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by
Tyler Staton
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July 16 - September 8, 2025
He risks on us out of love for us.
In the words of Quaker activist and educator Parker Palmer, “Here is one of the great acts of love, empowering another person, knowing full well that person will probably make serious mistakes with that power, knowing that those mistakes may be costly even to the one who does the empowering.”18
Oxford theologian Simon Ponsonby pointedly asked, “If we have what the first Christians had, why do we not do what they did? We must conclude that either God gave them more than He has given us, or we have failed to avail ourselves of what He has given us.”
what they did, we study.
The early church was not a matter of talk but of power. The modern church is lots of talk, little power.
Wesleyan minister Samuel Chadwick made a similar observation: “A ministry that is college trained but not Spirit filled works no miracles.”23
He stopped watching movies and started analyzing them. The notebook somehow became a wall between him and the story. By evaluating film, in his own words, “I lost the ability to have an authentic response.”24
In an effort to become less naive, we accidentally become less human. We become something like Brooks in a theater with a notebook open in his lap: critics who’ve lost the ability to have an authentic response. Beware of mistaking sophistication (a good thing) for cynicism, bitterness, a lack of compassion, or minimizing the whole self to a brain on a stick (all detrimental things).
The father gave his wayward son gifts symbolizing the authority the son carried as an heir to the whole estate.
We are forgiven sons and daughters! But we’re not remembering that we’re heirs. We don’t know how to live as heirs with authority over the Kingdom we’ve been entrusted with.
You’re home. You’re forgiven. You’re clean. You’re renewed. You’re free. It really is that good. But there’s even more. There’s power, authority, and miracles. There’s grace not only to you but through you. There’s faith, salvation, justice, hope, healing, and a Kingdom that crashes into this world when and where you least expect it.
The Church . . . can be in the way of God, but it never will cease to be also the way to God. HENRI NOUWEN
If we are to explore healthy and helpful models for knowing the Spirit as a person and living in the Spirit’s presence and power, a good place to start is with humbly acknowledging that the church, both historically and in the present, tends to gravitate toward two unhelpful models: the expression of the Spirit’s gifts as everything and the expression of the Spirit’s gifts as nothing.
“Trauma” is a seventeenth-century word of Greek origin that literally means “wound.” Merriam-Webster defines it as “a disordered psychic or behavioral state resulting from severe mental or emotional stress or physical injury.”1
Resmaa Menakem defined trauma as “a wordless story our body tells itself about what is safe and what is a threat.”
pastor Rich Villodas defines trauma as “the state of woundedness and the story that comes from living in that state.”3
“He boasted that he was someone great.”5 This is the seed that grows to distort all fruitful ministry. When the leader’s ego is driving the pursuit of supernatural ministry, it distorts the Spirit’s power from a creative force producing freedom to a controlling force producing captivity.
human beings are not free but driven by the obsessive compulsions of desire and gratification. Journalist Johann Hari summarizes Skinner’s research: “Human beings, he believed, have no minds—not in the sense that you are a person with free will making your own choices. You can be reprogrammed in any way that a clever designer wants.”6
In some very real sense, we all are shaped by what we pay attention to. Fill your mind with violence, and you’ll become more violent. Fill your mind with pornography, and you’ll become more lustful and objectifying. Fill your mind with cynicism, and you’ll narrow your eyes in suspicion and skepticism. And what holds true for negative thoughts and behaviors is equally true for positive thoughts and behaviors.
The artist was not driven by measuring the greatness of the finished product but by the creative act itself.
Those living in the Spirit’s power will operate in flow, a free state of timeless creative focus, and they will be unattached to the fruit of their creative labor, driven instead by the act of co-creating in partnership with God.
Trusting God as healer and guide allows the present Spirit, rather than past pain, to be the author of our stories.
Philip carried the power of Jesus in harmony with the way of Jesus;
Jesus’ ministry was one of others-centered love, not ego inflation, costly sacrifice not platform building.
For Jesus, living and ministering in the power of the Spirit included public miracles, but his private life was even more...
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All that happened in public was simply the overflow of what happened in secret.
We frequently see people reeling after a heartrending revelation of God’s presence, then asking, “Who is this Jesus?” An unexpected spiritual experience sends the recipient in search of an explanation.
For many Christ-followers in post-Enlightenment Western culture, our temptation is to believe in Jesus’ truth claims and even engage his practices but never experience his saving power and presence by the Holy Spirit.
God created every aspect of us, and he makes his appeal to every aspect of us—our intellect, our emotions, our bodies, and our experiences.
It’s one thing to come to Jesus at midnight with no witnesses. It’s quite another to fall at Jesus’ feet in the light of day on the very steps of the temple.
Having beheld the beauty of God in his power—to heal, forgive, free, dignify, and save—did Nicodemus finally tear off his robes at the beauty of God willingly suffering in the name of love? Some think so. But while John is careful to call Joseph a disciple in this passage, he never applies that term to Nicodemus. And we never read of Nicodemus in the other three Gospels, in Acts, or in any of the New Testament letters. There’s no way to know for sure.9 What we do know for sure is that, at least on the pages of Scripture, Nicodemus remained forever at the fringes, a spectator rather than a
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What if living in the indwelling presence and supernatural power of the Holy Spirit requires that I feel like I’m regressing before progressing—like a child at her first piano recital who panics for a minute while trying to find middle C? And what if, from that place of naked vulnerability, I can get lost in the music again and find that I’m right at home?
There is a common version of following Jesus that stays on the riverbank—delighting in his claims, marveling at what others experienced, enjoying the view, but neglecting to become like a child. The tragedy may be subtle, but it’s a tragedy nonetheless when an admirer of Jesus fails to experience the full life of the Spirit.
When was the last time I had to seek out an explanation because my experience with God was a step ahead of my understanding of God?”
We study and discuss the lives of the biblical saints and tell and retell their stories until we’re convinced we’ve lived them, though all we’ve really done is heard the rumor of combat from the safety of the barracks.
Many faithful followers of Jesus today are held back in the ministry of the Spirit not by a lack of desire but by a lack of practice. We do not know how. We do not know where to start. We believe God speaks today, heals today, delivers today, but no one has ever given us a healthy model for practice.
John Wimber, founder of the Vineyard movement, formulated a helpful maxim that goes something like this: For anything to be picked up off the pages of Scripture and lived in a local community within a particular context, you’ll need a theology, a model, and a practice.1
But how are you supposed to keep on trusting a God who whispers with a smile when he’s leading you into an ambush? Or, scariest of all possibilities, was it not God speaking and leading them at all? Were they mistaken about God’s voice and direction? If they got this wrong, how could they know for sure if it had ever been God’s voice they were hearing?
Like a money changer who became intimately familiar with every aspect of a genuine coin, we must grow so familiar with God’s voice that we can recognize a counterfeit and recognize it quickly. That’s discernment.
Thomas Green notes, “The art of discernment is both central to the Christian life today and, at the same time, not very well understood even by prayerful and committed Christians.”2
We tend to miss God in our midst, not because he’s too extraordinary but because he’s too ordinary. We tend to look for God in the wind, earthquake, and fire rather than the whisper.
Pete Greig writes, “If we are ever to feel fully safe and truly loved by the Lord of all the earth, we must eventually—like Elijah on Horeb and that couple on the Emmaus road—learn to listen for his voice in the anticlimax of life’s nonevents.”
Maybe God whispers because it’s the only way he can get what he wants most, what was lost in Eden: to walk with you and me in familiar intimacy that we might know God as he truly is and discover ourselves as we truly are in his presence.
The Spirit’s whisper is directed at the soul’s depths, while the deceiver’s lies appeal to the shallow waters of the ego.
Saint Ignatius expounds, “It is a mark of the evil spirit to assume the appearance of an angel of light. He begins by suggesting thoughts that are suited to a devout soul, and ends by suggesting his own.”13
The enemy of your soul gladly nudges you toward standing on stages leading worship, working in impoverished villages digging wells, or sitting around church leadership tables making decisions—so long as he can magnify your ego under the clever disguise of pious spirituality. He is equally content with guiding you to a brothel or to a prayer meeting—so long as the result is to feed and strengthen your ego rather than your soul.
God appeals to the deepest longings within us. The deceiver appeals to our shallow hungers. God nourishes the soul. The deceiver massages the ego.
God was putting his heart in Elijah before he poured his power through Elijah.
Author and professor Bobby Clinton argues that both Scripture and church history indicate that pretty much everything God speaks to us until around our sixties is preparation. If there’s fruit, that’s a bonus, but the aim is preparation and training in discernment—to learn God’s voice and live with such radical trust that your life becomes an open channel between heaven and earth.20
In their lives, as in my own, they discovered again and again that their hope lies not in perfectly walking God’s path, but in God, the guide himself, who is always coming after us—not with a stick to punish but with grace to guide us home.
