A Heart for Weakness Part 1: Context
Introduction
Augustine said something like, “God may not give us the desires of our hearts, but he will always give us the heart of our desires.” Like the man who prayed for patience, and the Lord supplied noisy neighbours. That God provides the innermost core of what we are praying (Rom 8:26) has been proven true for me by some recent tortuous experiences. For months I have found embedded deep within me an enormous longing (Ps 84:2) to grow in Christ. I know by the intensity and persistence of this impulse that its origin is in heaven. Aware that I was heading overseas to the Philippines and on to Hong Kong this desire only became stronger, especially in the midst of unusual uncertainties about itinerary. Transiting in Singapore airport on the way to Manila I strongly sensed that more than me teaching others, somehow the Lord was going to teach me. There was no way however the journeying trials used to do this. The gravity of some of the events below might seem exaggerated, but they are true to my experience as I felt the hand of the Lord heavy on me (Ps 32:4).
Somethings Really Wrong
Little things started to go wrong from the time I landed in Manila. My friend was not inside the arrival hall, and I had no working phone. Then a few days later boarding a scooter for hire to take me to a church my leg hit and broke its number plate. (By God’s grace, the driver late called my friends and said because I was a “missionary” he would forego any costs.) The next day in haste to get to public transport I knocked over a cleaner’s sign but was too sinful to turn back to restore it. My conscience was smitten by how unchristian I was! Finally, in an escalating series of feeling weighed down by my own errors I became agitated with a young man’s slowness to understand spiritual things. An awareness of a deep ungodliness in my heart stayed with me into the early night hours of that night. The Lord was not satisfied with something deep in me. Thankfully, a holy fear of God indicated a divine encounter.
I was praying day and night over what exactly the Spirit wanted to speak to me about so I could change my heart (cf. Ezek 18:31). Was it a specific chronic sin of intolerance, reactiveness, holding others to my standards, all of the above and more? I felt quite dreadful about this, and impotent. How could I be so heartless and self-righteous to others? Where had the soft merciful heart of the Father gone? Simultaneously I knew I was under spiritual attack in a foreign land and that the Lord was working out his greater purpose. The Father had after all been listening to my earnest prayers to be like Jesus for months (Isa 26:9). Then I sensed that the Lord’s wisdom was going to take care of me, and that this was going to be enacted in events. Only God knew the Taal volcano was set to explode, but before it I did the Lord first spoke some foundational truth into my heart.
All One in Love
We tend to think of reconciliation as a future event, but the Bible speaks of it as essentially past. “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” (Col 1:19-20). This means that when we minister to people in their brokenness not to reconcile them to God but from the reality that by the blood of the cross they are already truly reconciled (Rom 5:10-11). Since God is already at peace with all who are in Jesus (Rom 5:1) I should be too! Instead of becoming agitated with” slow-witted” Christians (Gal 3:1), I need to dwell by grace in the “throne rights” of a child of God (Eph 2:6 cf. Rev 3:21). God’s purpose, liveliness, happiness, goodness, peace etc. and now a part of my essential being in Christ. No external circumstances, no matter how puzzling (see below) need affect this.
In the middle of one night I could sense that the ultimate impulse holding everything together was Love. Colossians 3:14 applies to the whole universe, “And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect unity.” (cf. Heb 1:3). The (objective) reconciliation of all things through the blood of Christ has been accomplished through Love (1 John 4:10; Rev 1:5b). The greater the awareness of this Love of God the less our sense of distance between us and others. There is no space between us for alienation, negativity or reactiveness for every space is already filled with God’s great Love (Eph 1:22; Col 3:11). This is not sentimental garbage or naïve idealism, it’s what we believe when we have the mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16; Phil 2:5).
I had an unusual revelation when a Filipino brother quoted Acts 17:25, “he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.” Jesus was totally aware that his total human existence, down to the air he breathed (cf. Gen 2:7) was supplied by the Father, “I live because of the Father” (John 6:57). He knew he was “held together” by the Love of the Father in the power of the Spirit. We can share this quality of awareness. By faith we can appropriate what Jesus took away in his death. That at his point of dereliction, “Why have you forsaken me? (Mark 15:34), Christ took into himself the “not-held-together” state of the fallen world that rejects the Love of the Lord. Every final force of “destruction” (Rom 9:22; 2 Thess 1:9; 2 Pet 3:7) has been taken into the cross so in Christ there is only fulness of Love. These deep truths enter into our experience in the same way they became true in Jesus, by total disablement/disempowerment.
Disaster
Then the evening before I was due to fly out the next morning the Taal volcano erupted and all flights were cancelled. The airline was uncontactable by phone and by the time we reached one of their offices the next available flight to Hong Kong was very shortly before I was due back in Perth. In the end I was forced to wait an extra four days in Manila, knowing that the volcano could blow up any time, and my insurer informed me I had failed to tick the natural disaster box on my policy! Many people were praying for a safe exodus, but in large scale things like this the sovereign will of God is surely unchangeable. Then in the middle of my final night in the Philippines the Lord started speaking about a sin in me which was tying all my wrongness together. Intolerance of weakness. I needed to see weakness in others as an opportunity for a display of the grace of God in them. After all, only through weakness/struggle/impoverishment/feebleness can people come to Christ and grow in him.
Paul doesn’t say, “Who is weak but I am strong/superior/past-that.”, but “Who is weak, and I am not weak?” (2 Cor 11:29) and “To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak” (1 Cor 9:22). The apostle is weak by choice because he has learned to submit his will to the will of him who sent him. I was soon to learn even deeper things from the Lord.