For Your Souls
For Your Souls
Take two seconds and think of one good thing that your parents gave to you. A large inheritance? Ice cream on Sunday evenings? At the bare minimum, life! Are you a parent? What good thing are you intent on giving your children? Education, skills, ethics, or morals?
What motivates these gifts? Hopefully, love is what motivates parents to give good gifts to their children (Matt. 7:11). But, unfortunately, what motivates parents is often not a love of children, but a love of self.
What will my reputation be if my children don't "turn out"?
How can I prevent my children from rejecting me after they grow up?
What is the least amount of effort I can give to parenting so that I can still do the things I want to do?
Inner thoughts like these are rooted in fear. Fear of others, fear of loneliness, fear of losing other things that you value. There is a lot of fear that can come with parenting, in part, because it requires so much time, money, attention, and years of investment all without any guarantee that you will "succeed" in producing a well-behaved, moral, ethical contributor to the human population.
The apostle Paul may not have had his own children (we don't know). Still, he had many spiritual children as he shared the gospel (1 Cor 4:15). He describes the daily pressure of his anxiety for all the churches and the unsurmountable obstacles he faced (2 Cor 11:28). Would these churches actually endure? Sin was rampant in them. The people were confused and easily turned to false teachers. Selfish and undisciplined, the churches sound so similar to children years from any semblance of maturity.
When he is at his weakest, Paul prays desperately for God to remove the pain, the trial, and the difficulty, but God says "No." Why? Because God wants Paul and those who are audience to his life to see that God's grace is sufficient and that the power of God is seen clearest in man's weakness (2 Cor 12:9).
You are wrestling with something that is time-consuming, emotionally draining and is a mountain of unknown right now. You have few to no options in how to go forward. You're praying for some daylight to shine on your soul so that you can get up tomorrow and keep going. Your power is exhausted...
Here is what Paul comes to know in his weakness: the power of Christ is greater than anything, so he says, "For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong." 2 Corinthians 12:10. Being strong in Christ, he says to the Corinthian believers, "I will most gladly spend and be spent for your souls." (2 Cor 12:15).
May the power of Christ reach you in your weakness today and shine into your soul the Glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor 4:6).
Making Home with Christ along with you,
Loren