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April 30 - May 23, 2018
It makes me think of grace. (No, really.) Because when it comes to our dependence on God, it is all grace or no grace. If our standing with him rests even an ounce on our works, we are utterly and hopelessly lost. No, it must be grace all the way down.
I think by “boasting in weakness” Paul means that we ought to own our weakness. To own up to it. It does not mean throwing a pity party. It does not mean having a martyr’s complex. It does not mean being Debbie Downer. It does not mean the kind of self-conscious self-deprecation that actually brings more attention to one’s self. It is not a false humility. It simply means owning up to the reality that if it were not for Jesus Christ, everything about us would blow apart in the gale-force hurricane of our own sin and frailty.
There is more security, in fact, with Christ in the middle of a stormy sea than without Christ in the warm stillness of our bathtub. In fact, the end of verse 10 unlocks the purpose of boasting (or owning) our weakness: “For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
God was asking me to admit that I could not swim. He was telling me to trust totally in him, not in my own sense of accomplishment and not even in others’ positive appraisal of my ministry. But the weird thing is, in the spiritual economy of the kingdom you find yourself by losing. You live by dying. See, I had it backward. I thought God was asking me to lay down pastoral ministry and sit down. But really he was telling me to rise up and walk. He was telling me to lay aside all the things I’d been using, the props if you will, to show my strength and simply follow him that he might be all.
But God doesn’t puff Moses up. He doesn’t raise his self-esteem. In fact, he sort of confirms all the disqualifications Moses raises about himself. God says, “I made your tongue. I’ll give you my power. I will be with you.” God was not trying to convince Moses that Moses was strong enough for the job. He was telling Moses that God himself was strong enough for the job.
Don’t be afraid of your weakness. It’s the only thing God will work with! And the weaker you are, the stronger you will discover your Savior to be. You need not fear. The Lord’s grace is all-sufficient for weakness. It goes all the way down to our need.
answer.” I bet you’ve been there. I bet you’ve prayed those “I just want this to be over” kind of prayers. Maybe you’ve faced an illness or medical condition that causes you incredible pain that never goes away and seems like it never will, and you have found yourself pleading with God, over and over again, “Please, Lord, take this pain away from me!” Maybe you’ve been struggling with depression for a long time, and other people are getting frustrated with you and wonder why you can’t just “snap out of it,” and you’ve tried to tell them that you would if you could and that you don’t want to
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Did you catch that? “Why me?” Where many would say, “Why me?” in the pitiful sense of, “Why me? Why is God picking on me? Why did I get cancer?” Richard was saying, “Why would God choose little old me for this privilege?”
does not look like much. But it is more than enough. Some see the crumbs and move on. The plate seems distinctly un-regal; the illusion of this meager offering does not comport with the desires of their belly-god. Some hear in the call to feast on the words of the Lord a provocation calling them in some way a dog, and they scamper away yelping rather than leaning in, head bowed to be patted. My gospel is fuller than it appears, more satisfying. A morsel of grace is vastly delicious, greater in taste and sustenance than the biggest buffet at the world’s shiniest banquet. My gospel is desert
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artwork so tantalizingly promised, so wondrously described. There is a metaphor there. We are in a cave of sorts. Maybe it is like the cave of Plato’s parable, where we see on the walls mere shadows of the fire of reality. Around the corner, we are told, lies the great fire, a blazing beauty so wondrous it will fundamentally change everything we believe, everything we perceive, everything we are.
One pilgrim good with the crumbs was Jonathan Edwards. The man chased the sunbeams of God’s radiance like almost nobody else, always pointing us to the source of that radiance as the fulfillment and summation of the little fires we see now only dimly. The soul that in this world had only a little spark of divine love in it, in heaven shall be, as it were, turned into a bright and ardent flame, like the sun in its fullest brightness, when it has no spot upon it.2 Edwards began his career as a lawyer, and even as a pastor and theologian he had an academic, scholarly tenor to his analysis of
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I recently took up a brilliant biography of George Whitefield by historian Thomas Kidd.3 I was already somewhat familiar with Whitefield from my time pastoring in New England, where I dug a little into the region’s theological heritage and its towering figures. An Anglican from England, Whitefield was a sort of itinerant preacher in the American colonies in the early 1700s, traveling all over to preach the gospel. Wherever he went, immense crowds would come to hear him preach. People would gather in line days in advance to hear this great man of God proclaim the Word. And Whitefield was a
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glory. In Ecclesiastes, as Solomon is looking back on how often he terminated his affections on the crumbs and not on the Bread from which they had fallen, he keeps coming back to one sad image: it is like “striving after wind” (1:14,17; 2:11,17, 26; 4:4, 6, 16; 6:9). It’s like chasing the wind, like trying to catch smoke. In Ecclesiastes, all the beauty and meaning Solomon sought in the world only satisfied for a moment and then it was gone, poof, like a vaporous nothing. He calls it “vanity” and “meaningless.” The whole tapestry of the world he is weaving becomes unraveled at the end of
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