1 What Does the Power of God Actually Look Like?
Meaning
The sermon opens with a provocation: if someone asked you whether the power of God is operative in your life — how would you answer? Most people aren't confident. And part of the reason is that we don't know what we're looking for.
About 32 years ago, a woman from a "hip and happening" church visited FCF when it was still meeting in an elementary school with about 200 people. She told Pastor Randy afterward that FCF lacked the power of God. Her evidence: at her church, when the pastor placed his hand on people's foreheads, they would collapse — "slain in the spirit." She described her own experience: "My head hit the floor like a coconut."
Pastor Randy burst out laughing. Then he asked the serious question: "When your head hit the floor like a coconut — did you bounce up and love God more? Did you love the word of God more? Were you more generous, more loving, more kind, more forgiving?"
That story sets up the core question: how do we measure power at its highest? The answer Pastor Randy proposes: true power creates the strongest motivation, with lasting beneficial impact of the highest sort. It produces not just a jolt, but a sustained inner transformation toward the best things a human being can pursue.
Important Applications
- Spectacular experiences — head hitting the floor, miraculous signs, emotional highs — are not reliable measures of the power of God.
- The real question is not what happened in a service. It is what happened to your character afterward: more love? more generosity? more forgiveness?
- Many people are quietly experiencing the genuine power of God but don't recognize it because it doesn't look like what they expected.
2 The Object Lesson: Elijah and the Three Signs (1 Kings 19)
Meaning
God chose to teach this lesson to one of the greatest servants in Scripture: Elijah. The context: around 900 BC, Elijah calls for a 3-year famine, then brings rain, then confronts and destroys 450 prophets of Baal in a dramatic public contest — calling fire from heaven. The miracle was overwhelming.
But what happened after? The people of Israel did not turn back to God en masse. Jezebel was not impressed at all. In fact, she threatened to kill Elijah — and he ran. He collapsed under a tree in the desert and told God: "I've tried everything I know. It's not working. Just take my life." One of the greatest men in Scripture, so discouraged after his greatest miracle that he wanted to die. God sent an angel who fed him and put him back on his feet, then sent him on a 40-day journey to Mount Horeb.
There, God staged a masterclass.
First: a great, powerful wind tears the mountains apart and shatters rocks. "But the Lord was not in the wind."
Then: an earthquake. "But the Lord was not in the earthquake."
Then: fire. "But the Lord was not in the fire."
And after the fire: a still, small voice. That is where God was.
Important Applications
- God's most powerful work is not done in the spectacular. It is done inside a person who leans in to hear his whisper.
- Even great servants of God can hit the floor in discouragement after their greatest victories. God's response is not condemnation — it is feeding, resting, and reassigning.
- Shock-and-awe miracles can be followed by nothing changing, as Israel proved. The interior work of trust is what produces lasting change.
3 Extrinsic Power: Impressive but Inferior
Meaning
Extrinsic power is power from the outside. It takes several forms: rewards, threats, and the shock and awe of miraculous signs. These can absolutely jolt people, gain attention, and produce short-term compliance. But they cannot produce lasting internal transformation — because they must be constantly repeated and escalated to maintain any effect.
Matthew 16: after three years of ministry in which Jesus had already raised the dead, opened blind eyes, walked on water, and stilled a storm with a word, the Pharisees and Sadducees came and demanded "a sign from heaven." Jesus replied: "A wicked and adulterous generation looks for a sign." Their problem was not insufficient evidence. They had made up their minds. They wanted a Messiah who would overthrow Rome without disrupting their lifestyle and prestige. No miracle was ever going to address that.
2 Corinthians 4:4 explains why some people see God in Christ and simply shrug: "the God of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers." But here is the remarkable counterpoint: in a healthy state, our minds are actually wired to respond to virtue and moral beauty. Read about someone who risks their life rushing into a burning house to save sleeping strangers — and you will feel moved, admiring. Hear of genuine cruelty or wickedness — and you are repulsed. God designed us that way. When we reject God as revealed in Christ, it is because damage has been done to our moral reasoning.
Important Applications
- A church that chases signs and wonders as evidence of God's power is looking in the wrong place. The real evidence is changed lives.
- We are wired to respond to virtue. When we genuinely see goodness, kindness, sacrifice, and mercy in Christ, we are drawn — not coerced.
- People who reject God after seeing abundant evidence have a heart problem, not an evidence problem. No additional miracle will fix a made-up mind.
4 Intrinsic Power: The Locomotive — Unimpressive but Superior
Meaning
Intrinsic power is power from the inside. It does not look impressive from the outside. There is no head hitting the floor, no dramatic spectacle. From the outside, we look like ordinary people in process. But from the inside — the power of God is operating in a dramatic way: policing every thought, every motive, every desire, because we so love God, so want to be like him, so want to please him.
The illustration that captures it: a locomotive and its cars. One locomotive pulls hundreds of cars. But it doesn't matter how powerful that locomotive is — unless those cars are connected to it, they sit completely still. They are motionless. Helpless. Until connected to the source of power, they can go nowhere.
When human beings are in a state of distrust and disregard for God, we are exactly like disconnected cars. We will never be who we were meant to be or do what we were meant to do. But when we put our trust in Christ — when he wins back our trust — we are connected. And the power of God flows through us like energy through those cars. We are in motion. We are headed somewhere. And the motivation from within lasts for all eternity, only growing.
Jesus himself corrects his disciples' ideas of power: "The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant." God's idea of power is not getting others to serve you — it is the capacity, the desire, and the energy to serve and bless others. Jesus loved us to death. Literally.
Colossians 1:19–20: God reconciles all things through the blood shed on the cross — revealing to angelic civilizations and all humanity that God's power is always governed by sacrificial love.
1 John 4:19: "We love him because he first loved us." Romans 5:8: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. When that love is accepted, it is dynamic and transformational. It keeps an energy level, an enthusiasm, a passion going — for 52 years so far, in Pastor Randy's case — and it grows.
2 Peter 1:3: "His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness." Notice: not called us by the offer of a free ticket to heaven, but by his own glory and goodness. When we see God in Christ — his sacrificial beauty — it calls us, draws us, drags us (John 12:32 uses the Greek word for dragging a fisherman's net).
Important Applications
- The power of God does not primarily look miraculous from the outside. It looks like an ordinary person who is being quietly, progressively transformed from within.
- Being disconnected from God is not just a spiritual problem — it is a power problem. We will never be who we were meant to be, or do what we were meant to do, until we are connected to the source.
- God's goal is not to get you to heaven — it is to get heaven into you now. Start there and eternity takes care of itself.
- Sacrificial love, once genuinely received, is the most powerful motivating force in the universe. It does not need to be replaced. It only grows.
5 Seven Inner Experiences of Transformational Trust in Christ
Meaning
How does trust actually build? Pastor Randy describes seven inner experiences that unfold progressively as a person comes to genuinely trust Christ. As you read through them, ask yourself: have I had any of these?
Pastor Randy asked the congregation to raise their hand if they had experienced at least some of these. Almost every hand in the room went up. He pointed out: we started the sermon uncertain whether the power of God was operative in our lives — but these experiences are the evidence that it is. We just don't tend to recognize it, because it does not look like what we expected.
Important Applications
- If you have had even some of these experiences, it is evidence that the power of God is genuinely at work in you. Do not diminish it because it is invisible from the outside.
- These experiences do not all come at once — they are a progressive journey of development, deepening as you grow in trust.
- "That he who began a good work in you will carry it to completion." If you have trusted Christ and made him your follower, his power will finish what it started.
- We are connected to the locomotive. We are in motion. The destination is breathtaking: to carry the very beauty of Christ — forever and ever.