The Counterfeit and the Catalyst: Restoring Power to the Church
- by Michael Sitko
When we look at the New Testament pattern, for the early church we see a stark difference between it and many of the churches we see today. Paul saw this coming and penned a letter to his spiritual son to warn him of the dangers that he saw. As the Apostle Paul looks across the landscape of time, he issues a shattering warning to his spiritual son Timothy, who was stationed as a young leader setting things in order at the church in Ephesus. Paul pulls back the curtain on a subtle, insidious crisis that threatened the very structural integrity of God's household:
"But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come. For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away." (2 Timothy 3:1-5)
This list is not merely a description of the secular world. If you look closely at Galatians and Corinthians, you will see that this list is the absolute counter to the fruit of the Spirit and the nature of agape love. These could be called the “fruit of an unbelieving believer,” an unrighteous manifestation of human nature operating from a place of radical self-love.
When Paul tells Timothy to turn away from such people, he is not talking about removing ourselves from the world; he clarifies elsewhere that to do so, you would have to leave the planet entirely. No, Paul is speaking about our fellowship within the church. He is warning us against a culture that builds an external shell of religion while completely eviscerating its supernatural reality.
The Power Deficit in the Edifice of God’s Building
If the Kingdom of God has a building code, the primary material is relationship. We are not a static organization; we are what Peter calls "living stones" being built up as a spiritual house.
In a corporate model, people are treated as resources to build the organization. In the Kingdom, the organization is the resource used to build the people. Our workmanship, our Poiema, the poetry of God, demands a leadership that is parental rather than managerial. It requires fathers and mothers who provide a spiritual ceiling that becomes the floor for the next generation.
However, the modern church has engineered a devastating compromise. We have mastered the art of maintaining a "form of godliness" while functioning in a total void of the power of God. The Greek word for power in Paul’s letter is dunamis, the miracle-working, supernatural ability of the Holy Spirit.
The Anatomy of Denial: You do not deny the supernatural working power of God simply by preaching against it or claiming it ceased to exist. You deny the power of God by acting without it. For generations, the church has struggled under the weight of this counterfeit posture, looking a little bit like Christ but remaining entirely empty of His supernatural weight. God never intended for His family to represent Him on the earth without the dunamis power of His Spirit working with His sons and daughters. Jesus established the standard of our send-out when He declared to His disciples, "As the Father has sent Me, I also send you." How did the Father send Jesus? He sent Him healing the sick, cleansing the leper, raising the dead, and driving out devils.
Jesus looked at the religious leaders of His day and said, if you do not want to believe Me for the sake of My testimony, at least believe Me for the sake of the works, the miracles. He was saying that the miracles are one of the direct proofs of the Father’s alignment with the Son.
As living stones, we are called to speak the word and testify of righteousness, but faith without works is dead. Words alone do not fulfill the mandate. When I served as a police officer, I stood in courtrooms many times to give testimony. When you testify, your spoken words carry the substance of legal evidence. In Mark 16, we see this exact legal confirmation manifest: the disciples went out preaching everywhere, while the Lord worked with them, confirming the substance of their words with signs and wonders.
Whether you are called to be a paramedic, a teacher, a lawyer, a gardener, or an arborist, your job is simply the terrain. Your assignment remains the same: step into that sphere and destroy the works of the devil by healing the sick, cleansing the leper, and driving out devils. Power is not a luxury for the elite; it is the natural byproduct of a son or daughter who knows their identity.
Unbelief and the Cluttered Bridge
To understand why His sons and daughters so often lack this active dunamis, we must look at the story of the epileptic boy in Matthew Chapter 17. Jesus, Peter, James, and John have just descended from the top of Mt. Hermon where the Transfiguration had occurred. They walk straight into a scene of chaotic failure. A desperate father falls to his knees before Jesus, crying out for his epileptic son because the disciples could not cure him.
This failure was not just baffling to the crowd but also to the disciples themselves. These men had already been sent out on multiple occasions; they had successfully cast out demons and healed the sick across regions. People brought the boy to them because they expected a miracle based on the disciples' track record. Yet, in this moment, everything ground to a halt.
When the disciples questioned Jesus privately, asking, "Why could we not cast it out?" Jesus did not point to a lack of sovereign timing or a missing strategic formula. He looked them in the eye and said: "Because of your unbelief." He then added a phrase that has been widely misunderstood: "However, this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting." (Matthew 17:21)
For years, many have taught that Jesus was categorizing different kinds of demons, implying that certain high-level spirits require a heavier dose of spiritual power to conquer. But Jesus was not talking about the demon of epilepsy. He was talking about this kind of unbelief. There is a vast, functional difference between faith and belief. Faith is the legal substance, the unshakable knowledge that God is able. Belief, however, has to do with your eyes, and your capacity to see the thing done.
If you trace the footprints of the great men and women of faith who moved in genuine signs and wonders, you will find that God consistently trained their spiritual sight. They learned to visualize the healing in their imagination (the image centre of their spirit), seeing the person whole before the physical reality conformed. They trained themselves not to look to the persons condition but rather to seeing them as God created them to be, whole, healed, delivered and loved.
In Matthew 17, the disciples allowed their natural eyes to subvert their spiritual sight. What they saw in the natural, the foaming, the seizing, the severity of the symptoms, overrode their faith in the moment. Their physical eyes dictated their reality.
Clearing the Infrastructure of the Soul
This is why the disciplines of prayer and fasting are vital to the infrastructure of sonship in the Kingdom family. We must recognize that there are two distinct and essential operations of the Holy Spirit in the life of a believer: the infilling and the coming-upon.
In John 20, the resurrected Jesus breathed on His disciples and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit." In that exact moment, they were regenerated, sealed, and filled. Yet, in Acts 1, the very same disciples were commanded by Jesus to tarry in Jerusalem until they received the promise of the Father. Jesus told them, "You shall receive power (dunamis) when the Holy Spirit has come upon you."
The modern church suffers from a severe deficit, not of the Spirit’s internal presence, but of His resting upon us for power ministry. The infilling is secured by faith in Christ, but the degree to which the Holy Spirit rests upon a life for public demonstration is directly tied to prayer, fasting, and the degree of radical surrender to self-death.
Consider for a moment the makeup of our humanity. We are three-part beings: we are a spirit, we have a soul, and we live in a physical body. If you are joined to the Lord, your spirit is completely one with Him, all the fullness of Jesus dwells right there on the inside of you.
Imagine a bridge. On one side of the chasm is your spirit, completely united with Jesus, possessing every tool, every healing, and every breakthrough necessary to transform the world. On the other side of the chasm is your physical body, the instrument through which you interact with this hurting world.
The problem is rarely a lack of power in the source; the problem is that the bridge of the soul is heavily cluttered. It is blocked by natural logic, past disappointments, emotional self-protection, and the over-analysis of what our physical eyes can see. When someone asks for healing, the power of Christ wants to surge across that bridge, but it hits the barricade of our mental arguments and natural unbelief.
Prayer and fasting are not religious works designed to move the hand of an indifferent God. Fasting is the heavy machinery of the Spirit. It is the means by which we dismantle the internal infrastructure of our independent humanity. It clears the bridge of the soul, subduing the natural senses so that the dunamis already residing in our spirit can flow unhindered through our bodies to change the world.
Conclusion: The Posture of the Household
The ultimate goal of our culture in Kingdom living is to move entirely away from the cold, industrial model of a powerless modern church and return to the authentic household of God, where His power rests upon sons and daughters and is present to confirm the Word we preach with signs accompanying. We cannot afford to look like the pattern Paul warned Timothy about, highly polished, relationally structured, but completely toothless against the works of the enemy.
We must never forget that this entire familial structure of Gods kingdom is designed to be a conduit for the raw, transforming power of the Holy Spirit. We clear the bridge of our souls through prayer and fasting, refusing to let our natural eyes subvert our spiritual inheritance. Just like Jesus we are manifest for one explicit purpose: to destroy the works of the devil.