The Word Does Not Mean What I Was Taught

He was not trying to prove anything. That is worth establishing, because a man who goes looking usually finds.

He was doing something quite dull. He had been asked to speak on a passage and he does what he always does, which is read around it slowly for a fortnight before writing a word, and part of that is following the main terms through the rest of the letters.

The term was power.

And by about the ninth day he had a page of references in front of him and a problem he had not expected, which is that the word kept going somewhere he was not looking.

He had grown up with power meaning a particular thing. Something visible. Something that happens and that people can see happening, and that leaves the room different from how it found it.

And he could find that in the text. It is genuinely there and he is not going to pretend otherwise.

But he kept turning up sentences like this one, where the same vocabulary arrives and then attaches itself to something else entirely.

May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy.Colossians 1:11

Strengthened with all power. According to his glorious might. Two of the biggest words available, stacked one on top of the other.

For all endurance and patience.

He sat with that for a long time on the ninth day, and by the eleventh day he had a bigger problem, which is that if this is what the word does, then he has been assessing his own thirty years against a picture the text does not use.

And that is you with your own page of references, or you would not still be reading.

Where the word actually goes

Let me set out what you found, because you have found it and I only want to help you hold it.

The vocabulary of power in those letters attaches, repeatedly, to things nobody would put in a photograph.

In Colossians it is endurance and patience with joy. In Ephesians it is being strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner being, so that you may have strength to comprehend how wide and long and high and deep the love of Christ is. In the second letter to Corinth it is a man being told that grace is sufficient and that power is made perfect in weakness, and concluding that he will therefore boast of the weakness.

Three of the largest statements about power in the New Testament, and they land on staying, on comprehending, and on being weak without falling apart.

You have been given a picture of His power that the text keeps declining to use. It is written, may you be strengthened with all power, according to His glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy (Colossians 1:11). The Holy Spirit is the One who strengthens in the inner being, and the outcome named there is the ability to stay.

Now the part I want to be careful about, because you will notice if I overreach.

I am not telling you the visible things are not real, and I am not proposing a quiet reading of Scripture that has explained away the book of Acts. That would be dishonest and you would put it down.

I am saying something narrower and, I think, harder.

You have two categories in the text and you were handed one, and you have spent thirty years measuring against the half you were given. It is written that there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:4), and Paul says varieties because a church had already collapsed the range. The Holy Spirit works across both, and the second one has never had a word in your vocabulary.

And here is what I think is actually true about your thirty years, and I say it as a possibility rather than a pronouncement, because you have not told me your life.

You have almost certainly endured things.

Not dramatically. In the way a man endures who keeps teaching well through a decade nobody notices, who does not become bitter when he could, who reads around a passage for a fortnight when nobody would know if he did not, who is still at the table on the ninth day.

You have been strengthened with all power according to His glorious might, and the evidence of it is that you are still here doing this carefully. It is written that the strengthening is for all endurance and patience with joy (Colossians 1:11), and endurance is not a consolation category. The Holy Spirit has been doing in you exactly what that verse names, for thirty years, under a word you did not have.