The Greatest Power In The World Order Printed Copy

Author: Kathryn Kuhlman
Size: 1.57MB | 176 pages
|

Download Read Online

Continue with

Google Twitter

Email Register

Others like the greatest power in the world Features >>

The Desire Of The Righteous Granted

The Hidden Power Of Prayer And Fasting

The Power Of Persistent Prayer

Operating In The Courts Of Heaven

The Communion Of The Holy Spirit

Getting Result In The War Room: Prayer

About the Book

"The Greatest Power in the World" by Kathryn Kuhlman is a spiritual book that explores the concept of the Holy Spirit as the greatest power in the world. Kuhlman emphasizes the importance of connecting with the Holy Spirit to experience miracles, healing, and transformation in everyday life. Through personal anecdotes and teachings, she encourages readers to tap into this power to live a more fulfilling and purposeful life.

Charles Wesley

"O for a thousand tongues to sing / My dear Redeemer's praise / The glories of my God and King, / The triumphs of his grace!" He was said to have averaged 10 poetic lines a day for 50 years. He wrote 8,989 hymns, 10 times the volume composed by the only other candidate (Isaac Watts) who could conceivably claim to be the world's greatest hymn writer. He composed some of the most memorable and lasting hymns of the church: "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," "And Can It Be," "O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing," "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling," "Jesus, Lover of My Soul," "Christ the Lord Is Risen Today," "Soldiers of Christ, Arise," and "Rejoice! the Lord Is King!" And yet he is often referred to as the "forgotten Wesley." His brother John is considered the organizational genius behind the founding of Methodism. But without the hymns of Charles, the Methodist movement may have gone nowhere. As one historian put it, "The early Methodists were taught and led as much through [Charles's] hymns as through sermons and [John] Wesley's pamphlets." Language scholar Charles Wesley was the eighteenth of Samuel and Susannah Wesley's nineteen children (only 10 lived to maturity). He was born prematurely in December 1707 and appeared dead. He lay silent, wrapped in wool, for weeks. When older, Charles joined his siblings as each day his mother, Susannah, who knew Greek, Latin, and French, methodically taught them for six hours. Charles then spent 13 years at Westminster School, where the only language allowed in public was Latin. He added nine years at Oxford, where he received his master's degree. It was said that he could reel off the Latin poet Virgil by the half hour. It was off to Oxford University next, and to counteract the spiritual tepidity of the school, Charles formed the Holy Club, and with two or three others celebrated Communion weekly and observed a strict regimen of spiritual study. Because of the group's religious regimen, which later included early rising, Bible study, and prison ministry, members were called "methodists." In 1735 Charles joined his brother John (they were now both ordained), to become a missionary in the colony of Georgia—John as chaplain of the rough outpost and Charles as secretary to Governor Oglethorpe. Shot at, slandered, suffering sickness, shunned even by Oglethorpe, Charles could have echoed brother John's sentiments as they dejectedly returned to England the following year: "I went to America to convert the Indians, but, oh, who will convert me?" It turned out to be the Moravians. After returning to England, Charles taught English to Moravian Peter Böhler, who prompted Charles to look at the state of his soul more deeply. During May 1738, Charles began reading Martin Luther's volume on Galatians while ill. He wrote in his diary, "I labored, waited, and prayed to feel 'who loved me, and gave himself for me.'" He shortly found himself convinced, and journaled, "I now found myself at peace with God, and rejoice in hope of loving Christ." Two days later he began writing a hymn celebrating his conversion. Evangelistic preacher At evangelist George Whitefield's instigation, John and Charles eventually submitted to "be more vile" and do the unthinkable: preach outside of church buildings. In his journal entries from 1739 to 1743, Charles computed the number of those to whom he had preached. Of only those crowds for whom he stated a figure, the total during these five years comes to 149,400. From June 24 through July 8, 1738, Charles reported preaching twice to crowds of ten thousand at Moorfields, once called "that Coney Island of the eighteenth century." He preached to 20,000 at Kennington Common plus gave a sermon on justification before the University of Oxford. On a trip to Wales in 1747, the adventurous evangelist, now 40 years old, met 20-year-old Sally Gwynne, whom he soon married. By all accounts, their marriage was a happy one. Charles continued to travel and preach, sometimes creating tension with John, who complained that "I do not even know when and where you intend to go." His last nationwide trip was in 1756. After that, his health led him gradually to withdraw from itinerant ministry. He spent the remainder of his life in Bristol and London, preaching at Methodist chapels. Magnificent obsession Throughout his adult life, Charles wrote verse, predominantly hymns for use in Methodist meetings. He produced 56 volumes of hymns in 53 years, producing in his lyrics what brother John called a "distinct and full account of scriptural Christianity." The Methodists became known (and sometimes mocked) for their exuberant singing of Charles's hymns. A contemporary observer recorded, "The song of the Methodists is the most beautiful I ever heard … They sing in a proper way, with devotion, serene mind and charm." Charles Wesley quickly earned admiration for his ability to capture universal Christian experience in memorable verse. In the following century, Henry Ward Beecher declared, "I would rather have written that hymn of Wesley's, 'Jesus, Lover of My Soul,' than to have the fame of all the kings that ever sat on the earth." The compiler of the massive Dictionary of Hymnology, John Julian, concluded that "perhaps, taking quantity and quality into consideration, [Charles Wesley was] the greatest hymn-writer of all ages."

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.