I do not like math. For the entirety of my life, up until this very moment, I have wanted very little part of it. I will unashamedly concede that I did thoroughly enjoy memorizing my multiplication tables in the third grade, given it allowed me to gleefully beat my older fourth-grade counterparts at the annual parent showcase.
I was always the smallest student in every class, so I was admittedly very mission-minded with much to prove! However, following that fleeting elementary triumph, I am dismayed to say I do not recall feeling peaceable ever again in my storied relationship with mathematics.
I abhorred equations in higher grades given I felt it forced me to become an involuntary party to unapologetic deception! There was always an unidentified variable at work in each math equation that I could not see, but somehow must find the value and meaning of! I felt this whole premise to be very deceitful and unfeeling!
If I were a number, I would not want to hide my value and force people to find it! I inherently want to be present and bring immediate value to every situation I am factored into! I am, therefore, much more cheerfully amenable to words!
Words are required to bring some kind of immediate meaning to whatever sentence they are structured in to or they won’t make the narrative at all! Despite my previously immovable biases and opinions in this regard, I recently stumbled upon a mathematical concept that elicited quite an immeasurable and unexpected delight from my spirit that I am overwhelmingly eager to share.
Proverbs 10:22 says, “The blessing of the LORD, it maketh rich, and He addeth no sorrow with it.”
God’s Word tells us that He is not a proponent of this sort of gruesome mathematical addition, but I find myself so often formulating the value of my own life in this very way!
Almost daily, I can find myself subconsciously tallying up things I feel I am missing and relationships I wish I hadn’t lost out on, but our God isn’t a God of this kind of addition!
According to His Word, He has a different kind of equation for our lives! An unequivocal, unstoppably powerful formula that prevails over every problem in life that we could ever encounter.
Acts 1:8 confidently announces that “ye shall have power after the Holy Ghost has come upon you.”
The word for power in this verse is “dunamis”. “Dunamis” is a Greek term in mathematics relating to the law of exponents. It is the “power” to which a base number is raised for perpetual multiplication and growth!
For example, 7 to the second power is not 14, it’s 49. The “dunamis” power in this situation has not just doubled this number, it has more than doubled it, thus rendering exponential growth!
Ephesians 3:20 declares triumphantly “Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power (dunamis) that works in us”!
Further study reveals that “dunamis” is used about 120 times in the New Testament and has a distinct meaning apart from all other words for power in Scripture. One definition details that “dunamis” power “represents the kind of power that is an inherent force. It flows from a person to give them the ability to do the supernatural”.
One definition details that “dunamis” power “represents the kind of power that is an inherent force. It flows from a person to give them the ability to do the supernatural”.
Kara Moses
In Mark Chapter 5 we see a man who didn’t just have a few sorrows by which to count his life, he was possessed by a “legion”, or multiplied thousands, of demons. The land he occupied, “Gadara”, even meant “fortification”, “walled in” or “surrounded”. His life was quite literally an impenetrable fortress of multiplicative darkness when the “dunamis” power of Jesus stepped right into this impossible equation.
The power of darkness that so ruinously ruled the famed “demoniac of Gadara” then had no choice but to give way to the perpetuating, exponential strength of the Holy Ghost! The Apostle Paul boldly declared this same power to be ours in times of our own inner turmoil, stating that we are “strengthened with power [dunamis] through his Spirit in our inner being” (Ephesians 3:16 ESV).
It was “dunamis” power that flowed from Jesus’ garment when the woman with the issue of blood touched His hem in Luke 8. It was also “dunamis” power from which Peter spoke to the immobile man at the Gate Beautiful in Acts 3:6, eagerly replying to his desperate plea with “Such as I have, give I unto thee” and the once paralyzed man was raised to walk again.
Finally, it is by the “dunamis” power that the Church is raised up and held together with Paul’s glad affirmations of such being “For it is the church being built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, is growing into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit” (Ephesians 2:20-22).
Jesus Himself zealously decreed in Matthew 16 that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”!
Whatever the number of sorrows that you have tallied up in your own life has been, let the “dunamis” power that is the Spirit of God rest on them! The Holy Ghost can raise you up from the basest of life’s situations and build your testimony into the indomitable dwelling that is the Church of the Living God!
Whatever the number of sorrows that you have tallied up in your own life has been, let the “dunamis” power that is the Spirit of God rest on them!
Kara Moses
The same power that Scripture says is strengthening our inner man is the same strength by which the never-dying, eternal body of Christ will flourish forever!
Do not count your life by the number of your sorrows, but by the priceless, perpetuating treasure that is the Holy Ghost at work in you for the exponential glory of God and His unstoppable Church.
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