Strength to Weakness

We are into advent season and our theme is Love What Has Changed. Each week of advent we are going to talk about something significant that has changed because of the advent (the coming) of Jesus Christ. When Christ came into the world what changed? What was once this way and then after he came it became this way?Well, this week we want to focus on a change that happened to Christ himself. In becoming a man, Jesus went from strength to weakness. He went from being almighty God to an all-depenedent child, an infant that any one of us could have physically overpowered in an instant. Isaiah’s prophesy begins, “Unto us a child is born.” This just rolls off our tongues so easily, but it ought to stick in our throats and cause us to choke. And so the goal of today is to make you choke. That really is the goal. God would truly be honored if we just choked at the absurdity that God became a man.So today we are going to talk about the gift of weakness. Christmas is marked, perhaps more than anything else, by the giving of gifts. Everybody gives gifts at Christmas. Now what makes a good gift? Maybe it’s easier to approach this question from the opposite direction. What makes a bad gift?Often times, half the fun for a kid is imagining what’s in the package. There’s all this suspense. They shake it to see if it makes noise or to see how heavy it is. It takes a lot of the fun away if you already know what the gift is. The older you get the fewer surprises you receive because you’re always giving guidance. Something that’s not a surprise. A bad gift is something you don’t need (you already have six flashlights and you are given another). Or maybe something cheap or something that doesn’t have much value. A bad gift could even be something thoughtless. Maybe someone would like a smelly bar of soap but not me. Clearly you don’t know me.Now it is absolutely correct to say that Jesus was the gift of all gifts. If you think about it, it ticks all the boxes of a good gift. It’s a total surprise. Nobody was expecting God to come in the flesh! It’s something we absolutely need. It’s extremely valuable. It could not be more thoughtful. But if you distill the gift down to its essence, what is it? It’s the gift of weakness. It’s God becoming weak. Let’s take the infinite God and wrap him up in rags of flesh and deliver that as the greatest gift mankind has ever received.Nobody says, “You know what I really want for Christmas? Weakness. Give me weakness in spades.” And yet that is exactly what Christmas is all about. So we are going to talk today about why it is that strength made weak is the greatest gift we could have ever received.Now here’s the thing about God. He’s always doing things inverted from the way we would do it. He’s always inverting our normal intuitions. He’s always flipping things around on its head. His values are often times the exact opposite of ours. For example, if you were given a choice of any job in the United States, what would you pick? You would instantly start thinking through various factors that are important to you. Maybe you think of a job that makes a lot of money, where you are respected and appreciated, that gives you security, and has significant power where your decisions affect a lot of people. So maybe a CEO of a large tech company, a lead research scientist, or maybe a senator, president, or executive.Think about it. Jesus was in that position to choose and he chose to work for Wright Brothers Construction as a framer. Really? Of any job in the world you picked carpenter. Why carpenter? Why would you possibly want that? There are reasons but here’s one of them: the more disadvantage you begin with the greater the glory of your future ascension. It’s about stripping away the alternate explanations for your ascension to power. You weren’t given any privilege and so there can’t be alternate explanations for your rise.Is it any surprise that the son of a millionaire himself becomes a millionare? Of course not. He had all the advantages. He went to the best schools which connected him with the best people, which launched him into the best career which catapulted him into the best investment opportunities. It’s obvious. You’d almost have to be a fool to not end up successful. But if you rise out of the slums of Calcutta well, that’s impressive. Every force on earth was keeping you right where you are. You were denied an education. You had the worst nutrition and highest exposure to disease. You interacted with nobody of influence and all your time was just spent surviving so you had no chance of advancing. If you did somehow make it out, the only explanation is that you made that happen. You get a movie made after your rags to riches ascent. It’s on a totally different level.The principle we are observing is that God prefers the weak. He just prefers it because it’s better material to work from for his purposes. And we find this all through the Bible. Do you remember in the Scriptures where God speaks to the nation of Israel about her calling?Now that kind of makes you feel special doesn’t it. Out of all the people on earth, I’ve been chosen. Ha! Look at that folks, God chose me. And you can kind of start feeling proud about that. There were millions of people on earth. Why did God choose to work with the nation of Israel? What did he see in them? God says, “Hey, you want to know why I chose you?”God loves to make something out of nothing. And who did he choose to lead these people? God used an inarticulate Moses. Why? So that nobody could say it was the greatness of Moses’ speech that persuaded Pharaoh. And he led them out into a dead end in the desert. Why? So that they might be in a serious position of need so that God could save them. God prefers to work with the weak, marginalized, and insignificant.One of my favorite stories in this regard is the story of Gideon. Do you remember this? It’s such a great story. God chose Gideon and this guy is full of fear. I’m telling you, he’s just a total milk-toast pushover. He’s ruled by fear. And God says, “I’m going to use you to conquer the Midianites, some of the most vicious, merciless warriors in the Ancient Near East.” Gideon says to God, “No God you don’t understand, I’ve got a shallow frame. I’ve got the heart of a mouse, not a lion. I’m no warrior.” Gideon says, “That can’t be. You’ve got the wrong guy! God, I’m weak. I’m nothing.” And God says, “Really? Put me to the test. I dare you.”So remember the story. Gideon takes out his wool jacket and says, “God, if you want me to lead up your army, then let the wool be soaking wet with dew and the ground around it be dry as a bone.” And sure enough, in the morning it was so. Now Gideon set up the test. He could have asked for anything. He determined the rules. And God met every one of them and he still doubted. That’s weakness upon weakness. So he sets up a second test this time in reverse. Let the ground be soaked but let the wool be dry as a bone and it was so. Finally, Gideon begrudgingly concedes and gathers the entire army. You can imagine him shaking in his boots, going “What the heck am I doing here? Are you kidding me?” And so he tries to stack the deck in his favor. You can imagine him setting up a draft and getting every single warrior he can find. He’s got 15-year-old kids armed with picks and shovels.They start out with 32,000 soldiers strong and God looks that and wags his head. Way too strong. Way too powerful. We need to weed those guys out. So God says, “Everyone who is scared, go home.” And 22,000 people flee. That leaves 10,000. Now that tells you something! The fact that 22,000 people fled because they were too scared tells you something about what they were up against. Apparently, they were about to face an enemy impressive enough to cause a 32,000 person army to shake in their boots. Now you have 10,000 left. These remaining 10,000 had to just be gluttons for punishment. They were the military die-hards whose entire identity was wrapped up in combat. They had to fight. It was what defined them.You can imagine Gideon saying to God, “Are you kidding me? What on earth are you doing? How do you expect me to win by cutting away 2/3 of my army?” God looks at that army and wags his head again, “Man, I hate to break it to you Gideon. But that still way too strong of an army. Sorry friend. We are going to have to chip away just a little bit more. Just a little. How many do you have again? 10,000? Okay, yeah, we are going to have to take away 97% of that.” God says, “Everyone who laps water like a dog, those are the warriors I want.” So Gideon goes from 32,000, to 10,000 to 300. Can you believe that? 300 men! When the army was 32,000 strong, 2/3 of them, fled in fear because of the strength of the Midianite army? And you are going to take them on with 300, with one one-thousandth of your former strength? Why in the world would you do that?God says, “Ah yes. Now this is perfect, I’ve got the weakest general and I’ve paired him with the weakest possible army. Perfect.” God loves to work with weakness. God straight up tells Gideon, “Listen, you are too strong for me to use.”You see, the reason God loves to start with weak material is so that there is no question what the source of strength really is. When you have an army of 300 men destroy an army that causes 30,000 people to pee their pants in fear, there’s only one explanation. God. That’s it. God. God loves to be in a position of disadvantage. He loves to start with weak material. He salivates at the impossible situations. Do you see what God values? Are you starting to get a taste for God’s delicacies? Do you see the currency in which God trades?He Prefers Weakness.Here’s the great thing about God preferring weakness. That means he prefers us! Do you remember what Paul said to the Corinthians back in 1 Corinthians 3?God can choose anything he wants and this is what he chooses! Do you see it? Do you know how encouraging this is friends? God values the weak. God values the broken. If you are especially broken this morning and extra weak, if you are destroyed and your life is ruined, then you have the perfect qualities for God. God is going to bypass the more privileged and find the destitute, the destroyed, the powerless. It’s so different than the way we normally work.I’ll go to Lowes to buy lumber and I’m like the most demanding customer in the world. I’m always trying to pick through the pile to find something worth using. Not the one that has a knot in it, or is warped, or bent, or has a crack. The worst is when you go there and the entire pile is picked through and all that’s left is the junk wood. It just looks like a plate of spaghetti. And I always laugh thinking about someone actually buying that wood. It’s garbage. When I look at some of the lumber, man, what idiot would intentionally choose some of these boards. God does. He’s salivating. That’s the perfect material. The more warped and twisted a person is, the more bent and cracked and broken, the better. “Oh there’s a splintered edge, perfect. Full of knots and twists. I can’t believe I’m so lucky to find this one that is stained and damaged and abused!”Why is he so excited? Anyone can build amazing furniture out of perfect lumber but only a master carpenter can build jaw dropping furniture out of garbage wood that everyone else would bypass and say, “That’s junk. That’s garbage. Throw that in the trash, it’s useless.” It demonstrates the glory of the craftsman. Who did Jesus choose to be his disciples? Fishermen. Tax Collectors. Really? God chooses the weak. Paul prays to God, “Remove this weakness from me.” God says, “My grace is sufficient for you. My power is made perfect in weakness.”When I was in grade school, we used to play tackle football and we’d always pick teams by having two team captains go back and forth and choose teams. I choose Matt. I choose Joe. I choose Tyler. And back and forth you go. And you couldn’t help but feel bad for the guy who was picked last. Because being picked last always meant you were the worst. You were just being ranked, flat-out. Your order of being picked said something about how desirable you were as an athlete.Do you know that God works the same way but totally in reverse? If God picks you, if you get chosen by God, that’s not a compliment. God is looking to build his kingdom with broken materials. He’s looking to build his kingdom with stuff others would throw away and say there’s no point in trying to restore that. It’s too far gone. That’s junk. Now it’s all at once an insult and a blessing. It’s an insult because it says something about your condition. Being chosen by God means one thing and one thing only: you ain’t pretty. It really does confront your brokenness. But here’s the blessing. Being picked up by God is a sure guarantee that you won’t stay junk. Once the master craftsman gets through with you, you are going to be amazing. The way you are going to be redeemed will one day blow your mind.Let me finish with a sharp point. When God shows up to speak to Gideon in the book of Judges and tells him that he is the one who is commissioned to single-handedly take out the Midianites where do we find Gideon? Gideon is at the bottom of his class. Gideon is timid. He is weak. He is a wimpy coward. When God shows up, he says to Gideon, “Greetings, mighty man of valor.” He is certainly not describing Gideon here. He is describing what he will one be one day. This is how God works all through the Bible. When God comes and calls you in love, he makes you into what he calls you. We are weak but we are called saints. We are failures but God calls us righteous. We are faithless but God calls us stewards of the manifold grace of God. It is a gift to know that God is redeeming our brokeness.We live in a polarized world. Everyone is so divided. Isn’t there something we can all agree on? Here’s something. All of us can agree that this world is full of problems. Nobody argues with that! The arguments always come when you try to identify what the problem is. In politics, if you are liberal then the problem is the conservative party. If you are conservative the problem is the liberals. If you are a non-religious the problem is the religious people. If you are religious the problem is the non-religious. If you have money the problem is the poor who don’t. If you don’t have money the problem is those who do. If you are black the problem is the whites. If you are white, the problem is the blacks. If you are a parent the problem is your children. If you are a child the problem is your parents. If you are a wife, the problem is your husband. If you are a husband, the problem is your wife.Nobody agrees on the problem. And this is why we experience turmoil in our world today. Everybody wants power so they can use that power to knock down the problem they perceive. They work hard to get into positions of power to destroy what they perceive as the problem. And so everyone is trying to destroy everyone else. But you want to know what the gift of weakness does? It conditions our perspective. It unites our perspective on what the problem actually is. The New York Times solicited feedback from its readers during WWII by asking the question, “What is wrong with the world?” G.K. Chesterton famously replied with perhaps the shortest letter to the editor ever published.Or to say it in the words of Shakespeare, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars; but in ourselves…” The problem is not out there. It’s in here. The problem is not that other people are making you miserable, but primarily, you’re a sinner, proud and self-centered.Here’s what Christmas helps us understand. We all want a Messiah don’t we? We all want a rescuer with great power to come swooping in and solve all the problems. But be careful what you ask for. Here’s what you certainly don’t want. You don’t need a Messiah to come along and destroy all the evildoers, because we would all be destroyed. If God had sent that kind of gift, where would you be? Instead, what you want and what you need is someone who will come and deal with your sin, who will show you your sin, who will die for your sin, who will cleanse you of your sin. And in order to do that, you need someone who will take your place. You need someone who is perfect and powerful to become weak and absorb the sin you deserve. Then there’s hope, and guess what? That’s the gift of weakness.How Weakness Softens Us.Do you see how this gift of weakness softens us? It causes us to stop blaming one another and instead just receive grace and opens us to forgive one another because after all, I’m just like you. We are all like each other. None of us is any better than the other. It softens us.One of my favorite Aesop’s fables is the showdown between the North Wind and the Sun. The North Wind and the Sun had a quarrel about which of them was the stronger. While they were disputing with much heat and bluster, a Traveler passed along the road wrapped in a cloak. “Let us agree,” said the Sun, “that he is the stronger who can strip that Traveler of his cloak.” “Very well,” growled the North Wind, and at once sent a cold, howling blast against the Traveler. With the first gust of wind, the ends of the cloak whipped about the Traveler’s body. But he immediately wrapped it closely around him, and the harder the Wind blew, the tighter he held it to him. The North Wind tore angrily at the cloak, but all his efforts were in vain. Then the Sun came out and warmed the Traveler. Just a little at first, but then the heat became stronger and stronger. At last, he became so heated that he pulled off his cloak, and, to escape the blazing sunshine, threw himself down in the welcome shade of a tree by the roadside.We could adapt this for our purposes. The jacket here represents all our defenses and insecurities. When someone yells at us and says, “You’ve hurt me. You are the problem!” We pull our jacket tighter. We refuse to admit. We hurl back insults. But when Christ descends out of love, he does it not because he wants to blame us for the problem but because he wants to fix the problem. His initiation is humbling and that movement of love warms us. It creates security so we can lower our defenses and confess that yes, really it is true that all along, I am the problem. I do need fixing. Would you please heal me? Would you please take this sin that has so damaged me and others? We warm from the inside and pretty soon we lower our defenses. We take off the coat. And he takes it. It conditions our perspective.For Christ to become weak, that represents incredible sacrifice. To voluntarily choose to become a man represents, to say it lightly, incredible inconvenience. You’d have to have a reason. It perks interest in those watching as to what the motivation could be. Why would God give up his throne as sovereign and voluntarily limit himself in such significant ways? Because behind the weakness is a motive. It’s love.Now I want you to think about just how significant this initiation is. This commands a response from us. Consider this. We all have people in our life we really respect and admire. We all have people in our life we’d love to get to know but we know they are in such high demand, there’s not a chance. Maybe it’s a well-known author, a musician, an artist, an athlete, a person in the marketplace, a well-known pastor, or an academic.They would have so much to offer because they have been so successful in their area of excellence we just aren’t on the same plane. Our orbits never intersect. Now in my case, I would have loved to know C.S. Lewis. Now imagine, I write him an email and just ask for some advice on a particular aspect of being a pastor. And then I get a package in the mail. It’s a book that he’s written and there is a four-page hand-written letter from him engaging me on the topic. And he asks me a bunch of personal questions about my life and is expecting me to respond. He’s taking an interest. He’s not only answering my email. He’s engaging me. He wants to know me. And then I answer that letter and another comes and this time there’s an envelope with an airline ticket and an offer that says, “Hey, why don’t you come out and visit? We have an extra room at our house. I can’t wait to get to know you more.”You think, “Man, I feel so thankful for him to respond to me like that. At the cost of his time and money, he wants to know me.” Well, you see where this is going. Jesus, not at the cost of his time, but at the cost of his life, is bent on saving you. At the cost of tremendous power, at the cost of tremendous pain, at the cost of tremendous suffering, he bent over to know you. He leaned in. He took an interest.Let me explain a sticking point for many of us. If you ask the question, “Why would God save me?” The question is a difficult one to answer. Did he save us because we were valuable? It’s a dangerous question to answer. You can get in all sorts of theological trouble in milliseconds. If you answer, “God saved us because we are valuable.” That is a problem. How again is it that we have value? We spurned him. We crucified him. What is the deal with that? If you answer, “God did not save us because of value.” Well, we were made in the image of God. Why would God save me? How do we answer?I have a super resourceful wife, and while we’re at a garage sale I’ll be walking along and she’ll say, “Oh my goodness!!! Look at that windowpane.” And I’ll say, “What? Where? Oh, that old piece of junk? Why would you want that?” And then she transforms that piece of garbage into a work of art. It’s amazing.Now let me ask you, if you see a pile of garbage and the artist turns it into art, what do you say? Did the garbage change state? Did it suddenly transform into something materially different? No, but it was redeemed. It was destined for the trash pile but it was washed, reshaped, and utilized in a new way. Do you praise the garbage or do you praise the artist? You praise the artist! The garbage has become valuable because of what the artist has done. And what does that cause us to do? It causes us to praise. It causes us to worship the artist. To worship the redeemer. To praise him.You see Jesus is a gift. He’s the ultimate gift. He became weak for us. That weakness was the greatest gift we could ever receive. When we first saw the gift it was a bit disappointing. At first, you don’t really see it as a gift. You want power so you can knock over what you perceive to be wrong with the world. We really didn’t expect the gift to be this way, but now we see it’s what we needed. I never would’ve looked for this kind of gift. I thought I needed power. That’s the gift I thought, but now what you gave me I see is what I needed all along, and I never would’ve asked for it otherwise.This is what Christmas is all about. We didn’t expect this gift but it’s what we needed. I thought my real problem was I didn’t have enough money, connections, or the right relationships in my life. I thought I would be happy if my situation was changed. But now I see the real problem is I am not so much a sufferer who needs to be rescued from my situation, I’m a sinner who needs to be rescued by my Savior. I’m not somebody who just needs someone to deal with the problems out there. I’m someone who needs to deal with the problems in my heart. I need to lay down the melancholy burden of myself. I need to be freed from my self-centeredness and the guilt that goes with it. I need to have my sins dealt with.That is the message of Christmas. It’s a message where our weakness is confronted by the weakness of Christ. It softens us. It breaks us. It changes us. It reduces us. It saves us. And then we praise him for it!