Walk in Authority

So, being sent out by the Holy Spirit, they went down to Seleucia, and from there they sailed to Cyprus. When they arrived at Salamis, they proclaimed the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews. And they had John to assist them. When they had gone through the whole island as far as Paphos, they came upon a certain magician, a Jewish false prophet named Bar-Jesus. He was with the proconsul, Sergius Paulus, a man of intelligence, who summoned Barnabas and Saul and sought to hear the word of God. But Elymas the magician (for that is the meaning of his name) opposed them, seeking to turn the proconsul away from the faith. But Saul, who was also called Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked intently at him and said, "You son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, full of all deceit and villainy, will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord? And now, behold, the hand of the Lord is upon you, and you will be blind and unable to see the sun for a time." Immediately mist and darkness fell upon him, and he went about seeking people to lead him by the hand. Then the proconsul believed, when he saw what had occurred, for he was astonished at the teaching of the Lord.
— Acts 13:1–3

Opposition Is the Proof, Not the Problem

Every time someone is genuinely sent, opposition follows. That is not a sign something has gone wrong. It is more a confirmation that we are going in the right direction. Matthew 11:12 says the kingdom of heaven has been advancing forcefully from the days of John the Baptist, and forceful people take hold of it — though the same verse, read in its other grammatical sense, says the kingdom has suffered violence. Both are true at once. The kingdom advances with force, and the moment it does, it exposes the forces already arrayed against it.

Resistance in your path usually means you are moving in a direction the enemy needs to contest. A life with no opposition at all is usually a life walking the same direction as the opposition. In Acts 13, the opposition was already sitting in the governor's house. The proconsul was the highest authority in the land, and Elymas had his ear.

I learned this walking through a village in Africa years ago, on my first trip there. I had pictured something closer to community singing and open arms. The first morning, someone snatched a borrowed phone out of my hand through the window of our van, and when I wouldn't let go, he struck my arm until he got leverage and ran. The driver told me afterward that it was fortunate there had been no machete — that the phone in my hand was worth a year's wages to some of the people watching us drive past. Later that same morning, preaching in the village, a child no older than six made a gesture of cutting my throat with his fingers, with something behind his eyes that told me he was not himself. I recognised it as what it was. I did not back away from it. I kept preaching, and people began to be set free as I did.

Resistance is an opportunity to find out how much God has already placed in you. It is the difference between believing you are strong and discovering, under pressure, that you have been prepared for the moment. Before you overcome something, your words about it are just words. After you overcome it, the same words carry weight they did not carry before. People sense the difference. You become like Jesus, one who speaks with authority. Paul had overcome his own blindness, and he gave Elymas the same blindness to redeem him as he himself had been redeemed. What he overcame, he was able to release.

Whatever you have overcome, you now have authority over. That is simply how it works. Paul walked into the governor's house with authority because of what he had overcome. He knew blindness: three days of it after Damascus, until the scales fell from his eyes. He knew repentance: the man who had persecuted the church was broken, forgiven, and sent. So when he told Elymas that darkness would fall on him, he spoke from ground he had already crossed himself. If you are still in the middle of a struggle — with lust, with anger, with whatever keeps knocking you back down — you will not stay there forever. You fall, you get back up. You fall again, you get back up again. And at some point, without entirely noticing when it happened, you find you are carrying weight you could not have carried before, and other people start coming to you for help walking through the very thing that used to defeat you. That struggle was never wasted. It was the ground being prepared for the authority you would eventually need to carry someone else through it.

Authority Has a Measure

Authority is authorised by heaven. Jesus tells Peter, "I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. And whatever you bind will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose will be loosed in heaven" — and in the Greek, the tense suggests the binding and loosing in heaven have already happened. The church's task is to recognise what heaven has already settled and align with it.

Paul writes to the Corinthians, "But we will not boast beyond limits, but will boast only with regard to the area of influence that God has assigned to us, to reach even to you" (2 Corinthians 10:13). The Greek behind "area of influence" is metron, the measure. Authority is given in a measure, to a sphere, for an assignment. I have no particular authority over the federal government of Canada, because I have not been sent there, and there are real principalities behind regional power according to Ephesians 6 that I have no standing to confront uninvited. But in my own household, in my own church, in the classroom where I teach, in the sphere God has actually assigned me, I carry real authority.

Paul was invited into the governor's house, and the invitation marked the edge of his metron. Within that powerful realm, he carried a measure of authority, and he exercised it there. Wherever your metron reaches, you have authority.

Whatever you open in your assigned sphere opens; whatever you close, closes. A father who cheats on his taxes has opened a door to deception in his home, and should not be surprised, years later, to find his children lying about their own exams. Whatever gets opened eventually gets walked through by somebody.

Walking in What You Have Already Been Given

There is no such thing, I have come to believe, as a weak Christian. There are only Christians who have not yet realised who they already are. In our old church, the platform was large and huge speakers hung from the ceiling above it. One Sunday, in the middle of preaching, I heard a voice say, "I hope that speaker falls on your head and you die while you're preaching." You hear the Lord, and you hear the enemy too. It startled me, and it kept ringing in my ear, and I preached harder. Afterward, people told me I had gone really hard that day. I told them I was not fighting them.

I came home to a nasty anonymous email. My flesh wanted to write back and defend itself. The Holy Spirit stopped me: pause, think about what you really need to say according to the heart of God. I wrote, "Thank you for your feedback. Would love to talk with you one day. Please come and see me after service." The reply came back: "Next time you come, I'm not going to see you." I answered again, as kindly as I could.

The next Sunday I noticed a young woman in the back corner wearing dark sunglasses. The Lord told me she had been assigned to my church by a coven, to curse us every Sunday. I was about ninety percent sure. She came and sat beside me, and I told her what God had shown me: that she had been sent to curse me and the church. She said, "Yep." I told her I walk with the Lord, and that she could not curse what God has blessed. There is a passage in the Bible where a false prophet set out to curse and heard only the shout of the Lord. She answered, frustrated, "That's true. Everything I say bounces back because you're a true man of God."

I asked if I could give her a word. She said, "Do whatever you want, man." I began to prophesy over her with the authority God had given me, and partway through, tears came running down from behind her dark sunglasses. The Lord was touching her. I wish I could say she gave her life to Jesus that day. I had confronted my own demons, and I had authority over my church, so I exercised the authority the Lord had given me, and it brought power. Power is authority that is backed up, the evidence and demonstration of it. The Lord has placed you in a sphere and handed you authority there, and He expects you to use it. Every battle you have won has prepared you for the room He is about to send you into. Go in with confidence, step over whatever opposes you, and speak what He has given you to speak. Heaven will back it up.

For Reflection

1.     Where in your life has opposition shown up recently — and what might that opposition actually be confirming rather than contradicting?

2.    Is there a sphere God has clearly assigned to you — a household, a workplace, a friendship — where you have been passive instead of exercising the authority you already carry?

3.     What have you opened, knowingly or not, in your own household or sphere of influence that now needs to be closed?

4.    Think of something you have already overcome. How might that specific battle now be the platform from which you are meant to help someone else?

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