Power to persevere

Zechariah 4: 1 – 14

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 16 May, 2004

“‘NOT BY might, nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the LORD.” The words are famous, but they mean far more than we often realise. They are words to a Messiah and to his people.

  I had a pastor who used to tell us repeatedly that, if the Holy Spirit were removed from the world, the church should immediately collapse into unworkability. He went on to say that any church which could survive without the Holy Spirit is not a church at all.

  Maybe we should look at ourselves and think very carefully, because, as the Bible says, it is

‘Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the LORD Almighty

  The principle still applies. How much of what we do and say would be totally unchanged if the Holy Spirit were removed from our world? The purpose of the Church is to reveal our Lord Jesus Christ in the power of his Spirit, and whatever is not done in that power is not done as God plans it to be done.

  Last week we looked at the two great kings, Saul and David, how they were anointed to their task of leadership. Saul joined with some prophets and prophesied. David’s infilling with the Holy Spirit led to his great military victories. These men were equipped in many ways to fulfil the leadership roles to which God had called them.
  We also saw that Solomon was touched by the Spirit as well. But what we didn’t particularly see was that few of the following kings of Israel and Judah had that same experience of Holy Spirit anointing for leadership.

  There was one king who did receive the anointing of the Spirit, and he is a king most of us hardly know about. We know about David. We know about Solomon. We know about Uzziah, who died in the year of Isaiah's vision. We know about the bad king, Ahab, and the good king, Hezekiah.

  But we hardly notice Zerubbabel. He isn’t in the Books of Kings. He is not in the Books of Chronicles. He is in Haggai and Zechariah and in a couple of other passing references.

  Saul was the first king. Under him, the Israelites changed from being a loose confederacy of related tribes to being a nation. Then came David, who consolidated what Saul began, David who broke the Philistine power and settled the Kingdom’s boundaries. Next was Solomon, who settled and established the nation in its times of prosperity.
  Even after the nation disintegrated, even after Israel and Judah went their separate ways, there were some important kings who built their parts of the nation.

  But then things fell apart. In 722BC, the Assyrians raided the northern nation. Israel, the Samaritan nation, was taken into captivity, and vanished from the world scene. Many of the Israelites took refuge in southern Judah and melted into the Jewish nation.

  Then, between 609 BC and 587 BC, Judah was also carried away into captivity in Babylon. In that strange land they said,

1 By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion. (Ps 137)

  And then, when the captive Israelites were growing old, when a new generation was coming up, the Medes and Persians arrived at Babylon.
  We need not go into detail about how God declared Belshazzar’s doom, or about how the Medes and Persians dammed the river and marched into the city along the dry river bed.

  What we need to know is that the new king sent the Jews home to rebuild the city and the Temple and to re–establish their nation. And two men led them: Zerubbabel the king and Joshua the priest.

  Imagine how discouraging this must have been! Imagine the task before these two men!

  I was in e-mail contact with a friend, a Pentecostal pastor, who is establishing a new congregation down around Blakehurst.
  It is a struggle, but I realised that he has a much different task from someone trying to rebuild a church that has fallen down or to re–establish a sense of purpose in people who have lost it.
  And that is exactly the position Zerubbabel found himself in. He was faced with an impossible task. He didn’t know where to begin. Foes were ranged around him and the Jews were chronically short of resources to carry out the task.

  That was when God raised up two prophets, Haggai and Zechariah, to encourage Zerubbabel and to re–invigorate the work.
  And that was when Zechariah told Zerubbabel,

“This is the word of the LORD to Zerubbabel: `Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the LORD Almighty...”

  You know, the biggest problem that Zerubbabel and Joshua faced was really not the enemies outside, nor was it lack of resources. The biggest problem was the loss of will and the lack of confidence to forge ahead. They had lost the will to succeed.
  For those older people who came back to the land, there was no hope that they could ever rebuild anything approaching the splendour of the temple Solomon built.
  And, for the younger people who came back to the land, there was no understanding of what could be. They had never seen the old temple. They didn’t know what they were aiming for. So they aimed at nothing and thought it didn’t matter.

  I have never seen this church in its heyday. But I know that a lot of the older people who were here when I arrived, people of the generation of Mrs Clendinning or Mr Hunter, had begun to lose heart. They could see the rot. They could see that growth had ceased a long time before. There were even some who had decided, “When Bill Hunter and Wal Clendinning go, there will be no one left to keep the church going.” I’m sure that some even left because of that loss of confidence.

  And you who are younger, John, Jay and Joyce, for example -- you have never known anything much beyond this little congregation in its dimly-lit hall, faithfully plodding away and achieving so little.

  What I do bring is my experience in a little church, a church which struggled with conflicts and with demonised people just as we have.   Yet I have seen Sunday night after Sunday night when they had to put extra seats in down the aisles to accommodate the overflow crowds. We would get 150 or more people into a hall built for 100.
  We had pastors who were no better preachers than I am, and about as old, yet people responded each week to the gospel.
  The young people gathered in the prayer–room while the appeal was made out in the hall. Five, eight, ten people came every Sunday night to receive Jesus or to follow him in baptism or to return when they had fallen.

  And the answer was for us what it was for Zerubbabel:

`Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the LORD Almighty...”

  If I can tell you the stories and you can catch some of the possibilities, if I can paint the picture and you can see it working here, then you will seek the Spirit of God and you will search until you find the power we all need to carry out our ministry.

  I used to attend another church at a different time, just on Sunday nights. I hadn’t seen much of response to the gospel in our Baptist church for a while, and it was good to be attending a church where Jesus was preached and where people responded.

  What impressed me even more was the informal ministry after the service each Sunday night. We had coffee and biscuits together, but the main thing was the way they ministered to each other.
  I’d hear someone say, “I don’t know what to do about school, I’m not studying like I need to, and I can’t seem to take it in well enough.” The next person said, “Here are some Bible verses,” and the pair would sit together and read the Bible and get encouragement to study to show themselves workmen approved by God, or to ask of the Lord for wisdom.
  I still remember someone just out of High School coming to me and lovingly confronting me about a relationship issue. When he had the story, he quoted a Bible verse to me and promised to pray for that situation.
  Each time I returned there, he asked me after the service how the situation was going.

  That was a church that had nearly died, and God raised up Spirit–filled and Spirit–aware people who turned it around in a matter of a couple of months.

  It is

`Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the LORD Almighty...”

  Yet the fact that Zerubbabel was of the royal line adds a further dimension.
  The point is that we are still talking about a royal anointing. What applied to David at the beginning of his kingship also applied to Zerubbabel at the beginning of his own very different and equally different kingship. It would not be done by human might or power.
  We could even go further and say that much more of what David achieved was done by military might and conquering authority than was done in Zerubbabel’s kingship. Zerubbabel just didn’t have that equipment. He had to rely more on Holy Spirit power.

  On Friday night, Elaine from CUAG was at the prayer time, and she mentioned how, as a person with strong goals and a lot of determination, she often has to take a conscious decisions to stop planning and organising and working out how to make something work. She is learning how to rely more on the Holy Spirit instead. And she said, “It’s amazing how much better things work out when I do!”

  A while ago, I was a convention weekend guest speaker for a Central Coast church.
  Saturday night I spoke and people were interested and learned something.
  Sunday morning I was spoke seriously, and I think people were challenged.
  Sunday afternoon, something happened which totally undermined my confidence, not just for speaking that night, but for speaking ever again. I felt such an absolute failure, I felt so miserable and defeated, that I just wanted to put my stuff in the car and go straight home.
  But I felt I could not let the local pastor down. It would be just another failure for me, and it would ruin what he had planned as well. I told God that I would go ahead and speak, but I knew I could only do it if he were gracious to me and guided me by his Spirit.

  As I began to speak, I suddenly realised that the Spirit was with me in a way I had never before or since experienced. I had my full notes as I nearly always do, but he was prompting me: “Pause here: let people take that in... Take this through quickly: move the people along from thought to thought... Repeat that point... rephrase this sentence to something better...”
  And I could sense the people coming together in unity as they listened to the Spirit taking those words and applying them to their hearts. It is so difficult to express what that is like — every heart beating in unison, every mind firing simultaneously, every individual a harmonious note in a great symphony of Word and Spirit. It was overwhelmingly powerful, awesomely right!

  As I came to the end of that sermon, as the last “Amen” faded away, there was a moment of silence. Then everyone stood and applauded, but they were not applauding me so much as applauding the God who was so powerfully at work that night.

`Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the LORD Almighty

  Zerubbabel had to learn that lesson. He had to learn that it was in his brokenness that the Spirit could use him, that when he came to the end of his own resources, that was when the Spirit of God would empower and direct and bring even the dead nation back to life.

  Yes, I said that this was a kingly anointing for service. Zerubbabel was the Lord’s Messiah for that moment. Jesus, the crowning glory of the royal line of David, Jesus, the Lion of Judah, is the supreme Messiah, the one on whom the Spirit rests without measure. But Zerubbabel was a scale model Messiah, the appointed, anointed leader for that moment.

  As I said last week, Jesus’ baptism and Jesus’ infilling with the Holy Spirit are moments in his kingly rule.

  So the message that it is not by might nor by power but by God’s Spirit is a messianic message: it is a word from God to Zerubbabel, the model Messiah, and it is a sample given to Zerubbabel of the complete issue to the Lord Jesus Christ.

  You know, in a sense, that promise could never be to an ordinary Israelite. It was a promise to their King, but only indirectly to them. He was the anointed one; he was the Spirit–empowered one. And the Israelites rebuilding the city could only respond by working cooperatively with their king.

  But it is a very real promise to the least saint in Jesus; it applies to you the moment you first believe, because as the Bible says,

...you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God

  You and I are in Christ, if we are washed in his blood through repentant faith. What applies to Jesus our Lord also applies to you and me.
  Jesus says,

As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.

  He is God the Father’s apostle, God the Father’s sent one; you and I are Jesus’ apostles, Jesus’ sent ones. We are equipped as he is equipped. We have to learn to use what we have been given.

  We do not have power in having loud voices, or forceful words; we do not have power in being recognised politicians or in controlling a gang to enforce our aims. The moment we head that way, we abandon the sheep and join the wolves, and there is no blessing there.
  As the Word of God says, and as it says to you,

`Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the LORD Almighty

  All we need is in that verse. Do you believe it? Will you act on it? I pray that you will!
AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2004. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)

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 All design and contents (c) Peter R Green 2002