May 23, 2011
God is My Strength
When I hear people talk about God being their strength it conjures up
in my mind the thought of God lifting them up and getting them through trials
and tribulations. I seldom have the image of an already victorious man giving
credit to God for strength. Certainly the song lyrics, ‘when I am weak, He lifts me up’ are correct; however I’m wondering
if we should also in our strength be thinking, ‘when I am strong, He keeps me up’.
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----Why should we need God’s strength? We have soil to drop seeds into and water to wet them and ourselves too. We have the sun to raise our food out of the ground, time to wait for the fruit, and space to build homes in which we can wait. We have machines to get us around, machines to get the crops from the ground to the mills and back to the store shelves from where we can gather them into our homes and enjoy. It all goes on quite naturally. And it always has. As long as we have ego-strength we can pick ourselves out of the mud after a flood or build our homes again after the earthquake, or restock the shelves after a thief has used our pantry for his grocery store. All is well here in Babylon, where mankind is quite capable of taking care of itself.
-----I can read what Voltaire thought, but can I relate to it? Did he relate to what Moses thought? Maybe he should have. What I find most interesting about uniformitarianism is that the idea occurred to men while gathering their own strength in the face of an age that had not really changed much for the number of generations it took them to forget an earlier, sharply different time. Oh, yes, the ideas of man changed greatly from generation to generation, but the landscape in which they moved, the basic properties of their social interactions, and especially that drop-the-seed-in-the-ground-and-apply-water-and-wait thing remained the same age after age. It seems that since God had not recently thundered from a mountaintop or raised a body from the dead in public spectacle, He was quite forgettable. And so He has become quite forgotten as everything goes on as it has before, and especially as an inability to relate to men’s experience of former times weaves a rather opaque veil.
-----Or at least for now, it seems to go on as before, in this time God has not chosen to interrupt in the sight of all eyes. But not all is what it seems. We need the strength of God not to have happiness in times of sorrow or sorrow in times of success, or to turn sorrowful times into successful times. We need His strength to know truth in this time of deceit and to experience God’s interruption where He now chooses to intervene, right there in your personal life from your personal heart. We need it to love and honor men whether or not they love and honor us, to forgive them whether or not they’ve forgiven us, and to do good to them whether or not they’ve done good to us. We need it to become what Jesus was so that together in what His strength makes of each we can become what the church should be, forgetting neither the age before when He parted the sea and thundered from the mountain nor the age to come when He will actually sit in Jerusalem really teaching all mankind what He now teaches to our individual hearts. We need His strength not to look through the eyes and ears He’s given for seeing and hearing sights and sounds of Spring and Summer, but through those He’s given for seeing and hearing the sights and sounds of His interactions with humanity, those in the past, those from His Spirit in your heart today, and those to come when the "uniformitarian veil" of this physical universe is folded up and set aside.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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