Are you willing to meet Jesus in your weakness?
Read it:
The sacrifice pleasing to God is a broken spirit. You will not despise a broken and humbled heart, God (Ps. 51:17).
My goal is to know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of hissufferings, being conformed to his death (Phil. 3:10).
Unpack it:
o What kind of sacrifice that is pleasing to God (Ps. 51:17)?
o What two descriptors of what God will not despise (Ps. 51:17)?
o What two words that describe Paul’s goal (Phil. 3:10)?
o What two other things involved with knowing Christ besides the power of the resurrection (Phil. 3:10).
Work it out:
We live under the pressure to “have it all together,” and sometimes we may even think it’s within our reach. This illusion takes just moments to be shattered. For me, that happened with a single phone call on May 5, 2008.
My dad called to tell me the neurologist had given him bad news. He had ALS, it was fatal, and at the time, they thought he had three to five years to live.
My dad’s illness revealed brokenness in the world and in my own heart that my patterns, protectiveness and pride could not fix. No amount of striving would change the prognosis, and no amount of hiding would make it go away.
Though we are all uncomfortable with feeling helpless, the most difficult seasons can be the most fertile soil if we are willing to meet Jesus in our weakness.
Ultimately, unwillingness to admit brokenness makes our hearts impenetrable, and patterns, protectiveness and pride continue to harden our hearts. It’s not that Truth cannot break in, but He often waits for an invitation.
Even the tiniest bit of surrender, trust or humility is enough of an indication that there is an invitation.
Ponder: How comfortable are you with acknowledging brokenness in your life? Did your family of origin allow room for imperfection or weakness? Was weakness viewed negatively or positively, as the beginning point of strength?
Unfortunately, we don’t have to feel convicted about our patterns, protectiveness or pride to experience the consequences of them. Unwillingness to acknowledge our brokenness only further blinds our eyes, deafens our ears and hardens our hearts. To even begin recognizing our brokenness, we must ask the only One who can make our eyes see, our ears hear, and our hearts understand.
Will you trust God enough to ask?
Ponder: Have you experienced (or seen someone else experience) God’s strength in the midst of brokenness?
God is not an unrelenting taskmaster with a sledgehammer, threatening us to come out or else, and nor is he an accuser looking to publicly humiliate us by revealing our guilt and shame. He is patient, full of loving-kindness and compassion. He invites us to humbly ask Him to break through our hardened hearts in a way that only He can so that we can experience His life in us. And, so others will see Him in us, and experience life as well.
But what if we don’t?
The peril of the path is this: where there is no brokenness, there is no openness.
Brokenness is what we need. It is the only way a hardened heart opens. This cannot be accomplished by force, but by realizing that we are too weak to do it ourselves. When the striver in you shouts “work harder,” or your inner hider whispers, “you’ll never change,” remember Jesus paved the way to the Father . The work is finished.
Because of Jesus, death is not the end but the beginning. On the other side of death is His resurrection power. The word resurrection (anastasis) means: standing on the feet again or rising as opposed to falling; to rise again from the spiritual death of sin. (Strong’s, G386, “anastasis,” blb.org)
Scripture tells us the same power that raised Jesus from the dead lives inside of us, but we can’t access it without death.
Jesus didn’t come so the good could be better; He came so the dead could be alive. In clinging to our patterns, protectiveness and pride, we stand in the way of His work. Sometimes we don’t want to die to our sin until we get a glimpse of the suffering our sin brings with it.
We don’t need new sin; we simply need new eyes to see the suffering our sin has caused. Perhaps these glimpses would make us more willing to die.
Ponder: What has sin cost you and those you love? What kind of suffering has it brought with it?
We cannot rise again in the power of Christ if we have not died to ourselves. We have to be utterly convinced our patterns, protectiveness and pride will not deliver what it is that we truly want. If you don’t want to die to yourself, ask God to show you what your hardness of heart is killing or keeping you from.
He will not transform the path into good soil without brokenness.
Ponder: What is keeping you from wanting to die to your patterns, protectiveness and pride?
We can surrender our weakness without offering solutions to accompany it. Surrender has no prerequisites. The Healer doesn’t require our hearts to come whole; He takes them weak, broken and bare.
Our weakness is where we experience Jesus’ completeness.
Are you willing to trust Jesus with your weakness?
It is not a barrier to the flourishing life, it is the way to it. What we do with our weakness will determine whether or not we flourish. Everywhere there is brokenness, there is openness for seeds of transformation to be planted.
Excerpt taken from The Flourishing Life— Discovering the transforming power of trusting God with your weaknesses, ways and wants. Available for preorder Friday, November 29, 2019. Study The Flourishing Life with a friend or your small group in January. Subscribe at everydaytruth.ca to stay tuned for more details!
