Did you know that God gives you a message that he has authorized for you to speak? Every believer has that, an authorized message. So it’s not something that we developed really. It’s something God gives us.

Paul was imprisoned because he was carrying a message that would light up the heart. That it would hit with dynamite. That it would resonate in the hearing of the hearer. Paul prayed for that. In Colossians 4:3 Paul prayed for an entrance and an utterance: “I pray that every time I open my mouth I’ll be able to make Christ plain as day to those who are hearing what I’m saying. I pray that every time I open my mouth I’ll be able to make Christ plain as day to those who hear, to the hearer.”

You and I have a message that is like fire that God Himself has authorized to be released through us.You have an authorized message. I have one. The next person has one. We don’t necessarily say and do the same thing. It’s the message God gives us. But at the end of the day you’ll find that message is the same for everyone. It leads to the same place, back to the Messiah, back to Almighty God, back to the leading of the Holy Spirit. The authorized message. So besides the right teaching and an authorized message, the believer needs to possess this.

And you think about it. Observable spiritual authority. Remember in the Word, the disciples were perceived as unlearned men. It was realized they hadn’t gone to seminary. They hadn’t been train. They had not sat under the teaching of the religious leaders and the scribes, and yet they had authority. They were not educated or highly developed culturally people, but they instead had been with Jesus. That was the bottom line. They had been with Jesus. So their words had authority. It was observable. It was something that was seen. It’s like a presence that you see on a person’s life.

We get that from Acts 4:13, the Passion Translation I love says this. “Then they began to understand the effect that Jesus had had on these disciples simply because they were with Him.” Simply because they had spent time with Him. That applies to you and me. When we spend time with the Lord, we come away with something that’s observable by other people. It’s not of our own doing. It’s something that comes from having been in the presence of the Lord.