Endued With Power: How To Activate The Gifts Of The Holy Spirit In Your Life Order Printed Copy

Author: Novel Hayes
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About the Book

"Endued with Power" by Novel Hayes is a practical guide that helps readers activate the gifts of the Holy Spirit in their lives. The book provides insights and strategies for understanding and utilizing spiritual gifts such as prophecy, healing, and tongues. It encourages believers to seek God's power and guidance for living a life filled with spiritual gifts.

Rich Mullins

Born Richard Wayne Mullins on October 21, 1955, in Richmond, IN; died on September 19, 1997, in La Salle County, IL; son of John and Neva Mullins. Education: Attended Friends University, Wichita, KS, late 1980s. The talents of Contemporary Christian singer/songwriter Rich Mullins and his work with the group Zion were first noticed by Christian music superstar Amy Grant. The inclusion of his song "Sing Your Praise to the Lord" on Grant's Age to Age album in 1982 soon lead to deals with Reunion Records and the start of a successful career as a songwriter and singer. With nearly ten albums and numerous Contemporary Christian hit songs to his credit, Mullins's career was cut short by an automobile accident that took his life on September 19, 1997, in Illinois. Raised near Richmond, Indiana, Mullins began writing songs in his head as he drove a tractor over the fields of his family's farm. He taught himself to play the piano at age four and soon mastered a number of other instruments as well, including the guitar and hammered dulcimer. Long before his birth, however, factors over which he had no control were beginning to shape the world in which he would grow up. In Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven by James Bryan Smith, the singer tells of some family history and how it came to affect his life: "My dad grew up back and forth between Kentucky and Virginia because his father was a coal miner. And when my dad was 14 my grandpa came home and told my grandma to load up the truck 'cause they were gonna move.... And my grandpa said, 'Well, Rose, we're going to Detroit.' And she said, 'Why in the world are we going to Detroit?' And he said, 'Because I don't want my boys to grow up to be coal miners.' And so they got as far as Indiana and ran out of gas--and that's how I got here." As a boy, Mullins was known as Wayne, his middle name. Although he went by Richard when he went off to college and shortened that to Rich when he launched his music career, he preferred to be known as Wayne by his family. Mullins was particularly close to his mother, Neva, who was raised a Quaker. He admits, however, to having been somewhat embarrassed by his father, who was raised in the heart of Appalachia, "which is a very polite way to say that he was a hillbilly," Mullins told Smith. Mullins said that it was not until he was nearing the end of high school that he began to understand the true meaning of the biblical injunction to "honor thy father and mother." In Smith's book Mullins is quoted: "[I]f you cannot honor your father and mother, then you can't honor anybody. Until you come to terms with your heritage, you'll never be at peace with yourself. That was a real breakthrough moment for me. So, what I needed to do was come to understand the Appalachian life, so that I could know more about my father, who had been a stranger to me all my life." In 1974, after finishing high school, Mullins attended Cincinnati Bible College in Ohio, working as a youth minister in a local church. A couple of years into college, he formed a band of his own. The band only stayed together for about a year, and during that time it performed Christian music at schools and colleges throughout the Cincinnati area. In the late 1970s Mullins left college to work with Zion Ministries and perform with their band, aptly named Zion. In the summer of 1981 a copy of an album recorded by Zion--made up mostly of songs written by Mullins--found its way to Christian singer Amy Grant. The up-and-coming Grant and her managers were impressed by Mullins's "Sing Your Praise to the Lord" and decided to include it on Grant's next album, Age to Age, released in 1982. Mike Blanton, an adviser to Grant and founder of Reunion Records, signed Mullins to his first publishing deal as well as his first artist deal. Mullins's first album for Reunion, self-titled, was released in 1986 and includes such songs as "Place to Stand," "Elijah," and "Few Good Men." He followed that in 1987 with Pictures in the Sky, which includes "When You Love," "Be with You," and "Verge of a Miracle." Winds of Heaven, Stuff of Earth, Mullins's third album for Reunion, was released in 1989 and features "Awesome God," "Other Side of the World," and "If I Stand." Also hitting music stores in 1989 was Never Picture Perfect, which includes the singles "I Will Sing," "While the Nations Rage," and "First Family." In 1988 Mullins moved to Wichita, Kansas, to study music education at Friends University, a nondenominational Christian institution. While studying at Friends, he continued to record and perform whenever he could. In 1991 and 1992, he released two volumes of a compilation entitled World As Best As I Remember It. After completing his studies at Friends, Mullins joined a Compassion International mission to the vast Navajo Reservation in Arizona to teach music to the local children and spread the Christian gospel to whomever he could reach. As part of his work in the Navajo Nation, he formed a music club for some of the younger residents. In May of 1995, he moved to the Navajo Nation, settling into a trailer adjacent to the reservation. He lived there with fellow musician Mitch McVicker, and the two were involved in a project to collect musical instruments for the children of the reservation. Throughout his career, Mullins has been nominated a total of 12 times for Dove Awards, presented each year to the best in Contemporary Christian music. He never received the award, but close friend Doris Howard told Release magazine that he probably didn't mind. "Nashville didn't own Rich, but then, he cared nothing for the things of this world." On September 19, 1997, the Jeep in which Mullins and McVicker were traveling from Chicago to Wichita overturned on Interstate 39 in La Salle County, Illinois. Both men were thrown onto the road from their vehicle. A tractor trailer following close behind swerved to miss the Jeep but instead hit Rich, killing him instantly. McVicker, though injured critically, recovered. Rich Mullins's Career Joined Christian group Zion, late 1970s; released self-titled album for Reunion Records, 1986; recorded total of nine albums of Christian music for Reunion, 1986-96; wrote several Contemporary Christian hits, including "Awesome God" and "Sing Your Praise to the Lord"; studied music education, devoted time to relief efforts among Navajo Indians of the Southwest, mid-1990s.

enjoy your possessions before they possess you

Take an inventory of your life. What do you own right now? Whatever possessions you have are no accident, and not a product of mere happenstance. At the micro level, Jesus promises to care for even the minutest everyday details, like pocket money and food and clothes. As we see in Scripture, in these small possessions, God calls us to live with moral standards because we are susceptible to sinning our way into big problems (like unreasonable consumer debt). God calls us to be wise with money and to work and live economically fruitful lives, and to be careful with our possessions. At the macro level, all wealth distribution and re-distribution is the work of our sovereign God (Ecclesiastes 5:18–6:2). All of our possessions are his, and he gives (and takes away) as he sees fit. God makes the poor and he makes the rich (1 Samuel 2:7). So how does God decide to distribute wealth in the lives of his creatures? This plays out in many different ways. God may give you many possessions, but not give you the power to enjoy those gifts — a great tragedy (Ecclesiastes 6:1–2). God may give you accumulated wealth, and give you the power to enjoy those gifts — a great blessing (Ecclesiastes 5:19, Proverbs 10:22). God may give you possessions, but through future persecution, he may take all those possessions away from you in the end (Hebrews 10:34). God may call you to a life of unalleviated poverty (2 Corinthians 6:10; 8:9). God may give you a life of wealth (2 Chronicles 32:29). God may give you a life in the middle — neither poverty nor wealth (Proverbs 30:8). God may bless you with great wealth, then take it all away and reduce your portfolio to ash, and then restore you with doubled wealth (Job). God may make you wealthy and then call you to voluntary poverty in order to show the world that he is your greatest treasure (Matthew 19:21; Mark 10:21; Luke 18:22). None of these situations is normative, if God sovereignly dispenses possessions to us as he sees fit (which he does). When it comes to possessions, our experiences will vary greatly. But no matter how much (or how little) we possess, there are four things that will help us rightly enjoy the gifts God has given us. 1. Money is temporary. Money existed before us, and it will exist after us, too. The streams of commerce have been flowing for millennia, and one day we will be gone and the currents of economic stimulus will flow to the next generation. We exist in time with money and possessions, but everything of value we own will be passed on to others. Which means in a very real sense, money is temporary. It carries the face of a Caesar or a president to remind us its value is as temporary as world rulers and the rise and fall of nations. So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s. In other words, the Christian is called to possess all things as though we don’t possess anything (1 Corinthians 7:30). Hold the money, use the money, save the money, steward the money. But also recognize the cash in our wallets is the Monopoly money of this present age. The cash itself has no eternal face value. We entered this life with empty hands, we leave it with empty hands, and to live in the middle with a lust for cash is like holding a sharp dagger backwards and gutting our own souls (1 Timothy 6:6–10). This is true of cars and houses, too. C.S. Lewis said the secret to genuinely delighting in one’s own house is through sacrifice, through a certain crucifixion of the self’s relationship to it. We sacrifice our house, we release our grip on it, and then it becomes an object of joy. When it comes to possessions, true delight is found on the other side of disinterest (Letters 2.788). The takeaway: We don’t boast in our possessions; we boast that God possesses us (Jeremiah 9:23–24). Here our stewardship comes into focus. Material blessing is our temporary stewardship, but delighting in God and his gifts is our true and eternal vocation. 2. Enjoy your possessions now. As we have seen, we don’t always know what God is doing in our lives when it comes to our material possessions. He has different plans for us all. But he intends all of his children to enjoy the gifts he has given us. If you have pants, a shirt, and a sandwich you can be content in life, and if you can be content with a little, you can enjoy God’s goodness to you in every one of the millions of simple gifts he gives to you every day (1 Timothy 6:8). In fact, few things in this life are better than to enjoy your life and the good gifts from God in a spirit of fear and obedience and faith toward God (Ecclesiastes 8:15; 9:7–10; 10:19; 12:13). If you are prone to grumble more than express gratitude, pray and ask that God would give you the power to enjoy his gifts rightly — a gift in itself. As the book of Ecclesiastes makes clear: One of the rarest and most precious gifts is the gift of enjoying our daily gifts. 3. Enjoy your possessions by sharing them. The man who cannot enjoy God’s good gifts every day is often the man who wrongly thinks he must own gifts before enjoying them. We don’t have to own something to find joy in it. Beautiful art is intended to be shared in museums and galleries, not to be locked in the secluded basement of a billionaire. The delight of exclusivity is a delusion — a false delight. Christians get this. The delight of sharing is what drove the early church to share everything they owned (Acts 2:45; 4:32; 1 John 3:17). They gave money. They cared for the poor. They helped the missionaries. A group of wealthy women funded gospel work (Luke 8:2–3). There is a special delight in our possessions when we don’t think of them as “mine” but make use of them to increase the delight of others. 4. Enjoy what you do not own. Finally — and perhaps the whole reason why I wrote this article in the first place — God calls us to enjoy what we can never possess. I cannot own many of the greatest gifts God has given me. I do not own my wife; I do not own my kids; I don’t own my time, or the oceans, or the rain, or the sunshine, or the majestic mountain ranges — certainly not in any sense in which I own my minivan (my name is on the title). The man who loves the ocean so much that he sells all that he has and buys a beachfront property with his own private sand and closes it off from others so that he can exclusively use it is the man whose joy will die by exclusivity. He cannot enjoy possessions because the possessions possess him. On the other hand, the man who buys beachfront property in order to freely share that property with his friends and family will find his joy doubled. By his seaside generosity, this man will bless many others in great ways. But perhaps the most blessed of all is the man who doesn’t need to own beachfront property at all. He has learned to enjoy every beach in the world for its sheer beauty. He is freed from the desire to enjoy only what he possesses. This seems to be the way Romans 1 pushes us to contemplate. To be truly human is to express a Godward gratitude in the delights of creation. And if that is true, then we discover that what it means to delight in this world is a category that explodes all the categories of what the world promises us in possession. Old Tom Bombadil The beautiful literary example of a man who delights in what he doesn’t possess is found in the character Tom Bombadil, tucked into the early storyline of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. In the epic unfolding storyline, Tom Bombadil is a mysterious figure who is quick to laughter and who seems to live in a blessed state of joy. But his life also bears no impact on the central drama that is unfolding around him. (Thus, Tom Bombadil never appears in the movies.) Tom’s role in the overall story is subtle and easy to miss. Early in the journey, Frodo and company wander into his lands, into a respite of joy in stark contrast to the darkness they would soon face. “Who is Tom Bombadil?” a curious Frodo later asks Tom’s wife, Goldberry. “He is the Master of wood, water, and hill.” “Then all this strange land belongs to him?” “No, indeed!” No, indeed! The woods, the water, and the hills that fill Tom Bombadil with delight are not his to possess — they are his to tend and to enjoy. To be sure, Tom is not an allegory against owning property, nor is he an allegory for passivism. As Tolkien also makes clear, it will take warfare against Sauron to stop the encroaching evil in order to preserve the lifestyle that Tom and Goldberry enjoy. As if we need the confirmation, Tolkien makes it clear in his letters that Tom is an intentional enigma. Tom incarnates a contrast. Tom represents a soul that has been freed from the greed of possession in order to delight in created beauty. He has renounced control and therefore finds the means of power to be valueless, too. As a result, Tom Bombadil can hold Frodo’s great ring of power with no danger to himself or anyone else. The ring wields no power over Tom because Tom has no interest in possessing the power of the ring. When the lust for possession is broken, when gratitude takes its place, and when one can simply delight in the glories of creation, then some of evil’s darkest schemes in the human heart are broken. Tom Bombadil is a model of delighting in what we do not possess, and then of sharing what we do possess — like dinner fellowship around the yellow cream, honeycomb, white bread and butter at his table. May we shine like such glad-hearted, grateful enigmas in our own world.