Acts 1:8 - But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

When Peter Pan tells the Darling children they can go with him to Neverland, they ask how to get there. He tells them that they'll fly. When they try and fail, Peter is puzzled. "This won't do," Peter murmurs. "What's the matter with you? All it takes is faith and trust." I could almost hear the frustrated preacher behind those words. "What's the matter with you, congregation of mine? Why aren't you doing good Christian thing A or good Christian thing B? All it takes is faith and trust!"

Most pastors, and for that matter, Christians in general, have too high a view of Human ability. We are left wondering what's wrong when we try to do something and fail. We wonder why our minds drift to the same selfish or impure places day after day, despite our efforts to control them. We wonder why our relationships seem to falter when we've tried so hard to make them work.

But Peter Pan is forgetting something: "Oh! And something I forgot ... dust! A little bit of pixie dust." And so, with the magic ingredient introduced into the situation, flight is possible. Sure it helps to set your mind on "the happiest things," but the pixie dust is the key. It's the fuel that makes the flight go.

In the same way, it is the Holy Spirit that makes our Christian lives possible. But unlike Tinkerbells's dust, we can't grab the Holy Spirit and shake a little out. No, it's better than that. The Holy Spirit is promised as power to us, but He is not fairy dust or a magic potion. He is God! He is the third person of the all-powerful triune God indwelling us, instructing us, and empowering us.

It's the Spirit that allows for flight, not the quality of our "faith and trust." Someone once said that as our opinion of human ability goes up, our reliance on Jesus goes down. Let's always remember that. A high view of ourselves gives us a low view of Jesus. But it's a low view of ourselves and what we can actually do that promotes a high view of Jesus and what He has done for us. Only the eye-opening power of the Holy Spirit can grant us this kind of gospel sanity and cause us to fly into the freedom that Jesus paid so dearly to secure for wingless people like us.
Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,