The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb: Searching for Jesus’ Path of Power in a Church that Has Abandoned It

by Jamin Goggin

Our weakness is seen in three aspects of our condition. First, as human beings we are created finite and temporal and therefore weak and limited. We are dust, even though we are God’s beloved dust.9 Second, each of us has unique areas of frailty, incapacity, and weakness, whether physical, emotional, or mental. Third, we are weak because of our sin. We have all sinned and fallen short of God’s glory (Rom. 3:23), and we all continue to experience the “desires of the flesh” (Gal. 5:17–21). In all of this we are called to humbly acknowledge the totality of our weakness and rely wholly upon God for strength.

This last point can easily be misunderstood. Because of sin, we are all drawn to autonomy—we are all oriented to independence rather than dependence upon God. Because of this, we will always be tempted to use our strengths (whether they are talents, abilities, or even spiritual gifts) in our own power rather than in reliance upon Christ.

Play to your weaknesses

Whether I like it or not, I’m going to be in a meeting or standing in front of thirty graduate students, and I have to choose to rest in Christ’s power or try to assert my own.

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 powerful; we only need him where we are failing or still poor. In this sense, operating from our strengths is practicing atheism.

Marriage, for instance, is a relational reality that calls us into our weakness, if, in fact, we are willing to grow in love. In marriage we are called into our brokenness, our inability to love another well, and our unhealthy desires.

Paradoxically, we don’t discover what it means to be image-bearers by looking primarily at the first image-bearers (Adam and Eve); we discover what it means to be image-bearers by looking to the image of God himself, Jesus Christ.