I Just Can’t Do It!

Therefore I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ’s sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong. 2 Corinthians 12:10 NASB

Weak – If you read the list of trials in the first part of the verse and stop before you come to the final phrase, you might be inclined to think that Paul is about to give you his glowing success resume. “Look at everything he has overcome. Why, he’s the perfect candidate for leadership! He’s a self-made man.” I used to think like this. Then something happened.

All of my life I was expected to stand on my own. From the earliest days of childhood, I was encouraged to develop the skills and stamina to make it without help. Saying, “I just can’t do it” was not only unacceptable, it was an invitation for continued discipline designed to teach me that I could if I tried. It is no accident that The Little Engine That Could was an integral part of my childhood education.

I grew up. Life became exceedingly more complex, although I suppose that, relative to my skills, it was always more than I could manage. But along the way I learned the fine art of denial. I avoided situations that would result in a clear demonstration of my inability to perform successfully. I gravitated to my strengths. I conquered!

Of course, there were always areas where no matter how much I wished to succeed, no matter how much I tried to succeed, I never could succeed. Intimate relationships without overtones of eros, private battles for true spiritual integrity, failures of will in facing the pain of psychic growth—these were but a few of my secret terrors. It wasn’t just the secret parts of my life.   I used to pretend that I was athletic to those who did not know better. I tried to act macho. I desperately wanted to be rich. I compensated by becoming an overachiever in less fearful arenas. I achieved what I thought was intellectual prowess, public charisma, and the aura of mastery. It was a great facade, bolstering an injured ego; the same ego that constantly viewed the private mirror of a failure of self. All that pretending managed to keep away most of the demons for many years.

After some time of slow moral oxidation, the surface finally collapsed. My life fell in on itself, the shell of protective successes eaten away from the inside by the rot of moral excesses. The inner life came to the light and it was not very pretty. A year after the final collapse, I realized that it is futile for any of us to believe that somehow the structure that we fabricate on the surface will seep into the depths of our lives and rearrange the foundation. Quite the opposite is always true. What we are on the inside will inevitably find a way to expose itself through the epidermis of our pretensions. The Torah says it much more bluntly: “be sure that your sin will find you out” (Numbers 32:23).

You might object to such religious zealotry by claiming that the inner structure of your life is not at all full of mortal or venial misconstructions. Most of us wish to concur. We do not believe that we are thieves, adulterers, gluttons, murderers, and gossips. The inner fabric of our souls may be polluted, but it seems more a case of excess commitments, flagging altruism, perfectionist tendencies or compromised principles rather than those dark qualities that described the personalities in Dante’s picture of Hell. For all of our personal spiritual discomfort, we much prefer the therapist’s couch to the chancel altar. We wish to believe it is only a matter of fixing something in us that has gone awry. How much simpler to view our malaise as a lack of proper development than a fatal design flaw! But we’re Greek and the Greek solution to all moral failure is education, not repentance.

Unfortunately, I have found that my inclination to seek self-motivated actualization as a remedy for inner corruption neither heals nor protects. I am unable to get past the implications of Yeshua’s words. He saw that my anger was the moral equivalent of murder, my lust the equivalent of adultery, my ingratitude the equivalent of gluttony, my disrespect the equivalent of gossip, my envy the equivalent of theft. Worse still, he only restated what God Himself demanded in the Decalogue. In spite of my clever rationalizations to excuse my moral corruption, I am unable to ignore the dire consequences of denying God’s assessment of my condition. My sin did find me out. And what I wanted to pretend was only in my mind found a way to become a part of my actions. Sin always hides behind its own disclosure.

In that place of inner torment, a personal taste of Hell, I slowly learned what perhaps might be the greatest lesson of my life. I learned that God never expected me to be able to do it in the first place. That myth was my own, created by my choices, intended to separate me from the one true lover of my soul. What I have begun to discover, in only the most rudimentary of ways, is that I draw closest to my Father when I admit the totality of my weakness. He is not teaching me to somehow become tough enough to do without Him. He is teaching me that He will gladly do all for me precisely because I am totally helpless over my own self-destruction. My Father wants me to come to Him, begging His mercies and grace, in order that He may shower upon me more than I could have ever imagined. Paul puts it rather nicely, that He will do “exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20). Amazing, isn’t it? Not just more than we ask, not even exceedingly more than we ask, not even exceedingly far above all that we could ask, but abundantly, far above all that we could ask or imagine! That is really getting it done!

Why do I struggle so much with this need to do it myself if God is so entirely capable and ardent? Once again God provides me with a clear explanation. I don’t happen to like what He has to say, but I recognize its truth. I am obsessed with my own self-will. I pursue a course of action that denies His sovereignty and providence because I ultimately want to run my own show. I want to be like God. Oh, I don’t mean I have pretensions about being God. That would be true insanity. No, I just want to be like Him, not in the way He wants me to be like Him but in the way I choose, namely, to be the one who determines what is good and what is evil. I’m pretty good friends with that couple in the Garden. I kick God out so that I can move in. No wonder it is so hard for me to embrace my weakness. Admitting powerlessness is more than admitting I have a few faults. Embracing my weakness means absorbing into my very being the wrong-headedness of my entire stance toward life. It means giving up, not because I am beaten but because I am fundamentally obstinately perverse. Coming to God in my weakness is agreeing with Him that I don’t belong, that I can never make it, that I am “as filthy rags.” I suspect that we never begin to experience one particle of the grace of God until we first feel the mountain of sin pressing us into the grave. In my darkest hour, brought upon me through my own atrocious offense to holiness, I wailed in desperation for rescue and, miracle of all miracles, God sheltered me.

These days I am finding that what I thought was my curse of weakness has become a highway of grace. It is not because I have mastered a new skill. I have no secret to share. I am but a pathetic sinner in the hands of a holy God. But my weakness opens the door of my soul to His love. Where I am weak, I find Him ready to give His strength. When I was on the road of self-achievement, I had no need for a God of the weak. God waited until my camouflage collapsed. The God of weakness has no use for men of strength.   Now I find that I am truly grateful to be a fallen human being.

Sometimes.

I think I will have to read this over and over despite the fact that I wrote it. Sometimes I find God speaking to me through my own words. It’s always a surprise.

Topical Index: weak, strong, self-sufficiency, expectations, 2 Corinthians 12:10