to trust us. He wants to trust us with a power that is from on high. The best investment God gave us is His Holy Spirit. But first, He gave us life! Not even a good man may run into a burning house to save another but Jesus Christ laid down His life to save all. How are we in terms of being a significant other? God told Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply. Work. Get to know your significant other. When emotion kicks in and you are with the wrong person, you will find it hard to separate. Love is strong, the Bible doesn’t say it but it is also true, love is blind. Emotions kick in. Figure out how to be better with the person you are with. You don’t need to pray for it, it is already there. Stretch to reach it. For you to reach it, work on yourselves. What are the 5 things you need to work on, within your house, your family (like your children), within your workplace and within your finances?
Tarry, you don’t have time to worry about what is going on.
One of the greatest things that affirms that we can handle this process, the Bible says is that before Jesus left the disciples He blessed them. When Jesus blesses a thing, it can endure any process. He broke the five loaves; sometimes in life we may feel broken, but He is readying us to give us power from on high. Some of the heartaches we go through are part of the process. We have to outlast the process. When Jesus broke the fish and the loaves, He blessed them. Even though Jesus will break you, He will allow the process of becoming to come to fruition. We ought to give thanks that God broke us but that He blessed us first. Thank you Lord for blessing us first. Some people are broken and they never received the Lord, but they were never blessed first. Jesus before He left blessed us. We can handle this broken process. We didn’t need a covid vacation to reset us. Many of us wonder when things will get back to normal. How do we know how we were going before covid began was normal? Now we recognize we can have fun with our families. We ought to understand this; this power from on high, it comes from us working on us. When we become the individual God can endorse, then we can receive it. God will never give us our own until He sees us do well with someone else’s. We ought to work on ourselves. The disciples waited and like a mighty rushing wind, power from on high came over their lives.
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