The Power of the Kingdom, Part 1

God has a lot of snorkelers. They ain't trying to get that deep, so they snorkel on top of church. Dr. Tony Evans encourages shallow water Christians to dive in. If you're going to experience the power, you have to go all the way under.

To get this power, you've got to be immersed in it. Celebrating 40 years of faithfulness, this is the alternative with Dr. Tony Evans, author, speaker, senior pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, Texas, and president of the Urban Alternative. Meekness is a godly quality.

Weakness isn't. Today Dr. Evans reveals ways we can connect with and use the strength God wants to give us. Let's join him. Today I want to talk to you about the power of the Kingdom. It is one of those messages that has the potential of changing everything.

In Acts chapter 1, Jesus is having final words with His followers. They have been walking with Him, by and large, for three years. They have seen His life. They've seen His power. My goodness, they've seen people rise from the dead. They've had a teacher that you can't beat.

This is better than a seminary degree. To have three years with Jesus as your private teacher, no mistakes, no errors, the greatest illustration, the greatest use of the Bible, they've had it for, I mean, three intense years with Jesus Christ. But when it came time for Him to die, they all ran. They fled.

Peter denied Him three times. It says they hid for fear of the Jews. Somehow seminary didn't work. Somehow, seeing all those miracles and hearing all of those words and getting all those illustrations and listening to all those sermons didn't work when crunch time hit, because they ran for their lives. Jesus now, three days later, arises from the dead.

He's alive again. And we're told that in Acts chapter 1, when Jesus arose from the dead for forty days, verse 3 says, He presented Himself to them with many convincing proofs. I mean, they could see the nail prints in His hand. They could see Him. His Bible says He ate with them. The Bible says one day the door was closed and He walked right through the door.

But the door shut. The two disciples on Emmaus Road, their hearts burned within them as the risen Christ shared the Word of God with them along the way. They saw Him alive. So now they're convinced that Jesus is exactly who He said He was and could do exactly what He said He could do. There's a forty-day gap between His resurrection from the dead and His ascension up into heaven.

There are forty days. And verse 3 says during those forty days, He had a Bible study with them. It says He taught them things concerning the kingdom of God.

That's what we're talking about, the rule of God. He taught them how to operate under His rule. He gave His apostles the orders, the instructions, the governance, the guideline of how they were to operate underneath His rule. So now they've got the Christ who died, the Christ who arose, proving Himself to be the Christ, and more Bible study, because He taught them things concerning the kingdom of God.

But then He throws a curve ball. After the Bible study, after the miracles, after all of the things that they saw for those forty days by the risen Christ, He tells them not to do anything until they receive power. In other words, the Bible study would not be enough. Believing that Jesus died and rose would not be enough. Having all those miracles those three years were not enough, because you can have the best Bible teaching, the best Bible study, the best church programs, and believe in Jesus all you want, but if there is no power, what we are lacking today, personally and as churches, is power.

People who are serious about Jesus Christ are not walking around denying His life, His death, His burial, His resurrection. They're not saying the Bible is wrong or incorrect if they're serious Christians, but something is missing. Something is missing that we're falling apart like we are. Something is missing that we're throwing in the towel like we are. Something is missing that instead of being victors we live as victims.

Something is missing. What is missing is power. But what the enemy has done is gotten us to think if we increase program, we'll increase power.

Maybe if I do this more or that more, maybe if I go to church more, maybe if I read my Bible more, maybe if I increase good programming, not bad programming, Jesus says, even though I've taught you these 40 days, don't go anywhere, don't do anything, you stay right here until you receive power. If we had more power, we wouldn't need as many programs. If we had more power, we wouldn't need as many counseling sessions.

If we had more power, we wouldn't need to go to artificial means to help us to cope. What we're lacking—I'm talking about Christians now—what we're lacking is power. And power comes from one source, the Holy Spirit. Verse 8, you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you. Who is the Holy Spirit?

Let's start with making sure we know who He is. The Holy Spirit is the mysterious member of the Trinity, because He's the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the third member of the Trinity. There's God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The Bible says there's only one God, but it says that the one God is composed of three co-equal persons. The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, but together they make the one Godhead, like a pretzel with three holes.

The first hole is not the second hole, the second hole is not the third hole, but they're all tied together by one piece of dough. That is, the divine nature ties the Father to the Son to the Holy Spirit. God sent Jesus into the world to give a physical manifestation of who God is and what God is like. But Jesus, when He left, sent the Holy Spirit into the world to carry on His work during His absence. He taught them, it says in verse 3, things concerning the kingdom of God, how the rule of God was supposed to work on earth through His people.

But He says the power to pull off the rule will come through somebody else that I'm going to send. In John 14 and John 16, He says, I'm sending you another enabler, one of the same kind. He will be just like me, have the same abilities I have, have the same powers that I have, but He will represent me, just as I represented the Father physically during my 33 years of life, He will represent me. In other words, the way you experience Jesus today is through the work of the Holy Spirit in your life. You do not experience Jesus apart from the Spirit of Christ, who is the Holy Spirit. Therefore, if the Holy Spirit is not delivering power, it doesn't matter that you know Jesus.

They knew Jesus, but they had not yet had power. I had a problem in my heater a few years ago. It wasn't pumping out heat, and the heating and air conditioner guy came and he says, the problem is with the igniter. The igniter sends the flame so that the heat can pump out heat into the house. He says, you're not getting anything from the igniter and that's not working. I thought I needed a whole new unit. He says, your unit is fine, it's just not getting anything from the igniter.

Some of us think, if I could add more stuff to me, I'd be better. When God saved you, your unit is fine. Everything you need to be all God wants you to be, you've got at the point of salvation. The igniter is not able to get through the signal. The igniter is the Holy Spirit. His job is to send the flame of God—that's why he's equated in the Bible—to fire. Holy Spirit and fire. Because what does fire do? It burns through the outside to the core.

It gets down into the inner circle of a thing when it begins to burn. So this third member of the Trinity has one overarching goal, to connect the Christian with their king, because he was teaching them about the kingdom, it says. Now the disciples ask in verse 6, when are you going to set up the kingdom of Israel? When are you going to bring back the kingdom to Israel? He had been teaching them about the kingdom of God.

That's God's big, broad umbrella overarching rule. They said, well, when are you going to give Israel the kingdom? That was the millennial kingdom that is to come when Jesus Christ physically comes back to earth and rules the whole world from Jerusalem for one thousand years.

That's called the millennial kingdom. They wanted to know when this aspect of the kingdom was going to come, which is underneath the broad-based rule of God. Jesus says it's not for you to know when I'm coming back.

What you need is power till I come back. And that leads him to introduce the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit's job is to link you with the experience of Jesus as though Jesus were physically here with you.

That's his job. His full-time job is to make Jesus real for you, to you, through you, and in you. Dr. Evans will come back with a real-life example of how that process works when he continues our message in just a moment. One of the things that sets Christianity apart from all other faiths is that it didn't begin with us seeking God. It began with God seeking us. You can learn more about that miracle with the help of Tony's booklet, The Grace of God.

It talks about the new nature the world is building within us and explains how appreciating this unbelievable gift can help you finally break the failure cycle that keeps so many Christians trapped. And if you contact us by tomorrow, we'll send it to you as a way of saying thanks when you help support our work here on the air and around the world by making a contribution to Tony's ministry. Along with it, we'll send you all six full-length lessons in his current series, The Kingdom Life, which we'll be wrapping up tomorrow. Just visit us at tonyevans.org to get the details and make the arrangements before time runs out. Again, that's tonyevans.org. Or call our 24-hour resource center at 1-800-800-3222. That's 1-800-800-3222. I'll repeat that contact information for you after Tony brings us part two of today's message.

Let's join him. Many of us have in our cars jumper cables, these jumper cables in case your battery dies. So what you will do is another car will pull up in front of your car, you'll hook your positive with their positive, your negative with their negative, and then there will be a transfer of power from the living battery to the dead battery.

The dead battery will become alive because it has been connected to the living battery that is alive via the cable that connects you. Jesus is alive. The problem is He's way up there in heaven. I need a cable that can connect me with Him while I'm down here on earth so I get the benefit of Him up there while I operate down here.

God says I have a cable for you. His name is the Holy Spirit. His job is to connect down here with up there so up there flows down here.

He's your jumper cable. He is linked with the life of Christ to be manifested in the life of the believer. That is His job, to make experiential God's reality in your life.

Whatever is wrong in you through you can be traced to some degree to the lack of the Spirit's operation in your life if you're a believer. He was teaching them about the kingdom because the Holy Spirit only works if Jesus is King. He doesn't operate in your kingdom. He operates in God's kingdom. So if you're your own king, He can't help you.

I called a company one day to fix something in my house and they said that's not our product. We don't work on that. That belongs to another entity. Many of us are calling on God to do stuff He doesn't do. It's not attached to the kingdom of God. It's attached to the kingdom of me. Or it's attached to the kingdom of this world. Or it's attached to the kingdom of the marketplace. It's attached to another king and the Holy Spirit only works in concert with that which is consistent with what Jesus is teaching and He was teaching them the kingdom of God, the rule of God. This powerlessness that we are experiencing is because one, we're not committed to the divine rule and not being committed to the divine rule, the Holy Spirit is unable to crank up because He said I don't deal with that. That's not consistent with the truth.

That's why He's called the Spirit of Truth because He only operates in concert with this realm. Athletes will often talk about being in the zone. They're in the zone.

In other words, they're operating at a whole other level. I remember watching Michael Jordan one day in an interview after one of his monster games and he said, I can't explain it, but the rim looked that big. I couldn't miss. The rim looked that big because I was in the zone. When you came to Christ, God transferred your zone. But you have to be operating in that zone, the kingdom of God that is underneath divine rule called the Lordship of Jesus Christ to get the Spirit's power operative in your life.

You got to be in the zone that is operating under the kingdom. Here's what we often do. We snorkel. Snorkelers are on top of the water. Okay? They're on the surface with a tube sticking up and getting the air.

Okay? Because they ain't going deep. They just want to stay on top, see what they can see.

God has a lot of snorkelers. They don't want to be deep sea divers. They ain't trying to get that deep. They ain't trying to go there. So they snorkel on top of church.

They come and they stay on the surface. They ain't trying to go deep. I ain't trying to get power. I'm not trying to be under the kingdom rule. I'm not trying to—so let me just see what I can see from up here. And they become snorkeling saints, not deep sea divers.

They're ships on the water, not submarines going deep in it, because they're satisfied to be without power. And when you're without power, you can be manipulated with folk who come with programs. Because you're looking for something to fix this.

You're looking for something to make you better. You're looking for something to solve this, when the Holy Spirit has already been placed inside of me and you to grant us power from on high. For a lot of people, Holy Spirit's a magic show. You know, He makes me shout.

He makes me wave my hand. Oh, the Holy Ghost was with us in church today. God was all over the place. It was electric in church today.

Never mind that I'm no different after I walk out. But I had church today. It was lights. It was fancy. The singers were fancy. The preachers were fancy. The program was—everything was fancy, but I don't have power. If you don't have power, there was no Holy Ghost, no matter how many lights were flickering.

That's not what He does. He says, you shall receive power. The Greek word power is dunamis. The Greek word dunamis is where we get our English word dynamite.

So you have dynamite inside of you that is not allowed to explode. It must be operating under God's rule, He says. It must be operating under God's authority, because you've transferred kingdoms.

Just as a wife, a woman transfers kingdoms when she gets married, moving from her father's house to her husband's house, she transfers realms. Let's go a little deeper. He says in verse 4, for John baptized you with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now. We're going to baptize you with the Holy Spirit.

The word baptizo, baptism, means to immerse in something, to be immersed in it. Just like we do when we baptize people in water, we put them all the way under. If you're going to experience the power, you have to go all the way under.

You can't be tiptoeing through the tulips. To get this power, you've got to be immersed in it. The Holy Spirit can't just be an add-on. He can't be an addendum. He can't be just a thought in the air. He must be the centerpiece. I will baptize you in another realm.

And this realm is the realm of the Spirit. Plop, plop, fizz, fizz. Oh, what a relief it is. Remember that Alka Seltzer commercial? All you have is plain water, just water, but you have a problem. You have upset stomach and you have water. But then you go get plop, plop, fizz, fizz.

Oh, what a relief it is. And you drop two Alka Seltzers in the water and the water starts bubbling. Water starts churning. All of a sudden, what was ordinary has taken on a whole new life. But you need a whole new life because the only reason you put Alka Seltzer in there is because something is upset. And you need something more than ordinary. You need something extraordinary that has the power to deal with your upsetness. But once you put the Alka Seltzer in the water and see it churning, you don't just sit there and look at it. You take it and you inculcate it inside of you so that it can deal with what's upsetting you.

We got a lot of stuff upsetting us today, upsetting us spiritually, upsetting us personally, upsetting us attitudinally, upsetting us racially, upsetting us in our families, upsetting us with our identity, and we don't want to get wet. That is, we don't want to get immersed in it, baptized in this thing called the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit baptizes you into another realm. He baptizes you into another kingdom. He baptizes you into another sphere. He baptizes you into another relationship. And He only operates there.

He doesn't operate outside of that. The power that you need is tied not to the fact that you're saved, it's tied to your relationship to the Holy Spirit. But of course that all starts by having a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. And if that's a step you're thinking about making for the first time today, we encourage you to visit tonyevans.org and follow the link that says Jesus. There, Dr. Evans will explain everything you need to know about what it means to be a real Christian and how to start your brand new life. Now today's message was called The Power of the Kingdom, and we have it available for you if you'd like to review it on your own or share it with your church. It's also part of the series Tony will be wrapping up tomorrow, The Kingdom Life. Remember, we're offering this entire six-lesson series on CD or digital download as our gift when you make a donation to help support the ministry of the alternative, along with a copy of the booklet I told you about earlier, The Grace of God.

It's our way of showing appreciation for the continued support of listeners just like you who make this program possible. Get all the details and make your request online at tonyevans.org. Again, that's tonyevans.org. Or call our 24-hour resource request line at 1-800-800-3222 and let one of our team members help you.

Again, 1-800-800-3222. No matter how much desire we have to be a Kingdom Christian, none of us has the power to actually do it unless we get it from God. I hope you'll be with us tomorrow when Dr. Evans tells us how that can happen. Right now, though, he's back with this final word. If you have never accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Savior, you have that opportunity right now, and don't put it off. He died on the cross for you. He rose from the dead for you. But you must personally receive Him into your life for the forgiveness of your sins and to be given the gift of eternal life, which He gladly gives away to anyone who comes to Him for it. So why don't you now, right now, bow your head before the living God and simply tell Him this, Lord Jesus, I'm a sinner, and I know I need a Savior, and I choose You to be my Savior, because I believe You died on the cross for me, You rose from the dead for me, so I receive You now for my forgiveness and for the gift of eternal life. And if you just ask God to save you by believing in His Son Jesus, your sins are forgiven and you've just been granted the gift of eternal life. Welcome to the family. The Alternative with Dr. Tony Evans is brought to you by the Urban Alternative and is celebrating 40 years of faithfulness thanks to the generous contributions of listeners like you.