Tell of His Power

He bore my soul’s disgrace, that in His name I might be an overcomer. Tell of His power, sing of His matchless love. Ellen White, 2RH 584

God’s power is a central theme of scripture. In the Old Testament record we find that boundless power manifested in the stories of creation and the flood, the plagues of Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea and the river Jordan; in short, the entire history of Israel. The demonstrations of spiritual power are no less impressive than the physical. We read about the transformed lives of Enoch, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, Daniel, and many others who knew and experienced in their lives the mighty power of God.
The New Testament knows no decline of God’s power, still revealed in the great acts of creation and redemption. The sick are healed, graves are opened, storms are stilled, and, significantly, lives continue to be transformed. The profligate become pure, and the sinful become sanctified. The persecutor Saul becomes the apostle-evangelist Paul; the vacillating Peter becomes the steadfast martyr; the fiery son of thunder, John, becomes the leading example and exponent of Christian kindness and love. Power — immeasurable, almighty, all—enabling power — continues to be a central theme.
In both the Old and New Testaments power is uniformly set forth as a prelude to performance. In Exodus 20 the Ten Commandments are introduced with the words,

I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

To the Israelite this was a statement of power; a power that had been able to reduce a mighty empire to ruins, destroy a formidable army, part the waters of the Red Sea, bring water from a rock and food from the sky, and so on. So the formula appears: the statement of power preceding the challenge to performance. The same is seen in Matthew 28:18:

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All power is given me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore. . . .

And in Romans 1:16:

I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation. . . .
In eight of his epistles Paul introduces the power of God in his first chapter.
In the first chapter of his gospel John writes:

As many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the Sons of God. . . . (verse 12)

But in these last pages of the record of earthly history the situation has changed. A crisis of confidence afflicts much of the Christian world today. Doctrines of spiritual and moral defeatism are being promoted under strangely misleading labels, pseudonyms. A partial or total surrender to the demands of Satan is described as “Christ dependency.” Salvation from sin is regarded as beyond the power and/or provision of Almighty God, and the proposed solution to the problem is salvation in sin. Righteousness by faith is not infrequently presented as unrighteousness by presumption, according to the definition found in The Desire of Ages, page 126:

Faith claims God’s promises, and brings forth fruit in obedience. Presumption also claims the promises, but uses them as Satan did, to excuse transgression.

Schemes for recalculating and negotiating the claims of the gospel downward abound. Many Christians are moving toward the conclusion that some kind or degree of accommodation with sin is necessary and unavoidable, since the power required for victorious Christian living is simply not available to Christians in our time.
There are exceptions, of course, and one of the most notable is the subject of this study. In the gathering spiritual darkness there still shines an undimmed light, the writings of Ellen White, whose “victory complex” would seem to have far surpassed that of any Christian writer since the Apostle Paul.
Ellen White had apparently gazed upon the greatness of God until she could see little else. Wherever she turned her eyes, evidences of God’s power loomed before her, and she dipped her pen in power to describe them.
She seems to follow the example of the Bible writers and of the Lord Himself in presenting the concept of God’s power made available to Christians

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before calling for performance. This might be illustrated by visualizing two connected rooms, a large room called a power room, and a much smaller room called performance. The Christian should never enter the smaller (performance) room except by going through the larger (power) room. When the Christian has made his way through the power room, and has absorbed the remarkable array of assurances and promises held out to him, he may then enter the smaller room called performance with no misgivings.
Power, power, power! The almighty power of the Creator-God, the reclaiming and regenerating power of the Redeemer of men, the limitless power of the Holy Spirit, the ever-present power of the holy angels, the transforming power of God’s holy word, the sanctifying power of truth, all made effective in the human life through the infinite power of the grace of God. These were her themes.
The present writers, while conducting the research in Ellen White’s writings that resulted in our first volume, The Word Was Made Flesh were fascinated by the theme of power that runs through these writings, and determined to trace it through her books and articles when time and circumstances made a second research project possible.
This has now been done. We have examined over 4,500 victory statements penned by Ellen White. But feeling that all of these statements gathered into one book would make a volume too ponderous to be practical, we have sifted them down to approximately 2,500, which we now present under the title, Tell of His Power. We have passed by most of the exhortations and warnings, and have focussed our attention primarily on the assurances and promises. This is by far the most inspiring material that we have ever handled. If others gain the inspiration from reading these assurances of God’s power that we have gained from compiling them, we will feel amply repaid for the investment of our time and effort.

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