Receiving God's Word // Power Unlimited, Part 10

God wants to unleash power, power unlimited in your life. And one of the ways that He does that is when you hear His Word preached and take it into your heart. There's power, real power, power unlimited right there in God's Word. If you spend anytime with me here on the program one of the things you will know is that I'm really passionate about God and what He has to say. Not in a religious sort of a way but in a Jesus sort of way. The thing that really strikes me about Jesus when you read about Him, is how plain and matter of fact He was about sharing with people who God is and what His plans are. Over these last couple of weeks on the program we've been looking at what it means to lay hold of God's power unlimited, God's resurrection power that's available to you, as you open His Word the Bible and listen to what He has to say. The Bible is God speaking to us and He means to challenge us and stretch us and encourage us and bless us through His Word. One of the ways that many people get God's Word into them is by listening to people speak. Radio programs like this or on television and of course, if you attend a Church. But how can preaching and teaching be a part of really getting God's Word into us? Over these last twenty years or so, the time that I've been a Christian, I've seen two things. On the one hand I have been so blessed by some really good teaching and on the other hand I've seen some pretty bad stuff too. In my very first Church, a little Baptist Church, our pastor's name was Phil Littlejohn. Now Phil was a gifted teacher, he just had this ability to open God's Word and speak God stuff into my heart. I learned later this is a real gifting, different people have different gifts and abilities given to them by God and teaching is one of them. Jesus had that, I mean time and time again when He opened His mouth people were amazed because He spoke with a plainness and a power and an authority that they hadn't heard before. And you know something, He didn't always tell them things they wanted to hear. "Love your enemy." "Take up your cross and follow me." "Lose your life for my sake and you'll gain your life." It's not exactly good marketing, I mean the spin merchants would not have let Him get up and speak like that today. I've spent quite a bit of time looking at how Jesus preached. It's real, it's powerful. It's balanced on the one hand and radical on the other and it sort of, well, it cuts through all the selfish rubbish we go on with, right to the heart of what God wants to talk about. And my prayer is that when I discharge my gifting to teach in my own way, I'll always try to teach like He did. But you know I've also sat in Churches over the years and listened to preachers drone on with dry and theoretical, completely cerebral stuff, that's not relevant to my life. On more than one occasion I've walked out after church and two hours later I ask myself "Do I remember what he talked about?" And the answer is, "No, not really." Or you listen to other speakers and there are lots of words and they're very entertaining and they make people laugh and they tickle their ears with great stories and things they want to hear and they yell and people slap them on the back afterwards, 'praise the Lord' but I've been to some of those too and well, I felt like I'd been at the Lord's table to be fed but I left hungry and empty. The flip side of that is that with some other preachers, I can remember years later what they were talking about, years later in difficult circumstances God seems to bring into my heart the words they spoke to me. Preaching and teaching is one of the ways that God gets His Word into us. You see it right through the Bible; He uses men and women to speak to others, to teach them. I mean the Samaritan woman at the well; she went and told people about Jesus. Paul and Peter and all the other guys that went out preaching. The question is, how do you get the most out of that? How does preaching and teaching play a part in us reading our Bible and unlocking the power unlimited that God has for us? Well, here are just some of my observations. I see people come into a Church on a Sunday and listen to the preacher and they don't take any notes and they don't bring their Bible and they don't follow what the preacher's saying in their Bible. I take my Bible with me, I open my Bible and I read what the preacher is talking about. People can speak all the words that they like, everything that they say, they can crack jokes and have great stories – the most important thing is God's Word, the most important thing is what God is saying. And secondly I take some notes. I mean you can't even get through kindergarten on a half an hour a week without taking notes. You know, if we take God seriously, if we want to follow Jesus and really take that seriously, you know something, we've got to take learning seriously. Do you know what a disciple is? A disciple is literally "a learner", that's what the ...