Tony Evans - The Fire That Ignites: Living in the Power of the Holy Spirit

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

MORE OF THE
SUPERNATURAL

Pretend with me for a moment that you need a new refrigerator. You walk into an appliance store one afternoon and quickly spot the one you wanttheir most expensive model, naturally, with all the bells and whistles. The shelves even slide out automatically when you open the door. This is the real thing, the refrigerator for the twenty-first century.

You buy it for ten thousand dollars, and they promise to deliver it that very day.

On your way home, you stop at a food market and buy plenty of groceries. And you've just carried the last bag into the kitchen when the delivery men arrive. They bring your shiny new appliance inside and set it in its place, and you immediately stock it full with all the wonderful food you've purchased. That night you fall asleep thinking of delicious meals to come.

The next morning, you go eagerly to the kitchen and open your refrigerator s door. But the shelves do not come gliding out automatically; they just sit there. What's worse, melted ice cream in the freezer section has run down and is all over everything. The vegetables are turning color, and you discover that the milk has gone sour.

It dawns on you that your top-of-the-line refrigerator is not functioning as you were led to believe it would.

You grab the phone, call the appliance store, and ask to be connected with the salesperson who sold you the merchandise. When he answers, you give him a piece of your evangelical Christian mind.

Look, you say, I gave you ten thousand dollars, and you sold me a lemon.

The salesman is stupefied. Well, he says earnestly, will you please go and open the refrigerator door again and then tell me if the light comes on.

You step over and open it. No light.

Well, do me a favor, the salesman continues. Would you put your ear down at the bottom where the motor is, and tell me if you hear a hum?

You bend over and listen. No hum.

Now then, the salesman says, if you don't mind, would you kindly look around the back of the refrigerator and check to see if the cord is plugged in tight?

You go and look behind the refrigerator. The end of the cord is lying there, loose on the floor.

You get back on the phone. I checkedand the cord hasn't been plugged in. But for ten thousand dollars, that shouldn't matter. For ten thousand dollars, it ought to work just on general principle!

That's when the salesman gently clarifies something for you. Appliances, he explains, are intricately designed to have astounding capabilities. They are, however, dependent in nature. While they have all the component parts needed to perform everything the manufacturer designs each appliance to do, they aren't able to accomplish this on their own. They first need to be empowered by the fire that electricity provides. Only then can the parts do what the parts were created to do.

When you and I gave our lives to Jesus Christ, He gave us new parts. He gave us a new mind, a new heart, a new conscience, and a new disposition. He granted us a whole new nature inside our existing body. It was like new residents moving into an old house.

But sometimes it looks like this new thing doesn't work. Sometimes it appears that coming to Christ is like buying a lemonit just doesn't seem to function the way we were led to believe it would.

Sometimes it
appears that
coming to Christ
is like buying
a lemon.

That's why you and I must clearly understand that we're dependent by nature. We were never re-created in Christ to Function on our own. We need power; we need enabling from another source to ignite the proper functioning of the new nature God has provided us.

In this book we'll see how the Holy Spiritthe third member of the triune Godmakes the power and the promises of God experiential in the life of every believer. All that God has said, all that He has promised, all that He has granted and given and graced us withall of this works only when we're fully connected to the one source of enabling, God's Holy Spirit.

It's my hope that by the time you finish this book, you'll know where the socket isand that you will in fact be plugged in.

Now of course in our houses we have a number of appliances besides a refrigerator, and they all do different work; they each have a unique function. But for power, they all depend on the same source, electricity.

Likewise, you and I are unique in the new identity and giftedness God has designed for each of us as believers, and the same is true for all our brothers and sisters in Christ. In the church we've got toaster Christians, can-opener Christians, dishwasher Christians, and coffeemaker Christians. But we all plug into the same power, the same enabler. And when we do, it means we become what were created to become in our new identity in Christ.

The Holy Spirit has been given to every Christian and to the corporate family of God to make real in your own spiritual experience everything the Bible says. The job of the Holy Spirit is to lift this truth off the pages of Scripture and write it on your heartmaking it alive, making it vivid. And that means leading you into a whole new realm of existence. It means experiencing the supernatural.

Why then aren't more of us experiencing the supernatural? In our churches and in our families and in our personal lives, why aren't more of us seeing the supernatural invasion of Godmore of His wind, more of His fire?

In the pages ahead we'll look carefully into God's Word and at our lives to answer that question. For now, it's enough to say that if any Christian is defeated or powerless, that Christian is defeated or powerless not because he has to be, but because he is either uninformed or has chosen to be powerless. For the provision and presence of the Holy Spirit is God's unfailing promise, poured out upon us to link us to the very reality of God Himself.

Think intently about that for a momentabout the Holy Spirit as our link to God's reality, His power.

You know what it's like to be stranded in a parking lot somewhere with a dead battery in your car. You're in trouble, and you seek assistance. When some helpful friend or stranger responds, they park alongside your stranded vehicle. With the hoods opened on both cars, a set of jumper cables is attached to both batteries, linking them. Then the other person starts the ignition in his car.

What happens next is a transfer of power. Through the cables, power from the living battery is transferred to the dead one. One battery borrows life from anotherso that the dead battery becomes as alive as the living battery already is.

But for all that to happen, there must first be a connection.

The basic, underlying situation for every human being on earth is that we're in trouble, stranded. We need life inside our dead battery to give us the ability to become all God wants us to become.