Samuel Rodriguez: This Pentecost, Pray for Holy Dynamite

May 21, 2023 / newlifenarrabri / Leave a comment

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This week, we celebrate Pentecost, the event found in the book of Acts in which Jesus’s followers received the Holy Spirit.

Luke tells us, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you” (Acts 1:8). This is not a quake, an emotion, a feeling, an opinion or even a religion. Let’s set the record straight: Jesus said you will receive power.

Holy Spirit people believe. They do not beg. As Holy Spirit people, we should be known for our appointments, not our opinions. The Holy Spirit is the most significant empowering force in the universe. I’m not talking about just any power. I’m not talking about corrupt, coercive or controlling power. I’m not talking about temporary, tantalizing or transitional power. I am talking about the power that Jesus said will flow like rivers of living water (John 7:38).

In this passage, Jesus was prophesying about the Holy Spirit—the same power that descended upon Jesus when he was baptized in the Jordan, the same power that raised Jesus from the dead on the third day. Christ-followers have the same ability to speak into the storm and say, “‘Peace, be still’” (Mark 4:39b).

Because the Holy Spirit dwells within us, we have the power to speak life to ourselves, strangers and friends. With conviction, we can say, “Go, and sin no more” (John 8:11b). The same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead lives inside you (Romans 8:11). Jesus, through the power of the Holy Spirit, came out of the tomb. In his power, you can come out of anything. You can come out of addiction, anxiety, fear, confusion, bondage, depression, discouragement, shame and sin.

You cannot rightfully claim powerlessness and the Holy Spirit. You can’t have the Spirit and be defeated. Holy Spirit people are people of supernatural power to overcome this world.

Back in the Old Testament, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit was only temporary. It would come and go as it pleased. The Holy Spirit would visit and partially fill, but never wholly and never permanently. Now, because of the atoning work of Jesus, the power that you and I have is not temporary. It’s final.

No longer must we rely on the Holy Spirit falling upon us. We depend on Him filling us to overflowing. The third person of the holy Trinity now permanently resides in you. He is your comforter and advocate forever and always.

When the people of God lean into this reality, we will see an unprecedented outpouring of his power. COVID is not more powerful than the Spirit of God inside of us. No cancer, no depression, no political power, no religious ideology can outsmart or outmaneuver the strength and will of God inside of you. Nothing hell can conjure is more powerful than the Holy Spirit of God inside of you. Because of God’s indwelling Spirit, you can confidently say, “Greater is the one living inside of me than he who is in the world” (see 1 John 4:4).

When we as the church choose to embrace this truth, we will experience a revival like we’ve never seen before. Entire cities are about to experience an awakening; more people will come to Jesus than ever before. We’re about to see not just a revival within a building but entire cities and nations.

Get ready—because nothing can stop the Spirit of God from moving if we believe. This Pentecost, join me in praying for holy dynamite, an undeniable explosion of power in every nation. In Jesus’ name, do away with every single vestige of darkness, that each person would be washed afresh with the Holy Spirit—every family, every church, every ministry, every city, every community, every nation, baptized anew with the precious Holy Spirit, in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

Inertia Is A Good Thing, Really

August 11, 2019August 11, 2019 / newlifenarrabri / Leave a comment

A minor hiccup in power supply threw the south east of England into an unplanned “Earth Hour.” And it was all caused by wind generators.

Just before the blackout, the National Grid reported that fully 47.6% of the nation’s power was being generated by wind. Suddenly two small generators- one wind and the other gas- went offline. These generators account for less than 3% of power demand.

Immediately, the grid frequency fell from 50 Hz to 48.9 Hz and the power grid shut down to protect itself.

What is this Hz thing? Well, electricity mains systems use alternating current which in simple terms means that the electrons that flow to give us power are oscillating backwards and forwards at 50 times per second. If the frequency changes by a significant amount the whole grid can become unstable. In order to protect transformers etc, there are automatic switches that shutdown parts of the grid when the frequency gets out of a very narrow range.

This is what happened in London, and in South Australia three years ago.

In a traditional coal fired power system, electricity is produced by forcing high pressure steam past enormous turbines, which weight 200-800 tonnes. They are huge things and, once started, maintain a very steady speed even if there are changes in the rate of steam flow. Their inertia keeps the whole grid stable, so that if something goes wrong somewhere else, they still keep pumping out their power at 50 Hz.

But when smaller, more dispersed power generators dominate the grid, there is much less inertia to keep the power supply stable and things turn to custard very quickly.

The giant battery in South Australia is not there to keep the quantity of power flowing- it only has enough storage for a few minutes of power demand. It’s main role is to keep the frequency stable. Now power companies have to pay the battery for a service that coal powered generators provide for free- that’s progress.

H/T to Jo Nova for this analysis

All of this talk of grid stability and inertia made me think of how unstable our society has become, particularly over the last decade. What was once unthinkable has become normal, and it seems that every week there is some new perversion being promoted. Pornography is everywhere, families are disintegrating, and an epidemic of fatherlessness is being played out in mass shootings, suicide and violence.

The reason for this, I believe, is that we have bought into the lies of individualism. People think they have the right to do whatever they like, to indulge whatever desires and whims they might have, and all without any consequences.

Individualism has been around for a long time. Some people trace it back to the New Testament and the idea that ever single person is loved by God.

Previous generations had the church as the equivalent of the steam turbine. The morality and ethical standards of christianity have been taught, and continue to be taught, unchanging through the centuries. The word goes out steadily year after year, Sunday by Sunday, moderating the wild impulses of human flesh.

Then in the 1970’s people stopped going to church.It was deemed to be irrelevant and oppressive. People decided they could set their own moral codes. Everyone can do what they like without reference to anyone else, and it is all coming unravelled.

Without the steady inertia of the church, the moral grid of the nation has slowly turned to custard. The lights are going out, and we call it progress,

Martin Lloyd-Jones: “Why could we not cast it out?”

December 29, 2018December 29, 2018 / newlifenarrabri / Leave a comment

“Why could we not cast it out?”

And he said to them, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.” Mark 9:29

“You failed there, he said in effect to these disciples, because you did not have sufficient power. You were using the power that you have, and you were very confident in it. You did it with great assurance, you were masters of the occasion, you thought you were going to succeed at once, but you did not. . . . You will never be able to deal with ‘this kind’ unless you have applied to God for the power which he alone can give you.

You must become aware of your need, of your impotence, of your helplessness. You must realise that you are confronted by something that is too deep for your methods to get rid of or to deal with, and you need something that can go down beneath that evil power and shatter it, and there is only one thing that can do that, and that is the power of God. . . . We must become utterly and absolutely convinced of our need. We must cease to have so much confidence in ourselves, and in all our methods and organisations, and in all our slickness. We have got to realise that we must be filled with God’s Spirit.

And we must be equally certain that God can fill us with his Spirit. We have got to realise that, however great ‘this kind’ is, the power of God is infinitely greater, that what we need is not more knowledge, more understanding, more apologetics, more reconciliation of philosophy and science and religion, and all modern techniques — no, we need a power that can enter into the souls of men and break them and smash them and humble them and then make them anew. And that is the power of the living God.

And we must be confident that God has this power as much today as he had one hundred years ago, and two hundred years ago, and so we must begin to seek the power and to pray for it. We must begin to plead and yearn for it. ‘This kind’ needs prayer.”

Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Revival (Wheaton, 1987), pages 18-19.

Renewable Energy A Pipe Dream

November 23, 2014 / newlifenarrabri / Leave a comment

Engineers who worked on Google’s now abandoned renewable energy project discover that there is no way that current technology can replace fossil fuels in any practical way. They made the interesting discovery that the output of all renewable systems barely exceeds the energy input of constructing them in the first place.

If you add that to the research last month that found that it an area the size of the U.K. would have to be given over to wind or solar power every year just to provide renewable energy for the increased energy demand that year, it is obvious that current technology will not provide the clean green world that greenies dream of.

From WUWT:

A research effort by Google corporation to make renewable energy viable has been a complete failure, according to the scientists who led the programme. After 4 years of effort, their conclusion is that renewable energy “simply won’t work”.

According to an interview with the engineers, published in IEEE;

“At the start of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope …
Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.”
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change

There is simply no getout clause for renewables supporters. The people who ran the study are very much committed to the belief that CO2 is dangerous – they are supporters of James Hansen. Their sincere goal was not to simply install a few solar cells, but to find a way to fundamentally transform the economics of energy production – to make renewable energy cheaper than coal. To this end, the study considered exotic innovations barely on the drawing board, such as self erecting wind turbines, using robotic technology to create new wind farms without human intervention. The result however was total failure – even these exotic possibilities couldn’t deliver the necessary economic model.

The key problem appears to be that the cost of manufacturing the components of the renewable power facilities is far too close to the total recoverable energy – the facilities never, or just barely, produce enough energy to balance the budget of what was consumed in their construction. This leads to a runaway cycle of constructing more and more renewable plants simply to produce the energy required to manufacture and maintain renewable energy plants – an obvious practical absurdity.

According to the IEEE article;

“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”

I must say I’m personally surprised at the conclusion of this study. I genuinely thought that we were maybe a few solar innovations and battery technology breakthroughs away from truly viable solar power. But if this study is to be believed, solar and other renewables will never in the foreseeable future deliver meaningful amounts of energy.

Fusion Power Within A Decade?

November 14, 2014 / newlifenarrabri / Leave a comment

I have to admit I am somewhat sceptical about the timeline of an operational fusion plant within ten years but, if true, this has the capacity to transform the world with cheap, non-polluting energy within decades.

From businessinsider.com:

LOCKHEED: We Made A Huge Breakthrough In Nuclear Fusion

sun NASA/Solar Dynamics ObservatoryNuclear fusion is the energy that powers stars.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Lockheed Martin Corp said on Wednesday it had made a technological breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion, and the first reactors, small enough to fit on the back of a truck, could be ready for use in a decade.

Tom McGuire, who heads the project, said he and a small team had been working on fusion energy at Lockheed‘s secretive Skunk Works for about four years, but were now going public to find potential partners in industry and government for their work.

Initial work demonstrated the feasibility of building a 100-megawatt reactor measuring seven feet by 10 feet, which could fit on the back of a large truck, and is about 10 times smaller than current reactors, McGuire told reporters.

In a statement, the company, the Pentagon’s largest supplier, said it would build and test a compact fusion reactor in less than a year, and build a prototype in five years.

In recent years, Lockheed has gotten increasingly involved in a variety of alternate energy projects, including several ocean energy projects, as it looks to offset a decline in U.S. and European military spending.

Lockheed‘s work on fusion energy could help in developing new power sources amid increasing global conflicts over energy, and as projections show there will be a 40 percent to 50 percent increase in energy use over the next generation, McGuire said.

If it proves feasible, Lockheed‘s work would mark a key breakthrough in a field that scientists have long eyed as promising, but which has not yet yielded viable power systems. The effort seeks to harness the energy released during nuclear fusion, when atoms combine into more stable forms.