Power Outage

My phone buzzed with a notification from our church prayer text group:

Pray that our electricity comes back on!

One of our church families had lost power. When the windchills are -35, even a temporary power outage is a big deal. 

I just happened to be reading the book of numbers, where Moses prays, “And now, please let the power of the Lord be great, as You have promised…!”

We prayed, and our friends’ power was restored quickly, but it got me thinking, how often do I pray Moses’s prayer: Let the power of the Lord be great!? 

Moses was facing a power outage of his own. The Israelites refused to enter the promised land that God had provided for them. Instead of entering into all of the blessings His power could provide, they started listing all of the ways they would rather die: 

“Would that we had died in Egypt! Or would that we had died in this wilderness!”

God’s power never changed, but they had forgotten about it. They looked instead at their own power and knew it to be lacking. Instead of humbling themselves to seek God’s power, they lamented their own weakness and sought death.

It’s easy to throw stones at those Israelites. What dummies! Until it’s us with the power outage.

This week, I got angry at someone I claim to love. I fumed. I lamented. I stomped my emotive feet. I resolved to cut them off forever. 

Jesus’s words came in waves: “Love one another.” “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit.” “Love is patient. Love is kind.”

“I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me…”

He offered to do for me what I was powerless to do on my own, but I rejected it. I held on to my pride, my woundedness, and my anger. I fed and nursed my resentment like a pampered pet. I became more wicked than those grumbling Israelites. 

Another Christian sister reminded me of Moses’s prayer and how we had prayed it for our friends’ lights to come back on. She suggested, perhaps, that I should pray and ask for God’s power like Moses had. 

“Please let the power of the Lord be great as You have promised, saying, ‘The Lord is slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but He will by no means clear the guilty…Please pardon the iniquity of this people, according to the greatness of Your steadfast love.”

What is the source of the Lord’s power? It is His steadfast love. 

In order to give me the power of His steadfast love, He had to kill the pampered pet of pride and resentment. In order for His love to flow through me, He first had to empty me of my own foolish self. 

I’m pleased to report that the power is back on and that it is always good to pray, “Let the power of the Lord be great.”