Bill Johnson has said that a gospel without power is no gospel at all. I agree. Much more importantly, so does Jesus and so does Paul. A gospel that leaves us floundering in our pain and brokenness in this life while promising relief only after the funeral denies that the kingdom of God has come to this world.
Jesus scolded the religious leaders of his day because they neither knew the scriptures nor the power of God (Mt.22: 29). Paul warned Timothy about those who held a form of godliness but who denied the power of the kingdom (2 Tim.3:5). He also declared to the church in Corinth that the kingdom is not a matter of words but of power (1 Cor.4:20).
A gospel without the power to transform lives and set people free from the oppression of the enemy is only a philosophy of life. Jesus didn’t come as a philosopher but as the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Jesus didn’t come just to talk about how to navigate life in a fallen world but he came to teach us how to transform that world. Jesus came to defeat the “prince of this world” and to “destroy the works of the devil” (1 Jn.3:8).
Those “works” were the condemnation of man that came through sin, disease, suffering, torment, brokenness, violence, and finally death. Jesus spent three years and several hours on a cross triumphing over each of those things by the power of an advancing kingdom. Jesus taught us to constantly pray that the kingdom of God would come to this earth so that the Father’s will would be done “on earth as it is in heaven.”
God’s will is for the works of Satan to be eradicated from this world. Some of that work will be done in the hearts of believers as they receive Christ and the love of God and as the Holy Spirit begins to redesign the landscape of their hearts. But much of that work will be done by confronting the powers of darkness with the authority and the power of heaven that has been given to the church who is destined to do even greater things than Jesus did on the earth. (Jn. 14:12.)
A gospel that does not declare the power of God’s kingdom as well as the grace of that kingdom, is not the gospel Jesus proclaimed and demonstrated day after day. Don’t settle for less.
