weak can be good

I overslept so we will plan to do chapter 3, "Stringing Pearls" in Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus: How the Jewishness of Jesus Can Transform Your Faith, by Ann Spangler and Lois Tverberg, next Wednesday. Read the chapter work through the questions following it. Like the book the chapter is most helpful for us to better understand what Scripture says.

When we feel weakness this can be a precursor to God's blessing. When we are weak we can identify better, and more closely with other fellow human beings, just as Hebrews points out about the priests in the old covenant, but even our Great High Priest in the new covenant, Jesus.

Feeling weakness in whatever way can also help us be more dependent on God and rightly interdependent on each other in Jesus. We know that we can't make it without him, so we cry out to him in faith, and look to him for the help that he alone can give to us. And we also look to others to pray for us, or offer any words of encouragement and insight they might have from God.

I have seen God's blessing come through either into my life, or through what I had to do into the lives of others, in the midst of my weakness. In answer to prayer the Lord makes his power known in our weaknesses.

This is part of our walk by faith and by the Spirit here. I find that I distrust myself more and more as I get older. Because I know God's blessing comes from God, not from me. And even when we not only are weak but look weak, God's power through Jesus by the Spirit can, and often will come forth.

What have you found about this in your own life?

God our Refuge and Strength

God's greatness, along with his goodness knows no bounds. God is infinite and limitless, but in a way that is beyond our finitude and limitations, in other words not infinite of what we are in our finitude, but beyond that.

We live in our limits; we are frail, weak and broken. Nothing about us has arrived, in fact the strongest aspect in us can become our undoing (example: Moses once angry, becoming the meekest man on the earth, and later lashing out in anger at Israel as he disobeyed God's command as to what he was to do).

In this psalm God is the Refuge and Strength of his people. We are surrounded by troubles on every side, and there's always more at stake than meets the eye. We are walking the path our Savior has blazed by his work for us, in his death and resurrection. Now we are both living in the old world, but explicitly said to be part of the new world that has come in in Christ. This means we have to embrace, take up our cross, and follow Jesus in this life, in the way he lived, somehow sharing in the fellowship of his sufferings here, so as to become like him in his death.

God is our Refuge. He will protect us to the end, that we may live well before him, and before the world, no matter what is happening around us. Is that going to be easy? No. But by faith we must stay in the protection of the Almighty.

God is our Strength. We are weak, but in our weakness his strength is revealed. His strength, not our own, but in his strength we too will find strength so we can mount up with wings like eagles, walk and not be weary, run and not faint.

Let's not succumb to our own weaknesses, to the voice suggesting to us that our end has come, that there is no hope for us, that we can't make it. Instead we need to remember the God who is near. We need to find our protection and all that we need in him.

10 "Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth."

11 The LORD Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.

Psalm 46

What "amens" or thoughts would you like to add here?