In September 2018 at Westminster we’ve been working through a teaching series called “Miracles – Do they happen, how they happen, and the life-changing difference it makes.”

Part 1 was about opening ourselves up to the possibility of miracles and included an interview with Will Han, a church planter and pastor who has been a part of some incredible and miraculous experiences while on mission to India. [You can listen to that message and interview here.]

Part 2 was about what the scientific community has to say about the miraculous, and also how miracles tend to happen in the New Testament. [You can listen to that one here.]

Part 3 was about when miracles don’t happen. [You can listen to that one here.]

And for Part 4, we again welcomed Pastor Will Han (who had joined us for Part 1), to ask how it makes a difference in our daily lives. [You can listen in here.]

As a part of that message, I quickly listed four things you can do to dial into God’s power on a daily basis. And I want to thank John Piper for an article he wrote about this very thing which I found really illuminating, and which helped me form my own thoughts about this. Because I didn’t have time to expand during the message itself, I committed to producing them in blog form:

1. Immerse yourself in the Bible

Christians should be reading the Bible on a daily basis. How else will we know about the kinds of things God wants to do in the world? And how else do we learn about God’s character?

The Bible is the primary place where we learn about God’s will — his powerful will. As I’ve said before, the more you get into God’s word, the more God’s word gets into you.

2. Choose to believe what you read

Reading the Bible isn’t just a scholarly exercise; it’s a devotional one. Does it involve study and doing some work to understand the context of a passage? Absolutely. But the stories and teachings it includes are there for a reason. They’re not just about information; they’re about transformation. When we understand that we give it authority in our thinking and are more likely to live differently as a result of what we learn.

3. Pray for the Holy Spirit to fill you and use you

When you decide to be a Christian — that is, when you acknowledge your brokenness and sin before God, ask for his forgiveness, trust what Jesus did for you on the cross, and make him the Lord and boss of your life — God himself in the Holy Spirit begins to dwell and live inside of you in a new way. This is an incredible thing! So ask the Holy Spirit to use you in powerful ways, and be open to his guidance.

4. Live and act by the principle ‘obedience before convenience’ (and trust the results to God)

This is about choosing how to act. We live in a culture of convenience. We’ve been so conditioned by this that we can even import it into our faith. We will worship God, pray, read the Bible, serve and bless others, give and help generously, and tell people about Jesus… when it’s not inconvenient. In North America, we seem to be mixed up: convenience before obedience.

To fight against this, we need to choose to live and act by the principle ‘obedience before convenience.’ That is, we choose to live and act in a way that God invites and commands us to live and act, and then trust the results to him. Dialing into God’s power on a daily basis isn’t about waiting for a strong or happy feeling to overwhelm us first. Instead, we live in act in a way that pleases him, and which gets us in on the ways he is renovating the world with his truth and love, simply because we love him. Then we leave the results up to him.

To me, as I discussed in the podcast on September 30th, these are four things we can learn from Ephesians 3:14-21.

If you want to dial into God’s power on a daily basis… immerse yourself in the Bible, choose to believe what you read, pray for the Holy Spirit to fill you and use you, and live and act by the principle ‘obedience before convenience’ (and trust the results to God).