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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jamin Goggin
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March 27 - March 31, 2020
“The way of power, as you are talking about, is the way of self-redemption. We all have an Achilles’ heel, and so we use our natural abilities to compensate for the limp it has caused. We compensate through self-improvement. A lot of what we think of as our strengths is really just the result of this compensation. Rather than looking to Christ to redeem, we have acted as our own redeemer. Twice over we neglect our Redeemer. We neglect him in our self-accomplishment, in our attempt to overcome our weaknesses with strengths. We also neglect him because we don’t believe we need him where we are
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Rather than viewing our strengths as the path to a meaningful and powerful life, James was calling us to view our weaknesses as the path of our calling. Seeking to live empowered by our strengths was, in his mind, a wholly unchristian way to live. The Christian way of life is living in dependence upon God, moving forward to embrace our weaknesses so that God’s glory might be revealed.
it means that as we steward our strengths, we must do so from a posture of dependence upon God.
There is no calling in our lives that does not require a deep acceptance of our weakness.
As Christians, we believe in a given identity, not an achieved one.
He showed us that flourishing is not the absence of weakness, nor the absence of dependence or need, but that a genuinely human existence is discovered in relying fully on Christ.
Human flourishing is not about self-actualization, but about discovering our life in Christ. Flourishing entails discovering our insufficiency and coming to rest in the sufficiency of his grace. The flourishing self is the abiding self, not the actualized self. It is the self wholly dependent upon Jesus. This is what a genuinely human existence really looks like.
It is not unusual, therefore, to hear the call to fully realize our potential; to develop, build, and create selves in our own power; and to follow it up with, “for the glory of God.”
But Jesus champions not the great but the seemingly insignificant and irrelevant.
In this self-actualized account of human flourishing, the thrust of personhood is to achieve in my own power. The focus is on my ability, my creativity, and my potential. These become the pistons driving the engine of self (resulting, Jesus tells us, in the eternal loss of self). No place for weakness exists in this view of reality. More important, no place exists for God.
In contrast, Paul’s description of the spiritual gifts focuses on two key things: first, on the God who gives them, and second, on how the gifts we perceive to be weaker and less significant are actually more honorable in the kingdom.
When we grasp for control of our identity to generate value and significance, we shrink our identity. We easily give in to the temptation to reduce our identities down to certain gifts, our professions, or the approval of others. The entire endeavor to create a self in our own power results in an empty, superficial self.
While we are running around trying to create a life that matters, Jesus tells us that if we try to save our lives we will lose them, and if we try to be first we will be last.
It is not surprising that there has been a rise in the number of men who started watching pornography at a young age who now show no interest in real women. When sexuality is learned on your own terms—according to your own power—another person is just a bother.
We believe the truly flourishing person is bright, socially adept, and healthy. But what do we do with people who have dementia or Alzheimer’s? Or what about those in our churches who have physical or mental disabilities? According to our cultural values of power, their lives have functionally ended. Yet if identity and personhood are defined not by earthly power but by God’s grace, then we are in a different position. If we lose our mental or physical capacities, a thorn in the flesh remains; but we are still capable of flourishing in dependence upon God. In fact, it is here where we can be
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As we are all prone to do, they undoubtedly assumed whatever they did was for God.
This desire to be special, to be significant and powerful, is endemic in our culture; and we bring those things to the body of Christ.
We ignore narcissism, self-glorification, and domination as long as the number of conversions is up and more baptisms are happening.
If churches took this stand, it would change the attitude of our congregations, so that rather than trying to be powerful in the world, we would be a servant in the world. We wouldn’t try to be the strongest or most powerful or richest or most attractive or most popular churches, but we would be willing to be the servant, and therefore walk humbly with God.”
Where churches should be the servants of the gospel, they are instead the proprietors of the powers.”4
However, there are real powers and principalities at work in our world that function as systems of evil—such as racism, zealous nationalism, ageism, and materialism.
Indeed, every aspect of this broken world was originally created good and was meant to be in the service of Christ.
Jesus is claiming that Peter’s thinking is fueled by the demonic, and at the same time it is from the flesh and oriented around the worldly “things of man.”
The church is the place where the powers are to be exposed for what they are and are continually put to shame as they were upon the cross.
Often when we fail to stand firm against the powers, it is because we believe the powers can actually save us. We buy into the lie that we can employ evil powers for the kingdom.
This is the strategy of the demonic, not to attack the church directly, but to trick her into attacking herself: to convince her that the ends justify the means and that she can wield the tools of darkness to make light.
We are called to receive power in weakness, not power in our strength or in ourselves.
“Our coziness with the surrounding culture has made us so blind to many of its evils that, instead of calling them into question, we offer our own versions of them—in God’s name and with a good conscience.”
Where God intended love, relationship, and community, the powers breed discord, distrust, and division. They are so subtle and ingrained in the fabric of our culture that we don’t even recognize their presence. Racism is alive and well in our culture, but we often succumb to the lie that it died with institutional slavery and segregation.
Love is a power, power at its purest, but as such, it is a power that runs contrary to the powers and principalities of the world.
To resist evil one first must determine not to resist evil with evil—hate with hate—but to stand firmly on the foundation of love.
he saw men who had been abused and dehumanized by evil. The very thing they turned to for power to control was warping them and making them less than human.
I didn’t ever want hate to do to me what it had already done to those men.”
Reconciliation can’t take place until we believe we are all created in the image of God and have absolute value and worth. We have to become healed within the context of the people who have wounded us. We have to forgive each other.”
Embracing our weakness, that is significant. Embracing our weakness and embracing our sense of calling will sound like an oxymoron. You have to embrace both at the same time.”
In the face of evil in the world, the way of Jesus—the way of the cross—is power in and through our weakness.
This attitude communicates that the inner-city churches don’t really know what they are doing and assumes they might not have the same resources, education, or skill sets of their white counterparts; and this subtle idolatry can easily infiltrate our communities.23
People are not our enemies; our enemies are the powers of evil themselves.
The way from below often hides in attitudes and actions that seem too small to matter, but with time and community, they blossom into deep hatred.
The first temptation is that we seek to engineer a life of love in our own power. We get the for right (power for love), but not the from.
The second temptation is that we come to believe power to love can be a fruit of power to control. We want love, but we want to achieve it through a method that is foreign and antithetical to it. But love is not the fruit of power to control. Love presses us into vulnerability.
Love is a power that simultaneously calls us into our weakness and brings evil out of the darkness and into the light. Love demands courage and greatness, but it does so in the very places we are afraid of.
Vanier has always been more interested in the people he ministers to than in how well-known his ministry is.
We cannot really begin to know the truth of ourselves until we discover we have difficulties. Community is the place where we discover our own fragilities, wounds, and inability to love, where our limitations, our fears, and our egoism are revealed to us. We cannot get away from the negative in ourselves. We have to face it. So community life brings a painful revelation of our limitations, weaknesses, and darkness, and the unexpected discovery of the monsters within us.
When our weakness is exposed, we can try to reject community, but we cannot escape it.
All weakness is a cry for recognition; not because we are the best, not because we have strength, not because we can do things on our own, or because we are independent. But weakness is the cry, ‘I need your help.’ Vulnerability is a cry for presence.”
He didn’t need power; he had Jesus. He didn’t need to impress us; he had Jesus. He didn’t have to create a self in his own strength, because he had Jesus. He knew Jesus was with him in love, in the vulnerability of his weakness.
“Only in community . . . is it possible to follow in the path that Jesus walked alone.”
“What may appear weak and trifling to us may be great and glorious to God.”5
In sin, others become objects to use for our own benefit, and it is all too easy to baptize this practice in the name of spiritual growth, love, or whatever else we hide our sin under. In our quest to feel whole, we can end up consuming others rather than embracing them in love.6
