Our Weakness Is Our Witness

Transcript

Welcome And A Lawyer Story

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Well, good morning. My name is Katie. I am on staff and a member of our teaching team. Welcome. I'm so glad you could be here this morning. Welcome to those of you joining us online. You are also an important part of our community. Well, so many of you may know that before I was on staff at CrossPoint, I went to law school and worked as an attorney for a little bit. And because of that, I often get people calling me asking for recommendations. Like, hey, do you know an attorney who could like help me draft my will or help me start a business? Or like reviewing a contract of some sort. And what you need to know is that when it comes to attorneys getting business, there's like a whole world of like client development. Um, and if you've worked in a big firm or like a similar type firm, you kind of know what I'm talking about. It's one of those things where you you kind of get all dressed up and you might go to like golf outings or dinners or networking events. And the goal is to kind of rub shoulders with like corporate executives or the who's who with the goal of like impressing them and getting them to think like, man, you know, she seems like she knows what she's talking about. If I have a legal problem, I'm gonna call her. Um, and then of course, one day they have a legal issue, they think of you, and you get the case, and you get to bring in that business for your firm. So, for purposes of my example, I want you to imagine that you're one of those corporate executives. You got lots of money and lots of problems, um, or at least one, and you're like ready to meet some attorneys, you're ready to be impressed, okay? You might be expecting to meet someone who looks kind of like this guy, very put together. Um, or someone who looks like this this next person here. She's got a nice pantsuit, looks like she knows what she's talking about. Or this person. Looks like she's thinking really hard about legal strategy. Um what you wouldn't be expecting is probably to meet someone who looks like this. Um this, ladies and gentlemen, is my official photo from the Wisconsin bar examination. Um yeah, one of my friends from law school recently like took a picture and sent it to me and because she thought it was so funny. I'm like, how do you still have that? Um but you know, I just spent two months studying like in my parents' basement. Um I did pass, so there's that. But what you need to know about me is what I'm really focused, I don't like my hair in my face. I might just demonstrate just so you can kind of so I like to I like to put it back, right? So it's like so I can focus and I can read. But then as I'm studying, I pull on my hair. So it goes like this. And the more I'm the more I'm thinking and the more I'm putting the pieces come down, and um, and so then like that looks like a good like two to three days of really solid focus. And I rolled out of bed and didn't even think twice, and ta-da, there there is my picture. Um not really the the polished, impressive attorney you might be you might be uh expecting to meet. But again, I passed. So again, um imagine you're in the market for an attorney, you're looking to be impressed, and out rolls mid-kate uh mid-20s Katie, and you're like, that's not what I was really thinking of. But this is the visual I want you to keep in your mind today as we talk about Paul and

Corinth Loved Polish And Status

SPEAKER_01 3:10

how he came to the Corinthians. Because when Paul came to Corinth, it was a city that valued polish and status and impressive speech, and Paul shows up looking a lot more like Messy Bun Katie than the kind of a person that you would expect to trust. We're in a series right now on 1 Corinthians. We've been here for, I don't know, maybe a month or so. And in the past few weeks, we've seen how Paul is writing to the church in Corinth. Um, if you recall, he visited them. My hair's still funky. Um, he visited them during his missionary journey. If you were with us and when we went through Acts a couple years ago, you remember we went through all with all of Paul's missionary journeys. Um, and during his journey to Corinth, he, as he did everywhere he went, he shared the gospel. And in Corinth, and in particular, the lots of believers came to Christ. People believed, the church was established, and it was really growing. He left them in a really good spot. But since then it's been reported to him that there are problems. The church is divided. You remember uh Mac and Cameron and Drew talking about there were factions among them, they weren't unified, and Paul told them, at the root of your division is a misunderstanding of the cross, right? So he didn't just yell at them and say, just stop arguing, dang it. He said, There's a failure to understand the cross. Look at the cross. But remember what the cross symbolized for them. To us, the cross is a symbol of our faith. It's something we wear on our clothes, on our jewelry, and tattoos. Um, but to them, the cross was a symbol of fear and humiliation. Romans hung people on crosses on the side of the road in order to remind everyone else not to mess with them. So just like Cameron said a couple weeks ago, it'd be kind of like having like an electrical chair like on the stage behind me. Um, that's what it would have been like for them. Or having like a bracelet with like a lethal injection charm. Like that's what the cross was to them. Messiahs, on the other hand, were supposed to conquer. Like they were expecting a messiah who would bring victory, who would project power. Remember, the Jews wanted signs and the Greeks wanted wisdom. That's what they were expecting. Someone who would like come and crush it. But the cross looked like weakness, it looked like humiliation, it looked like failure, and yet this is the means that God chose for salvation. So Paul has spent our last couple weeks saying, This is how God works, and now today he's going to say, and this is how I came to you.

The Cross As Shame And Power

SPEAKER_01 5:30

So our passage for today is from 1 Corinthians 2, 1 through 5, and it reads And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom, as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I came to you in weakness, with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God's power. So again, notice how it starts. Maybe you can go back a slide. Notice how it starts. And so it was with me. He's saying, everything I just told you about how God works in the world. Remember how God moves towards those on the margins, how he wins by losing, how he works through losers. That's what you saw in me when I visited you. I was a loser. I came in weakness. So that begs the question for us: how exactly did Paul come to the Corinthians in weakness? What does he mean when he says this? Um, in researching this passage, I think there are like three possibilities that I found floating out there by what he means by this. The first one was uh physical weakness. Some scholars point to Paul's physical condition. He often referred to having like a thorn in his flesh. Some people think he may have like had poor eyesight because he was struck blind in his conversion. Um so it could have been like a physical weakness. Some think it might have been like his experience of experience of persecution. If you remember again, before he came to Corinth, he had been beaten and thrown out of cities and imprisoned and rejected and just um opposed and scorned in every possible way. So his ministry reel was not like a highlight of success, right? It's not something we would see on Instagram. Um, it was a story of defeat and suffering and rejection over and over. So when he comes to Corinth, he's not arriving as like a triumphant success story. He's coming bearing like this visible weight of what it looks like to follow Jesus. But the third category, and I think this is the most important one, um, in the passage again, he says, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom. So here Paul is describing like a deliberate choice. He was choosing not to rely on the normal tools of like persuasion and status that would have made him compelling in Corinth. So what you need to know about Corinth is that they placed a really high value on public speaking. They had these people called sophists that were like public rhetoricians, they were public speakers, and the elite in the towns would pay these people to come and argue and persuade and like share their insights and their compelling arguments, and they would watch them, like debate and speak. Um so people would kind of hang out in the public square and listen to these speakers. I almost picture like a public square with like a giant TED talk stage, and then you've got these different speakers coming out. But Paul wasn't playing that game. Paul says, My met my message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the spirit's power. So Paul is providing a contrast between himself and the impressive speakers that they were used to. Just as the cross looked weak to them, the messenger came in weakness. Paul was the bedhead, unimpressive speaker when they were expecting polish and to be impressed. The messenger fit the message. And this is how God works. NT Wright says that when God wants to sort out the world, he doesn't send in the tanks, he sends in the meek. In other words, God doesn't work through the world's preferred methods of power, dominance, impressiveness, or control. He works through people who refuse to rely on those things. And Paul says, This is exactly how I came to you. So we have to ask why. Like, why didn't Paul just like impress them into faith? Why not dazzle them with arguments and persuasive speaking like they were used to? Imagine if Paul walked into Corinth and like absolutely crushed it, like impressed the socks out of them. People would leave saying, Wow, that guy's brilliant. Like Paul changed my life. I want to follow that guy. But Paul says, my preaching was not with wise or persuasive words, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God's power. Paul refused to make himself the foundation of their faith. He came to them in weakness so that when the Spirit moved, they would know that it was God. Later in 2 Corinthians, Paul says, Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weakness so that Christ's power may rest on me. He says, I will boast about my weakness. His weakness was his witness because it pointed to the power of Christ. And it's to be the same with us. So this is our bottom line today that I want you to keep in mind. Our weakness is to be our witness. It was true for Paul, and it's

Paul’s Weakness And Three Meanings

SPEAKER_01 10:24

true for us. And when I say the word weakness, um, I don't just mean like in an evangelistic sense. Like I don't just mean like our, you know, pitch that we have or talk that we have with specific points to point people to Christ that might be part of it. But what I mean is like the way that we live in the world that points people to Jesus. Evangelizing with our words is part of it, but it's not the whole picture. Our witness is like the way we live, the way we embrace suffering and hardship. It's the person we become when things aren't going our way. But I don't know that we like this very much. I know that I don't. I work very hard to avoid being seen as weak. Um I think that there are, I'd say, three ways that come to my mind of how we tend to avoid weakness. The first way we tend to avoid weakness is we like to locate it in the past. We might be fine, like kind of talking about weakness so long as it's something that was kind of like back then that we've since overcome. I think we love sharing like testimonies or stories of faith that might include a story of struggle. Um, but we so rarely talk about the ones that are ongoing, that we're still struggling with. It's okay as long as there's just enough distance from my struggle so as not to compromise my credibility today. We present weakness as something we've graduated from. We distance it. But Paul, again, Paul says, I came to you in weakness. He's saying, I preached to you while I was weak, not a past thing, a present thing. I came to you in weakness. The second one is that we manage our weakness. We're okay with our weakness so long as it's packaged correctly, tied up with the bow and explained in a way that isn't like too uncomfortable for us. And as someone who preaches and is on our podcast and writes blogs for our church blog, this one can be a real temptation for me. Um, there are certainly times when I find myself like going through something hard and my mind quickly goes to like, you know what? This would make a really good sermon illustration. And then God's like, no, no, no, no. The primary question should always be, how does God want to change me in this? How does God want to form me? Not how can I use it towards some other end? And I do think God uses our struggles in all sorts of ways, right? He does bring beauty from pain and all of that. But his first question is always how, how our first question should be, how can he form me? How can he change me as a person? And then we can think about how he might use it. Our weakness becomes our witness only when we truly surrender it and let God change us in the middle of it. And then the third way is that we uh expect Jesus to remove our weakness or to fix all our problems. This is where we start presenting the gospel kind of like a spiritual upgrade. Come to Jesus, your problems go away, your life gets better, your stress goes down, ta-da. Um, as if Jesus is like a problem fixer or like a ticket to a better life. I don't know that we say this explicitly, um, but it can start to feel a little bit like a sham wow commercial. Do you guys remember sham wow? Um, in case you don't, it occurred to me that some people might not, so we're gonna take a minute and watch it. Go ahead and play the play the commercial.

SPEAKER_00 13:32

Hi, it's Vince with Sham Wow. You'll be saying, Wow, every time you use this towel. It's like a chamois, it's like a towel, it's like a sponge. A regular towel doesn't work wet. This works wet or dry. This is for the house, the car, the boat, the RV. Sham wow holds 20 times its weight in liquid. Look at this. It just does the work. Why do you want to work twice as hard? Doesn't trip, doesn't make a mess. Bring it out, you wash it in the washing machine. Maybe Germany. You know the Germans always make good stuff. You can cut it in half. Use one as a bath mat, drain your dishes with the other one. Use one as a towel. Olympic divers, they use it as a towel. Look at that, completely dry. Put a wet sweater, roll it up, it dries your sweaters. Here's some cola. Wine, coffee, cola, head stain. Not only is the damage gonna be on top, there's your milk. That is gonna smell. See that? The most we're gonna do this in real time. Look at this. Put on the spill, turn it over without

The Messenger Must Match Message

SPEAKER_00 14:22

even putting any pressure. 50% of the cola right there. You follow me, camera guy? The other 50%, the cola starts to come up. Know what the towel's gonna do, guys. It acts like a vacuum. And look at it, it's virtually dry on the bottom. See what I'm telling you? Sham wow, you'll be saying wow every time. I can't live without it. I just love it! Oh my gosh. I don't even buy paper towels anymore. If you're gonna wash your cars or any kind of vehicle, you'd be out of your mind not to own one of these.

SPEAKER_01 14:47

All I can say is sham wow. Love that. All I can say is sham wow. Does anyone have a sham wow? Anyone in here? No? Okay. I was just curious. I had to ask. Um, but again, when we when we sell Jesus as like a problem fixer, I think that tone can start to creep into how we talk about Jesus. Come to Jesus and he'll fix all your problems and take all your cares away. Again, Jesus does bring about healing, he brings about forgiveness, he brings about renewal. That's amazing. Amazing. But something happens when we present him as only that. Let me give this example. I took my son Charlie, who's 10, took him to a concert last weekend. It's Forrest Frank. It was awesome, it was a lot of fun. A lot of you were there. I saw all your Facebook uh feeds. Um, but he was singing this one song, it's called Lemonade. If you know it, you can say it with me. Life may give me lemons, but my Jesus, he be making lemonade. Okay, that's the most I'm ever gonna sing up here. Um the lyric is Life May Give Me Lemons, but my Jesus is making lemonade. My Jesus, he be making lemonade. And I was listening, like, okay, this is a really good song. I like it, you know, everyone's singing, but I'm listening, going, I don't like I'm not so sure if that's what Jesus actually says. You know, I'm not, I'm not sure if he promises to make all our lemons into lemonade. I think what Jesus is doing might be something very different from that. I think his mission in the world might be actually much bigger than that. So it's a it's a good song. Keep listening to the song. Keep bringing it. I know a lot of you have like the shirt with that lyric on it and the lemons. It's cute, keep wearing the shirt. I hope that I didn't ruin it for you. Um, just maybe not the best theology. Because sometimes the lemons don't turn into lemonade, sometimes the lemon stays a lemon. Sometimes the prayer doesn't get answered. Sometimes the healing doesn't come. Sometimes the burden remains. And honestly, friends, that shouldn't surprise us. Because the center of our faith is not a success story, at least not in the way that we might want to think of it. And it wasn't success in the way the disciples would have expected either. Remember, they were expecting a Messiah who would rescue them from the exploitation of the Romans. They were expecting someone who would bring political victory and military victory in the world. They were expecting someone who would attain like power and influence for them, not someone who would die a humiliating death on a cross. This wasn't the outcome they would have expected or been praying for. It looked like defeat. Even Jesus himself prayed, Father, take this cup from me. So if even Jesus, the Savior of the world, didn't avoid suffering or hardship or weakness, why would we assume that following him means that we will? I think this is where our instincts sometimes kind of clash

Our Weakness Is Our Witness

SPEAKER_01 17:38

with the gospel because we all want a story that neatly moves from struggle to solution. But Jesus doesn't work that way. Consider two examples for me. I've talked about the TED Talk a couple times. If you're familiar with the TED Talk, um, you know the routine. It's like there's a number there's speakers and they come in and they're awfully they're often like impressive, their whole talk is built on credibility. Um, they might share a story of struggle, but it's usually framed in like a very specific way. Like, hey, I used to be the most like unproductive, overwhelmed, disorganized person alive, and then I discovered like this one productivity hack, and now my house is clean, my inbox is empty, and I wake up 4:30 every morning and run like six miles before sunrise. And if you do my method, then you can be like this too. And you're like, cool. My social media is filled with like life hacks for busy moms and all that kind of stuff. The goal of these talks is to impress the listener with credibility. The implicit message is that this person figured it out and they can help me figure it out too. It's like a polished and persuasive presentation. But now contrast that with me to say, like an AA meeting. I haven't personally been, but I've heard lots of people talk about AA meetings or a similar setting. And people who have been there often describe it as one of the most honest spaces they've ever experienced. Because in that room, there's no performance, no for performance left to manage. No one's trying to present like a version of themselves that has it all together. There's no illusion of having arrived. There's ongoing dependence. And even the language reflects it, saying, I'm in recovery, no matter how long it's been, I'm in recovery, not recovered. I'm in recovery. And there's something really honest about that, recognizing that recovery is a lifelong process. But it's not just Alcoholics Anonymous, is it? This is all of us. Discipleship is a lifelong process. And this is why our witness in the world is to be more of an AA meeting than a TED Talk. And remember the example that Jesus gives us. Again, Jesus' life didn't look like a shamel commercial. Nothing got easier for him and his followers. In fact, in many ways, it only seemed to get harder. And my husband, Alex, and I watched The Chosen a few years ago, and it gave me such an appreciation for how it was for them to follow Jesus in that day. Just the suffering and the persecution that they experienced. In Matthew, Jesus says we will need to take up our cross and follow him. Take up our cross. Remember that language, cross, what that would have meant to them. In Romans, he

How We Hide Weakness Today

SPEAKER_01 20:16

tells us we'll experience suffering. In James, he says we'll face trials. In the book of John, Jesus actually promises us that we will have trouble. He says, In this world, you will have trouble. Right? It's very clear. But what does the next line say? But take heart, I have overcome the world. We don't see anywhere in Scripture a promise for an easy life if we follow Jesus. If we do, I'm afraid we might be reading the wrong Bible, friends. So the real question isn't whether we experience moments of hardship or weakness, it's what we'll do with it. Will we gloss over it? Will we minimize it? Will we like white knuckle through it in our own strength? Or will we see it as an opportunity for God to work in us? The real question is, is we lean, are we leaning into our strength or are we leaning into God's strength? If we're leaning into our strength, our weaknesses become an obstacle. But if we're leaning into God's strength, they become an opportunity for God to work in us and to form us. Our weakness is to be our witness in the world. If you remember back to last year, we were going through a series on the Sermon on the Mount, and part of that series was the Beatitudes. If you remember how the Beatitudes start, it's blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the poor in spirit. And what he's describing there is not simply people who are like sad or struggling, but people who are bankrupt of self reliance. Those who know that they do not have the resources, spiritual, moral, or otherwise, to carry life on their own. These people had no power or influence in the world. They were the nobodies. Blessed are those who mourn, Jesus says, those who are willing to face the brokenness of the world honestly, rather than deny it or minimize it or control it. Blessed are the meek, not the impressive, not the self-assured, not those who win by force of personality or power or influence, but those who refuse to grasp for control. Let's not forget, friends, that we follow a Savior who entered the world in obscurity. He was born to, essentially like a no-name Jewish couple in a manger. He lived most of his life doing his work quietly and largely unnoticed, at least from what we can tell. And when he stepped into public ministry, he wasn't received as impressive or powerful, but rejected, opposed, and humiliated. Jesus experienced loss, shame, suffering, and death. And this was the way he lived, and this was the way he died. So I want us to ask: what type of theology are we selling people? What type of gospel are we bearing witness to? Because people don't need a theology that promises them an easy life. They don't. They don't need a gospel that functions like a guarantee of status or comfort or success. They need a theology that can bear the weight of human life, the full human experience in its suffering, and its fragility, and in all its weakness. And the only thing that can bear the weight of that is the Savior who entered it himself. So our invitation is not to present ourselves as strong, resolved, self-sufficient people who occasionally struggle, but pretty soon we get over it and we're good. It's to live in such a way that our lives refuse to rest on human strength at all. To bear witness to a God who does not promise to remove from us our weakness, but who meets us in it, who sustains us in it, and who forms us through it. Back in 2020, I took a year-long leadership intensive. Many of you have gone through one, through year-long discipleship intensives. And I took one with uh Josie, my good friend, and Max wife, and then I went on to lead some of those groups on my own. These leadership intensives are kind of like a continual journey of sharing your own struggle as a leader. We have a practice as the leaders of those groups of sharing our kairos, which is a Greek word, basically sharing the ways that God is continuing to work in our lives and inviting us to repent and to deepen our trust in Him. And there's a twofold purpose for sharing our own struggle. One is, I think, to remind ourselves that we're a continual work in progress, we're constantly depending on God. But the other is to lead from that place. Some of the hardest things that I had to work through when I was in a group became the ways that I led when I led groups. Those are the stories, those are the experiences, those are the ways God formed me that then I was able to use to lead. Now, I would have loved to lead from my own strength. I would have loved for the women in my group to be impressed with like my knowledge or my insights or my experience. But God said, no, I want you to lead from a place of dependency. I want you to share the stories of your weakness. So I'm like, oh yeah, God, okay, so I'll share that one story from like 10 years ago. Like, remember how that was really cool. He's like, No, I want you to share the story from yesterday. I want you to share the story of how you lost your patience getting out the door to work. I want you to share how you found yourself spending your money once again based on your own desires rather than seeking my guidance. I want you to share how you find yourself making decisions based more on the expectations of other people than on me. Share with them how you repent and how you depend on me to change your heart every single day. Let me give a caveat here. We're doing a podcast right now on authenticity. And one of the things we say in our podcast is that there is a difference between authenticity and transparency. So hear me what I'm not saying. I'm not saying you should go out and share all your dirty details with everyone who's listening, right? That wouldn't be smart. Discernment is required. Um, you don't have to be fully transparent

Stop Treating Jesus Like A Fixer

SPEAKER_01 26:00

to be authentic. But there's a difference between airing all your dirty details and pretending like you have it all together and everything's great when you actually don't. And I'd like to further submit that this temptation to project strength and hide our weakness isn't new. We may want to think of it as kind of a modern problem with social media and image management and personal branding, but the Corinthians were doing the same thing. Remember, the Corinthians wanted flashy signs and impressive wisdom. They wanted a speaker who would really wow them, someone polished, someone persuasive, someone impressive, someone they could say, I follow that guy. And honestly, we want the same thing. We want to look impressive, we want to project success, we're naturally drawn towards people who look like polished and confident. But I said this before and I want to say it again. The center of our faith is not human success or human strength, it's a cross. So maybe the question for you today is what weakness are you trying to hide? What image are you trying to protect? Because maybe the very thing that you are trying the hardest to conceal is the place where God wants to work. Paul says, I came to you in weakness because the messenger should match the message. And if the message is a crucified Messiah, one who gave his life in self-giving love, then our lives should look cruciformed too. Not polished, not self-sufficient, but surrendered. Because in the kingdom of God, our weakness is our witness. And that's not because our weakness alone saves anyone, but because our weakness has a way of pointing people to the power of God. Some prayerful reflection if you have time this week and want to do something with this message. Um, you can pray and ask God, where am I tempted to showcase my status or my success as a means of impressing others? What's an area of weakness that I can lay before God and ask him to work in me? And is there a trial, struggle, or hardship that God is leading me to share with others as a testament to his work in my life? And then as an action step, share a weakness or a struggle with someone this week. It doesn't have to be big, it can be small. Doesn't have to be on Facebook. Um, but find one and share it as a way of leaning into weakness and finding God's strength there. Let me pray. God, thank you for this message. I thank you for your truth that you um you don't look down on us, kind of evaluating us and watching how well we have it together and waiting for us to mess up. But God, you expect weakness and you meet us there. So I pray that this week, as we go on from this place, as we go out into our everyday lives, that you would help us just have our eyes open to really be able to see those areas where we're struggling, where we're experiencing hardship or trial or weakness, and that we would use those as opportunities for you to meet us there and to form us and to change us into disciples. And then, Lord, that that would be our witness to the world, that we would go out and not present ourselves as people who have it all together, but that we would share the story of a faithful God who carries us every step of the way. And as we share that with the world, might they be pointed to our loving Father who created them and who loves them, and may you draw others to yourself through our story. I thank you so much for this congregation, for these people. Um, and I pray that you would just be with us as we leave here today and go out into the world. I ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Go in peace.