Tonight, you may be able to relate to one of our partners who recently asked God in despair: "Lord, I try to love You with all my heart. I stand on Your promises and believe You want to bless me. Why isn't anything happening?"

He answered, "You are stuck where you are because you have failed to use the grace I have placed within you to appropriate my riches and to overcome." This confused her because she had always thought God's grace and His blessings were the same thing...something you asked for and He handed out.

Actually God works to bless us in two different ways. He works for us from the outside, and He works within us, helping us to exercise His power and to lay hold of His riches. Sadly, some Christians get stuck on what they want God to do for them, and ignore the powerful works of grace He wants to accomplish from within.

Brother Cerullo has often said that it's time for the Church to move beyond the point of blessing, receiving what God can do for you, into the realm of power, realizing what He wants to do with you through the active force of grace. Paul knew God's grace as a force: "...by the grace of God, I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them - yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me" (1 Corinthians 15:10, NIV).

God's grace is an active force within you. Exercise it. Lay hold of it tonight, and you will enter a new realm of power and blessings.

Heavenly Father, thank you for awakening me to Your grace as a powerful force within me. I long to grow beyond the point of blessing and into the realm of power! Help me to exercise Your grace, so I might lay hold of all You have for me. In Jesus' Name, Amen.