The Missing Ingredient

My wife Joy is a great baker, much to the enjoyment of me, my kids, and the grandchildren. Her cookies and loaves are melt-in-your-mouth delicacies.

Sometimes while baking, though, she forgets one of the ingredients, and the final product doesn't taste quite as scrumptious as usual. That one part of the end product is needed to make it up to standard. Bread, for example, is just not the same without yeast to make it rise.

I was thinking about how we can also have a missing ingredient in our walk and spiritual growth as Christians. Jesus knew that His disciples needed another component in their walk with Him and the hard mission that He was calling them to. He said,

Acts 1:8 – But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth. (NKJV)

He ordered this because He knew that they would have many trying experiences in the future, and they needed power from God.

I know that in my own life, the power of the Holy Spirit has been a necessary ingredient in my spiritual makeup and work for the Lord. Having to go and minister to inmates at a maximum security jail was a scary encounter that I wasn't prepared for. But it was the Lord's call. However, through prayer and the unction of the Holy Spirit, my fears dissolved, and I was able to share the gospel and see men saved and encouraged. Without the power of the Holy Spirit, this normally-fearful guy, I'm sure, would have collapsed under the test.

In these last days, it will be imperative that Christians be empowered from on high, as persecution is bound to get stronger from a world tuning out God. I encourage all my brothers and sisters in the Lord to seek continually to be filled with the power of God through prayer, reading and meditating on the Scriptures, and fellowshipping with other believers.

Prayer: Father God, we pray for a fresh infilling of Your power, for every believer. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.

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