Limits and Strength
What if one requires the other?
No one loves to be restrained.
My one and half year-old son gets a look of panic in his eyes sometimes the moment he feels the seatbelt click across his chest.
When a bug keeps me from the gym, or hanging out with friends, the FOMO effect can hurt worse than the sore throat and body aches.
Then there is aging. Your body not being able to do the things it used to do with ease. As life goes on certain doors get shut. Opportunities dry up. It turns out that not everyone gets to live their dreams.
So, how should Christians think about our limitations?
We have them of course. Just as much as anyone. Receiving God’s Spirit apparently doesn’t exempt us in the short term from physical, emotional, mental, or economic thresholds.
Enter, 2 Corinthians 12:1-10.
In this passage Paul is talking about his highs and lows, but mostly his lows. He just spent chapter 11 describing all the things he’s suffered in the course of serving God. Shipwrecks, beatings, sleepless nights due to stress. These, says Paul, are the true marks of an Apostle.
His audience would have found this confusing to say the least. The Corinthians had a karma-goes-Greek style worldview. If you were doing it right, they reasoned, then you ought to be living large. You should look and sound good. You ought to book the biggest venues, and meteorically move from success to success.
In this sense Paul defied their cultural understanding of a holy man. “If I must boast”, Paul says, “I will boast of the things that show my weakness.” The Greek word used here for “weakness” has a wide semantic range. It can mean “incapacity, experience of limitation, ineffectualness, reasons for lack of confidence.” It’s these things that Paul says are of special value to him – and should be to us as well.
But what is there really to be gained by focusing on the things that hold you back? Shouldn’t the hero’s journey involve overcoming the odds?
Years back I was getting to know some men in a new Bible study I had joined. One of them plopped down next to me on the couch and asked candidly “brother, what would you say are your biggest flaws as a person?” I can’t say that’s my favorite ice breaker.
The good news is I don’t think Paul would have wanted us to sit around and compare our biggest failures. He actually has a different goal in mind. He continues, “For even if I wish to boast, I will not be a fool, for I would be telling the truth, but I refrain from this so that no one may regard me beyond what he sees in me or what he hears from me, even because of the extraordinary character of the revelations.”
Paul was a man of extraordinary gifts and experiences. He was an excellent communicator, a generational mind, and by anyone’s measure a highly successful leader. He also had experienced mind-blowing visions and performed miracles by the Spirit’s power. But he didn’t see these gifts and experiences as being what ultimately qualified him. In fact, he knew there was an ever-present danger that people who knew him might become enamored with his person, and in the process lose sight of Jesus.
And that was something Paul was unwilling to accept.
It’s better when people can focus on the content of a leader’s teaching and the manner of their life. Powerful experiences and inspiring stories have their place. But there is a crucial balance to be struck between inspiration and instruction when it comes to spiritual leadership. Both are important.
Inspiration typically utilizes pathos and emphasizes personal experience. Instruction on the other hand communicates objective truth. Inspiration when over utilized risks drawing people to self, making the inspirer seem cool and special. Biblical instruction on the other hand informs people directly about Christ.
Inspiring leaders often can motivate people in their orbit, but their influence wains with time and distance. Put another way, inspiration, when over used makes followers and admirers but not true disciples.
We need to prioritize instruction and modeling the humble ways of Jesus, if we want to have long term impact. This was something Paul understood. He wanted to be followed, but for the right reasons, and only to the end of leading people closer to God.
This attitude is important for believers to cultivate. But God also helps us along. Paul continues, “Therefore, so that I would not become arrogant, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to trouble me—so that I would not become arrogant.”
It’s hard to be the recipient of great gifts and experiences and not become conceited. This was a real and present danger for Paul as it is for any of us. To be arrogant means to have an undue sense of one’s own importance. This is exactly what happens when we slowly draw the wrong conclusion that our life’s particulars somehow make us better than anyone else.
Arrogance is wrong for many reasons. But one of the worst things it does is blind you to you to your God given limits. Alexander the Great was the greatest military leader the world has ever known. He was tutored by Aristotle, who was taught by Plato. He brutally conquered the Mediterranean world, and might have ruled for decades. But he over extended himself. He couldn’t be satisfied with his incredible achievements and attempted to conquer India. The campaign was a disaster. A project of pure vanity. He suffered mutiny then death. He left no children, no disciples. His empire crumbled in his wake.
God in his grace delivers sharp reminders of our weakness and limitations. He could strip us of our strengths, mute our gifts. But instead, he protects us just the way he did Paul. It’s unclear what this barb or splinter really was. In the end, I don’t think it’s that important. It could have been a besetting sin or temperamental weakness. It was most likely a physical ailment.
But regardless, Paul identified it as a thorn from Satan and asked God to take it away. “I asked the Lord three times about this, that it would depart from me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is enough for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’”
God said no to Paul’s prayer.
He refused to take away the weakness. He allowed the trial to continue. Why? Because he believed it left Paul with something better: a clear and uninterrupted sense of need for God’s grace, power, and mercy in his life and ministry.
Growing up in South East Asia, one of my favorite animals was the water buffalo. Culturally, they are symbols of majesty and strength. They are smart and powerful animals. But even they need a clear sense of boundaries in order to flourish. They require reminders of where they can’t go. Something which keeps them from thinking they can just do whatever they want. That’s why when domesticated, farmers will fashion pointed stakes and attach them to the buffalo’s yoke. They don’t harm the animals. But they keep them in line and focused where they should be.
Human beings are even more powerful and noble than water buffalo. But we are still prone to lose perspective, and assume we know best. We trust in our own strength, and wrongly attribute our successes to our own ingenuity and talent. It’s is one of God’s great acts of love that he throws (or allows) stumbling blocks in our way.
So, rather than resent these boundaries, broken circumstances, areas of failing, gaps, whatever they might be…instead we ought to boast. Paul says, “So then, I will boast most gladly about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may reside in me.”
It’s not that we need to view our problems and limitations as good in of themselves. They are often at least indirectly products of sin and evil.
It’s also not wrong to pray that God would take them away! But we can welcome and understand the role they play in our lives, should he allow them to remain.
Conscious weakness leads to dependence on God’s power.
My oldest daughter when she was younger suffered from extreme night terrors. She would sometimes scream and run around our house in the middle of the night for an hour or more. On some occasions she would even hurt herself, or hurt one of us. These went on for years and have only recently begun to subside.
These episodes would rob my wife and I of sleep and emotional energy. I don’t know why God didn’t cause them to fully go away. We certainly prayed they would. But I do know the nights they happened; I would spend hours awake in prayer. I know this caused me to be vulnerable and emotional with the people I was leading at the time.
I was personally limited. I had less energy, less confidence, less focus. But yet spiritually, I do believe I became more powerful. Because through the circumstance I was forced to pray and share my life with others. The situation also cemented in my head that as a parent, I didn’t have it all together.
Looking back, I truly believe this was a good thing. At least in that situation I can now say, “Therefore I am content with weaknesses, with insults, with troubles, with persecutions and difficulties for the sake of Christ, for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”
Limitations often take us by surprise and erode confidence. Sometimes people encounter new limits and draw the wrong conclusions. Not everyone benefits from the experience. We have to seek and take on a Godly view of our situation.
For instance, becoming a parent will probably change how you serve God and others. Your bandwidth will inevitably change and you will have to organize your life differently. But it’s not true that your best days of Christian service are behind you. Or, health problems will slow you down and might even take you out of certain roles. But that doesn’t mean that God no longer has a plan for your life. Is it possible that God is using or allowing your ailments to take you deeper? Is it possible that without this point of frustration in life, that you would grow conceited and wander off track?
If this is the case, then all that’s really happening is that you are in the midst of an important exchange – your power and capacities, for those of the Lord.
Watchman Nee was a Chinese pastor in the early Chinese house church movement. He is quoted in his biography “Against the Tide” as saying,
“One day our own resources, our power, our toil, our faithfulness, will all proclaim to us their vanity. This lesson is not easily learned. The hopes of so many are still centered, not on the blessing of the Lord but on the few loaves in their hands.
It is so pitifully little we have in hand, and yet we keep reckoning with it; and the more we reckon the harder the work becomes.
What is “blessing”? It is the working of God where there is nothing to account for His working. When five loaves provide food for five thousand and leave twelve baskets of fragments, that is blessing. When the fruit of your service is out of all proportion to the gifts you possess, that is blessing.
Many of us only expect results commensurate with what we are in ourselves, but blessing is fruit that is out of all correspondence with what we are.
If we set our hearts upon the blessing of the Lord, we shall find things happen that are altogether out of keeping with our capacity and that surpass even our dreams.”
God ordained limits can serve to enable strength. When we trust him to work beyond the boundaries of our circumstances, that’s the space in which true miracles occur.
Humble appreciation for our limits, which often come through the experience of weakness, can actually make us better helpers. Better leaders. Better spouses. Better parents.
People who recognize their limits in knowledge for example are slow to jump to conclusions and judge the actions or opinions of others. They keep learning. They keep trying things. They don’t assume they already know all they need to know.
Understanding your own limits in power leads you to not over extend. You recognize your need for other believers, and more quickly move to prayer.
When you know your control is limited you won’t put undue faith in your ability to manage the situation. Instead, you will focus on what you know is actually your responsibility.
The consciously limited person, can be a more powerful person. They seem themselves rightly in the world, and know their place before God. This allows them then to move effectively.
You may be reading this as someone who has, like Paul, done and seen extraordinary things. Many of us have been used in mighty ways and have some cool stories to tell. So, we shouldn’t be surprised when God chooses not to spare us from persecution or personal problems.
If we take Jesus to be our model, the suffering and glory go hand in hand.
Similar to my son’s seat belt, our limits might be a crucial source of spiritual safety as we develop and grow. Dealing with difficult times spiritually is what will qualify us to be of even greater use to God.
So, let God redeem your trials. They prepare you to serve. Be secure in admitting your weaknesses and failures. Dare to laugh at the ways in which you obviously fall short. You follow a great God who makes up for more than the difference.