Top Highlights

• Power can be a source of blessing, but when it is abused, untold damage to the body and name of Christ, often in the name of Christ, is done. For the sake of that body and that wonderful name, I believe we need to wrestle with the issue of power and understand how it can be used for healing or harm, for good or evil.
• Our English word power (Latin: posse, meaning “be able”) means “having the capacity to do something, to act or produce an effect, to influence people or events, or to have authority.” It also has harsher meanings: to master, dominate, coerce, or force. By our sheer presence in this world, we, God’s image bearers, have power.
• Our responses to the vulnerable expose who we are. This is an important principle to keep in mind as we consider the use—and misuse—of power.
• What is the source of our power as humans? In Genesis, we read about how God invested humans with power. “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth...
• To grasp the impact of power, we must have a sense of what a human is.