For many Christians, the life of faith never really gets off the ground because the person never really starts acting on the faith they have. This is our fundamental weakness. We don't feel ready to truly repent, to really turn away from all the sin and self-seeking in our lives. Many of us want two totally irreconcilable things - the old pleasures and attitudes
and the new life of Grace. The Spirit is opposed to a life driven by self-centered desires. We cannot be driven, be led, by the Spirit and driven by the flesh at the same time. We cannot "serve God and mammon." Yet here we are, so many of us, "clods of selfish ambition" as one writer calls us. We are unready to entrust God with everything and unready to share the message of the Good News. We seem forever unprepared to be and make disciples in the way Jesus intended. Its like he has sent us into battle, onto the front line, and none of us knows anything about soldiering. Yet, Christ dies for the unready and the unwilling. He offers himself to us in the midst of our rejection of him. He offers himself while we are "weak."
Weak- means powerless, helpless, feeble, impotent, sick, without strength. You and I are powerless to effect any significant spiritual change. in and of ourselves. In Dante's Inferno, Satan himself is in the center of hell encasing people in ice. They are frozen and can never move. Dante illustrates the insight that Hell is the impossibility of change.
Only Christ can initiate that heavenward change in us. It must come from beyond our self-effort. He comes to us when we accept we cannot change and are powerless to fix or heal ourselves. He then does what we cannot do for ourselves. With the admission of our own weakness and the realization of His transcendent power, He begins to transform us from the inside out!
Come and find out how!
