John and Lisa Bently and their four children were living the American dream.  John was a successful attorney. Lisa was a housewife caring for her husband and their home-schooled four children.  They had a beautiful home, two cars, belonged to a great church, and had a close circle of Christian friends.  One day Lisa was hit hard with a really empty feeling.  She admitted to God; “if this is all there is to my Christianity, then it’s boring and it stinks”.

Within a month, John’s law firm stopped practicing in his field of law which left him jobless.  There were leads, but nothing worked out.  Finally, an opportunity arose for him to work with a group in China that helped abandoned children.  John ventured off on his own.  A short time later, he called his wife asking that she and the kids move to China.  Ninety nine percent of their family and friends felt they lost their minds, but they went anyway.

Lisa reported in her account that she had nothing to offer Chinese orphans – just a willingness to follow God.  God responded and changed their lives.  Jesus did something quite similar.  He left the comfort and riches of heaven and traveled to our shore.  In the 14th chapter of John’s Gospel, we read where Jesus gives comfort to His disciples.  He tells them “Do not let your hearts be troubled.  Trust in God, trust also in Me.”

Well in the case of John and Lisa Bentley, God took them from riches to rags, and back to riches again, but of a different sort.  Lisa lived in a tight circle of Christian friends, but had little heart for the unsaved.  Giving aid to a little baby while in China, who’d been critically injured and left to die, changed her life.  Yes, the power of one.

That’s how it was for Jesus.  We would have been left to die eternally had He not come.  Through the power of One, our Lord changed everything.  He came so that we might have life while we are here on earth through the power of the Holy Spirit.  It was the power of the Holy Spirit that Jesus spoke about in John 14 that forever changed the lives of John and Lisa Bentley.

I’ve chosen to share this with you so that you can be assured that the same power is available to you.  The power of One.  It starts with each of us.  May God help you and I to see that we can shine like the stars for Him.