Decaffeinated coffee may be good; I have to drink it in the evenings myself, though I really don't like it. Decaffeinated coffee won't wake you up; it won't perk you up; it won't keep you up; it won't get you up; it's just there. It looks like coffee; it smells like coffee; it tastes like coffee; it just doesn't do for you inside what coffee ought to do. It is a coffee substitute. When I traveled in South America, my friends down there say even American coffee with caffeine in it isn't as good as South American coffee. The fact is decaffeinated coffee just isn't real coffee.

There is a form of decaffeinated Christianity in our culture and we buy into it more than we think. We go through the form of what it means to be a Christian but we're a little afraid to get out on the edge because we're afraid somebody might think we're religious fanatics. So we have decaffeinated our Christian faith, cut down the edges, smoothed off the places where it has touched our lives, then we wonder why there is no power in it.

Annie Dillard, in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk said, "As Christians, we play in the floor like children with chemistry sets, not knowing the power we hold in our hands. For if that power should ever come together, we wouldn't be wise to be wearing a straw hat or velvet hat like we wear to church but we ought to wear crash helmets or construction helmets because the power of God is so strong that we would need something to protect ourselves from it."

We play around on the edges of the Christian faith, never knowing its real power. That happened to Paul. Paul, the great apostle and missionary, was preaching and establishing churches. When he was in Corinth, he did the best he could to establish a church there.

Apollos had been there also. I've always seen Apollos as a movie star with a Greek god profile, the sculptured look with a full head of hair. He would stand and debate and people would be overwhelmed by his arguments. He had helped in the refuting of the Jewish law; he had been able to debate with the Jews, and had shown them out of their own Scriptures that Jesus was the Son of God and the promised Messiah.

He was doing a good work but Apollos was baptized with the baptism of John the Baptist. That was a baptism of repentance. Everywhere he went, he baptized people in the name of John the Baptist, though he preached Jesus. Now Priscilla and Aquila, two deacons in the church, took him aside and taught him the gospel. Apollos continued his preaching and then Paul went over to Ephesus where Apollos had been for a long time. When Paul got to Ephesus, all the Christians there seemed to be decaffeinated. They knew the arguments for being a Christian but they had no power.

Have you ever been to church and wondered where the power is? When I was a boy growing up, it seemed like all we did was meet at church, check the roll, and organize to get those who were absent there the next week. We never did anything except work on those who weren't there. It was like a flat tire all the time. That is what Paul found at Ephesus, so he said to these people, "When you were baptized, whose baptism were you baptized in?" They said, "Apollos baptized us and he baptized us in the name of John."