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Out of Weakness—Strength

by Parrish W. Jones, Ph.D.

©2005. All rights reserved

    

Psalm 78:1-8

Isaiah 61:1-3
Luke 4:16-21

I remember back in the not so glorious days of Florida State University when we were lucky to pull a 6 and 5 season just after Bobby Bowden had begun as head coach. For FSU a 6 and 5 was a winning season after years of 1 or 2 and 10 or 9 seasons. Someone asked Bowden how he had made the turn around. Always a gentleman but never a scholar, he can't speak English correctly after serving on the faculty of a major university for 30 years, he said, "Well, we got ourselves a bunch of great guys out there but they ain't got much talent, just ambition and grit. And you know what, they want to win real bad. So every week we reviewed the tapes of the other teams and our tapes and tried to figure out how to trap the other teams into playing to our weakest area. If we were lucky and guessed right, we won. If not, we lost it."

Today, we look at this lesson from Luke's gospel which nearly every scholar takes to be both the mission statement of Jesus and Luke's thesis for his narrative of Jesus's ministry. This text we can outline much the way we and our task force tried to do with the narrative we created at our last Summit Gathering. Let us take a look at the outline:

Now Jesus had a challenge in making this happen and still does. His challenge was to chose people who could lead this mission. Whom did he chose? You know the story. All of his disciples that we know anything about were flawed and often weak personalities. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1:26-31:

Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. 28 He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. 30 It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: "Let him who boasts boast in the Lord."

God has a method in the madness of choosing weak and flawed people. From our deepest weakness God can bring God's greatest strength.

Besides working on the results of our last gathering to discover actions we can take for closing the gap between where we are and where God wants us to go, we will be asking ourselves about our strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats. If we look at this chart, we see how these relate.

As we talked at the last gathering, we discovered some of these threats, opportunities, weaknesses and strengths. Unfortunately, in many churches we focus too much on the threats and weaknesses and not enough on the Opportunities and Strengths. But we must also recognize that weakness and threat are not deadly, sometimes as Bobby Bowden got his team to recognize, we can exploit our weaknesses to win. That takes creativity.

The danger of threats and weaknesses are not really those things. The real danger is our perception of them. Jesus could have just given up when he looked at the sorry material he had to work with and the threat of the empire of politics, economics and religion he had to confront. However, Jesus took these weak men and women and forged a creative plan to overcome the power and arrogance of the forces of the religious, economic and political empire. What appeared to be the overwhelming power of that empire became its downfall in the face of weak and apparently ignorant people of God.

 That is always how God works. God takes the least among us and lifts us up and the poorest and fills them with abundance, and the blind and makes them see and those imprisoned in real jails or in jails of addiction and liberates them. The powers of the world, including the ideology fabricators, do not expect this and so the community of faith always surprises them.

The danger to SPC is not its size. It is not its weaknesses. Nor are the threats that we face in the community. The danger is that we will play only to our strengths which will draw us into boasting of ourselves; or that we will be opportunistic and only go where it is easiest to go and do what is easiest to do. There are many churches who have done that and some are mega-churches and some are just little struggling churches.

Our challenge is not to become a church of a certain size. Our challenge is to be faithful to God in all things so God can mold us, as the potter molds the clay, into what God calls us to be. Our biggest challenge in this age, I believe is that we will adopt the world's notion of success instead of submitting to God's.

Worldly success is not just dangerous because it breeds complacency and satisfaction, but that it also leads to one of the deadly sins, namely, pride, which leads to the worst kind of idolatry: self-worship.

Let us always in everything boast in the Lord.