03.04 | The Work of Weakness

2 Corinthians 5:11-6:13

Apr 02, 2024

‘From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.’
2 Corinthians 5:16-17

Exactly one year ago today, I caught Covid.

I didn’t get it very badly. I took a couple of days off work, and then got back to work as normal. Except that, it wasn’t really a normal return to work. Alongside the efforts at doing the usual things, was an increasingly pressing fatigue accompanying all my actions. Headaches were becoming more regular, and my mental stamina and agility gradually lessened, until I found myself one afternoon, slumped in bed, with a feeling that I’d never had before.

I simply could not do a single further task. I was spent.

A week or so later I was signed off with long Covid.

The past months of the slow, up-and-down recovery process, has been a long journey in the relationship of strength and weakness. I am realising that I am more used to strength. I am more used to doing. To being useful, productive, able, and strong. I’m used to bouncing back from illness quickly and stepping in with others need a hand. I’ve realised through incapacity how deeply I’ve defined myself by my strength.

The past nine months have been a learning ground in another experience. Weakness. Needing help. Not doing. Being unable. I’ve needed to rely on my team and wife and even my kids to help me journey along the slow walk to recovery.

I’ve needed to begin the humbling, limiting, liberating, and powerful work of weakness.

Paul is getting to the heart of his message now. He’s in flow. And his flow seems to be widening and widening the gap between our external experience of the world, and the internal reality of who we are. It’s like he’s pushing these things further and further apart, until we’re left with utter external weakness on the one side, twenty miles to our left, and the most indescribably stunning vision of who we are faraway to our right.

Yesterday it was clay jars and shabby tents.

Today, he says, he does not regard anyone according to the flesh. In other words, he doesn’t measure anybody’s true reality, worth, and identity by their external circumstances.

Rather, he says, in the midst of your weakness,

You are a new creation.

Today, he says, in the midst of your days of suffering,

You are in the day of salvation.

This is not how I’d understood these things to be.

Because, somewhere along the way, I’d gathered up the idea that the successful life was about strength. That it was about increasing ability and capacity, with the metrics of my career and home life being a graph with the line going upwards and to the right.

I’d not have said this. But the heart, it turns out, can lag a long way behind the mind.

Weakness is helping my heart to slowly catch up. To see that the Kingdom of God works differently.

That God is less dependent upon my strength my behaviour suggested.

That following Jesus is not a transaction that guarantees me a career that is successful by the measurements of the world.

That a life of meaning is less to do with spectacular attainments, and more to do with a faithful pursuit of the King, through every circumstance.

And that the power of resurrection follows those that take up their cross.

Weakness is brutal. When we are physically drained and financially stuck and we don’t know the answers and we’re walking out of abject failure. But the brutality of these experiences do not touch your true self. Rather, within them is hidden an opportunity for the demolition of every value system that opposes that of the Kingdom. It is maybe the only place where we can unpick the fragility of the false ego, with all its claims to being so very important and necessary. It is the place of letting go of the exhausting demands of relentless perfection. And thus it is the place of great liberty, into the very strength and power and life of God Himself.

Because the more we die to all this foolishness around strength,

The more greatly we are ready for His inbreaking work.

For you, my friend, are a new creation.

And this very day, in the midst of all its weakness and imperfection, is the day of salvation.

Reflect:
Hold your day before Him.
Where are you experiencing strength?
Where are you experiencing weakness?
Breathe in. Breathe out. Let go of the anxious pressure to be competent, to hide your weakness, to be all sufficient.
You are a new creation. Ask His life to breathe and move through you.

Pray:
Father,
Reorder me:
Away from the obsession with strength;
Away from the obsession with competence;
Away from the desire to be self-sufficient.
Reorder me:
Into the humility that can flourish in weakness;
And the trust that grows in my incompetency;
And the community that builds around my limitations;
That my life may be
Not impressive to my wounded ego,
But glorious for you.
In Jesus’ Name
Amen