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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jamin Goggin
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September 18, 2022 - January 15, 2023
This hunger for power was reinforced by four years of high school athletics, playing for a team that didn’t lose much. I had learned to equate winning with work ethic. If you put in the hard work, you should win. Winning, of course, was the goal. What was the point of playing if you weren’t focused on winning? As I started Bible college, I quickly discovered that I could apply the approach I learned from sports to academics and receive the very accolades and praise I was so desperate for.
As he talked about the dynamics that contributed to his infidelity, at the forefront were pride, status, and grandiosity.
This is the first temptation of power: We view the problem as “out there.” We recognize it in other churches, pastors, fellow Christians, or political and cultural leaders, but we ignore the problem in our own hearts.
We find it much easier to become burdened and angered by sins that are not our own. When those sins are committed by those in leadership, we find it even easier. Notice, Jesus is not saying the solution is to ignore the sins of others. We should name sins, just as Jesus did. However, we must recognize that only after naming the truth of our own sin can we come in grace and truth to name the sins of others. Only when we see the truth of ourselves can we have mercy to address others in God’s grace.
I have seen my thirst for power driving my ministry. I have viewed other pastors as competition and the church as a means of self-glory. I have acted in ways that place me alongside the powermongers I so readily critiqued.
Grace is God’s giving of himself to his people, and in Christ, we come to receive the kind of power God offers: the power of the cross.2 This is a power known through death and resurrection—moving through our weakness to a new kind of strength—strength in abiding in, submitting to, and resting in God alone.
Wisdom is not essentially about making right decisions, but about living by the power of God in Christ Jesus.
Conversely, the way from below is a rejection of God’s power and a dependence upon ourselves in sinful autonomy. The way from below rejects abiding in God in favor of our own willpower, turning to the power of the self to make a difference in the world. Ultimately the source of this power, as we will see in chapter 4, is the world, the flesh, and the devil.
God can move in his grace to produce kingdom fruit despite our pride, but the call for followers of Jesus is to have hearts congruent with his work. True kingdom fruit is both internal and external. God seeks to make good trees that produce good fruit. To use the language from James 3 again, we can do things in bitter jealousy and selfish ambition, and despite our motives God can still bring about good results. But this is not all that God desires. God calls us to produce fruit from the heart and to participate genuinely in his work in the world.
The way from above is power from God and power for God; it is a power known in our weakness and expressed in love. The other way of power, the way from below, seeks power from within and pursues power as an end in itself.
Because we are prone to waywardness, prone to walk the path of pride, self-sufficiency, and power, we need the church to ground us in Christ and his way. We cannot live in Christ’s way on our own. This likely sounds right, but many of us functionally doubt our need for the church.
Who are the brothers and sisters in Christ we can look to who have embraced the way from above?
It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I came to realize how messy it really was. I discovered that while my calling was true, my heart was anything but.
The Christian life is one that requires dependence, humility, and weakness to know strength. This is the path set before us by Paul, and this was the path traveled by Christ as he marched to Golgotha.
Making a name for yourself, hiding your weaknesses, and emphasizing strengths are considered normal. How else would you get noticed? How else would people hear about your book? If you don’t stake your claim in “the scene,” nobody else will.
“You should have a fifty-year plan—a vision for growth over a long period of time as you embrace your weakness.”
The totality of Paul’s weaknesses had become unpalatable to them. The Corinthians wanted a super-apostle, not an apostle of weakness.
God invites us into the valley. The question is whether we will accept the invitation. The valley will always be in the shadow of the mountains. The mountains, with their dramatic peaks and pillars to the clouds, will always appear more special to the world around you. Becoming a valley is truly humbling. And yet this is the place where the rain soaks deep and fruit is truly produced. The valley is the place of life. It is the place of kingdom power.
The “way of weakness” sounds more like a depleted, insufficient, and irrelevant life. As we explored this tension in our hearts, we realized that much of our lingering skepticism was the result of a certain understanding of personhood. We still held beliefs about human identity and flourishing that could not digest this notion of power we were uncovering. Questions kept rising to the surface that we knew needed answering. Fortunately, we didn’t have to go far to find wisdom.
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. This has obvious implications for how we think about ministry and calling, but it also impacts our understanding of what it means to be a human being. On this understanding of life, part of what it means to mature as a person is to accept our weakness and abide within it.
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. Whether we feel strong or weak, therefore, God invites us to walk forward in the truth of our weakness so we might know his power.
As is often a temptation in our formation and growth as Christians, it is easy to think we can achieve our way out of our struggle. It is easy to think that if we do all the right things, everything will work out. I felt the temptation James spoke of, and knew my tendency to try to fix this myself. I knew what it looked like to try to reject my weakness and turn to power. I could see the ways in which I had bought into a self-achieved identity. The grasp for power is pervasive in my field, but is certainly not isolated to the academy. We want to buy the right house in the right neighborhood.
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He had a strong personality with an incredible academic background, and yet we didn’t feel intimidated by him. We never felt as if we needed to prove ourselves to him or seek his validation. Rather, his power led us into honesty and vulnerability, not self-aggrandizement and posturing.
The power from below radiates a certain waste product and pollution into our souls, shrinking our capacity for love and undermining our ability to really attend to others. The sad irony is that using this way helps us, in the short term, to get ahead in this world, but in the long term it undermines our ability to flourish as a human being.
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.
In the kingdom, flourishing is found in serving others, not “lord[ing] it over them” (Matt. 20:25). In the kingdom, flourishing is discovered by being last, not being first (Mark 9:35). In the kingdom, flourishing is embracing the littleness of our roles and accepting that the “less honorable” parts of the body are more honored (1 Cor. 12:21–26). In the kingdom, flourishing is known in our weakness (2 Cor. 12:9).
As we see kingdom power in the church today, our starting question should not be “How can we be great?” but “What role do the weak, disabled, and elderly have in our midst?” When those who are obviously weak have no place in the church, we know that we have rejected the way from above and have embraced a power antagonistic to the gospel.
Instead of entering into the way of weakness, we try to use God to become something powerful.
The way we understand it, spiritual gifts are unapologetically about power to control—where we assert our power in the service of the kingdom. These easily become devices for our self-actualization. We mistakenly believe these gifts are special abilities, almost like superpowers. This creates two problems. First, it establishes a hierarchy of value, where we come to see certain people as particularly important because of their gifts. We come to think about these “special abilities” in worldly terms, so naturally, we begin making worldly value judgments. The result is that we create a hierarchy
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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.
The result is a shift of sexuality into the realm of power and control.
Everything we do taps into a deeper reality of power: power from below for control, or power from God for love.
We asked, “Where have you learned most significantly that strength really does come in weakness?” As James leaned forward to answer, Rita muttered under her breath, “I could tell you after a few years.” Jamin and I sat silently, knowing that this disease was the great trial of her life; but then James inserted his own thought. “You see,” he started, looking over at his bride, “Rita is worried that as she loses her memory, she will forget Jesus.” James glanced at us but continued to talk to her. “So I remind her, what matters is not that you remember him, but that he remembers you.”
When we as Christians embrace the way from below, we reject not only the way of Christ but also the truth of ourselves. We are warping our souls and rewiring our hearts to a world that isn’t real. In doing so we embrace fantasy, and our hearts, souls, and minds recalibrate for a world that doesn’t exist. We had to find help distinguishing fantasy from reality, which meant that we needed to ask deeper questions about the true nature of kingdom power and worldly power.
No matter how genuine the desire, the quest to win and feel powerful had seeped into the veins of this church.
Giving ourselves to the way from below so warps the soul that we begin confusing God’s way with the way of the demons. What had been exposed was a culture of domination, underhanded power plays, and fear-driven leadership. Jesus claimed that his people would be known by their love, yet this place—in its quest to be biblical—somehow sought out worldly power to win.
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 imbibe the social hierarchies of the world—with its focus on celebrity, material possessions, and status—and we bring these values into the Christian life. Then these values become our litmus test for spiritual wisdom and leadership.
The scary truth is that we can become a tool of the powers, even in our zeal to do the right thing (maybe especially there). We can’t assume that the church is abiding in the way from above simply because it is the church. Again, Kyle and I were brought back to James 3, where this way of evil is expressed through jealousy and selfish ambition. These traits are often treated as insignificant if not palatable flaws of effective and passionate leaders. But James tells us that where these fruits of the heart exist, “there will be disorder and every vile practice” (James 3:16). In other words, we
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we have allowed a beautiful end to justify our evil means.
“Through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph. 3:10).
Is the church walking in the way from below—a way that is unspiritual, earthly, and demonic, driven by selfishness and jealousy—or is it walking in the way from above, made manifest on the cross in love? This question should be at the heart of our small groups, conferences, seminars, and publishing; it should be woven into our parenting, friendships, and service.
This is how powers created for Christ can be wielded against the way of Christ.
Nonviolent action is still action, but it is the kind of action that unearths the truth of a person’s heart.
“We conquer not by the sword but by the power of the powerlessness of love.”
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.
but is showing us how to unmask the powers and principalities at work in the hearts of those rejecting the way of God.
My child saw my weakness as absolute strength. But it isn’t easy to embrace weakness. I know the call is, ‘Your strength is made perfect in weakness.’20 Yeah, I can say all this stuff, but I can say it better than I can do it.” John sat forward a bit, still looking intently at me. “So, I’ve got to embrace that too. 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.”
There is no other way. In the face of evil in the world, the way of Jesus—the way of the cross—is power in and through our weakness.
Privilege says that the largest ministry with the most resources is the most effective ministry.”24 Cleveland’s points forced us to grapple with some of our unhealthy ministry assumptions and caused us to ask some tough questions: Why don’t we first turn to supporting and encouraging inner-city pastors instead of assuming our presence is the solution?
