“But He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Corinthians 12:9-10)
I’m terrified of running out of battery. I’m one of those people that keeps things plugged in as long as humanly possible. iPad below 70%? Time to charge. I don’t know why I am this way. I read somewhere that due to my moon sign in Taurus, I have the tendency to save and save and save and worry about “running out” of this, that, or the other. Yeah, sure. Thanks a lot, moon… Or maybe it’s just due to my control complex. But then there are the people who run out of battery and ask you if you have a charger on you. Or are stuck charging their phone in the LinkNYC or some random restaurant bathroom because they didn’t plan ahead. They didn’t pack their phone charger or set it on power save or charge it all the way to 100 before they left the house. They let themselves get drained to the bottom before they asked for help. We treat our spiritual batteries a lot like our electronics. We get so excited that we charge and charge and charge, and eventually our battery life goes to crud because we didn’t let it experience highs and lows. In fact, we were charging on a false “high”- we were fair weather friends. Things looked okay, so following God was a breeze. But when we realize our battery has dropped to zero, we’re devastated. We were so self-righteous and proud. We were always at 100%, and, naturally, we don’t feel okay asking a stranger to borrow their charger or call out to the ghost of Steve Jobs for mercy. Or we run to empty and then finally cry out of desperation and scramble to foolishly juice up next to the stalls. Both are hazardous.
Let’s take a look at the Israelites. After Joshua died, they decided to unplug from the whole “Yahweh” thing and let their juice run out. They got distracted by the pretty girls in their new territory and decided it was okay to worship the other gods lying around. And without their spiritual juice, they were weak and lost battles. So it was up to the Judges to bring God’s charger and save them. But if they had followed God to begin with, they wouldn’t have had to live under the enemy rulers year after year. Did they ever learn their lesson? Not really. But for some reason, “the Lord had compassion on them as they groaned under those who oppressed and afflicted them.” (Judges 2:18b) He was the kind of friend who loaned a charger, not the one who said, “Why should I feel sorry for you when you wasted your battery playing Candy Crush the whole train ride?”
And then there was the rich young ruler. I know, we jumped forward a few years, but hear me out. If anyone was juiced up, he was. He thought he followed every commandment to a “t.” (...sure.) He even had the guts to tell this to Jesus Himself! But when it was brought up that his cashmere security blanket might need to be sacrificed for him to truly follow God, he shied away. His security all along had been in his good fortune, not his faith. And there he was: stuck in the middle and unable to commit to Jesus without looking back at his credit score. You can bet he crashed before he even got back to his bougie pad full of meaningless religious texts.
And then, we have Paul. He says so himself: by all the world’s standards, he was in full battery mode. He was powered-up in status and practice. He says in Philippians 3 that if anyone had reason to put confidence in the flesh, he did! He was a thoroughbred Jewish high brow. But he was so empty inside because he did not yet grasp the Gospel. He never noticed just how empty he was until he was actually blinded and brought to his knees. And everything changed. “But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ… I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him.” (Philippians 3:7-9) And he encouraged others to see that sometimes, you need something to shake you to your core in order to admit your weakness and find true strength in your Creator.
Let’s admit it: If we rely on our own merits, we’ll run out of battery. Maybe it’s time to stop self-reliance, admit weakness, and accept true renewal.