Stronger Than You Think

To paraphrase the classic children’s song, “We are weak, but He is strong.”  We can never outgrow those words and the message behind them.  We never truly experience the power of God’s work in our lives until we acknowledge our weakness.  Otherwise, we keep pushing God out of the way and try to take control ourselves.  Once we abandon our prideful conceit that we have what it takes to manage our lives, we have opened ourselves for his power to work within us.  As Paul told his friends when he struggled with an infirmity in his life, “His power is made perfect in my weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

It is God who makes the sun rise, not us.  It is God who guides the course of planets and nations.  When we try to take matters into our own hands, we generally make a mess of it all, and eventually ask the Lord in humility to clean it up for us.  “Let go and let God,” as the old saying goes.  Don’t try to do for yourself what is ultimately in God’s hands.  Surrender your life to him.  Put yourself in his hands.  “Trust in the Lord, and lean not on your own understanding,” as Proverbs puts it (3:5).  We would all do well to live by these words

Perhaps, however, at times we learn the lesson too well.  While it is true that we depend upon the Lord for all things, and ultimately are powerless over the affairs of our lives, this does not mean that we should sit back helplessly and await God’s activity.  God will act; have no doubt about that.  But how?

I’m convinced that God prefers to act through his people.  He works his power by bestowing it upon the faithful, who then act in God’s name to do incredible things that no human on their own would be capable of.  It may be a great societal injustice, or a character flaw within themselves.  God could use them to turn their community upside-down, or to bring hope to a single person.

If you look at what God has placed before, and if you have heard his call to do something about it, you have several choices.  You can laugh at God and how absurd his plans are.  You can look around you for someone else to take care of it.  You can collapse in a pile of despair and depression, overwhelmed by the impossible.

Or, you can stand up.  You can claim the ability and the strength that God is giving you.  You can look the situation straight in the eye, and know that you can handle it with the Lord’s power at work in you.

Don’t ever hide behind the excuse that “I’m only human.”  You are a child of God.  He has given you, and all of us, responsibility to change the world, to change the lives of people around you, and perhaps most difficult of all, change yourself.

Yes.  We are weak and he is strong.  But that is not an excuse to hide behind.  It is a reminder that our weakness is irrelevant when we accept the strength he gives to us.