Power and Relationships

Copyright 2007 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

We cannot want personal power for ourselves only and also have authentic, loving relationships with others. Beyond that, whatever power we do have we need to give away in the service of those relationships.

Human beings are relational by nature. This is one of the primary ways we bear God’s image for God Himself is relational within the Trinity. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are separate entities yet, paradoxically, are one. This is the essence of the relationship within the Godhead, separateness in unity. Another aspect of the bond between the Three is the sharing of divine power. This unity in separateness, combined with shared power is part of the blueprint for every healthy human bond as well.

Christ’s earthly mission displayed this principle for us. We know that Christ ceded power in the very act of His incarnation. He voluntarily left His throne in Heaven and humbled Himself to become one of us. This temporal giving up of the Son’s full heavenly power was for the sake of relationship, more specifically to effect a restoration of relationship with a race which had estranged itself from its Creator. He could not have done this without identifying physically with that race and that meant becoming, in a sense, weak. Beyond this, the earthly ministry of Jesus was regularly marked by the giving away of His still present divine power in two forms, one direct and one by proxy. The first was in healing. The people who received direct physical healing from Christ often received a restoration to relationship with the God of Israel as well. The other form was in granting His disciples the proxy to command demons to leave those supernaturally afflicted, and more importantly relationally isolated, by them. In both cases those who were on the receiving end of this power had a chance to be restored to relationship with both God and man.

If this pattern of giving for the sake of relationship was faithfully reproduced by believers today we would be an incredibly potent form of salt and light to a dying world. Unfortunately Christians are still human beings and we suffer from the tendency to gravitate towards seeking power more for ourselves than for others. Our first parents, Adam and Eve, set this curse in motion when they believed the lies of the original “power-grabber”, Satan. Although we are redeemed we still sometimes have the tendency to think, like he did, that power trumps relationship as far as being desirable. Rather than sharing power to establish relationships we hoard it. Our surrounding culture encourages this and we Western Christians are far too open to that encouragement.

Such hoarding always leads to misery in the end for the simple reason that we live primarily through our bonds with others, not through our bond with power. Power is only a good thing when it serves our connection with God and with our fellow human beings. Otherwise is becomes poisonous to us and potentially deadly to our spirit, even as we think we are somehow being enhanced by it.

That said it is important to remember that power, like so many things in the universe, is morally neutral. It is fallen moral agents who use it for evil. With that in mind we can thank God that in Him we now have the ability to choose to use it for loving purposes. The greatest joy that power can engender in us happens when we imitate our Lord and give it away for the sake of others. The new and restored relationships that follow this giving are the true blessings of power.