Strength

“…God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.”
1 Co 1:27

The strong are in control, but the weak are under other people’s control. The stronger you are, the more options you will have in life, but if you are weak, you will run out of options rather quickly.

Because of a particular mistake that John Donne made in his youth, all his avenues of promotion were blocked except one - by the king’s order, he could only become a minister. He could have become many things had he not eloped with the daughter of a powerful man in court, yet he became immensely weak because of the offence he committed. In fact, he even did jail time for a while.

John Donne was a splendid poet, but I think he was at his best when he was ministering to the people in London as a pastor when the city was under the deadly cloud of the Black Death. Many people had escaped from the city to seek fresh air, but the devote minister of St. Paul stayed. He was the strongest when he cried out in sheer desperation: “John Donne, undone!” He produced his best poetry after he suffered great losses in life and had to depend solely on God for solace. His writings spoke to the most when he was reduced to the least and were most life-affirming when he was teetering before the portals of death. His “Holy Sonnets” are beyond compare as far as Christian verses are concerned. The Lord brought a strong man down through various adverse circumstances and lifted him up at the end. One can never become something in God’s kingdom until he becomes nothing. Of all the self-portraits done by Rembrandt, in which one of them do we see ourselves? Is it the licentious young man with a glass of wine in his hand and a woman in his arms? Probably not. It touches my heart every time I look at the picture of Rembrandt in his old age after he had gone through many sufferings in life.

We cannot be truly strong unless we first become weak; yet we often choose to be strong and tend to do and see things from the angle of strength, not weakness. The majority of Christian churches in America are fairly small, but every single one of them has the aspiration to become bigger and stronger, as if being big physically is the only indication of being strong spiritually.

We are by nature small, so we are into bigness; but God in essence is big beyond compare, therefore being small is more appealing to him. The Lord Jesus sees individuals in a crowd, but our desire is to turn individuals into a great crowd. We draw strength in numbers, but the Lord looks at the collective weakness of the crowd and the greater the number is, the weaker it will be. Didn’t the Lord spot little Zaccheus hiding in a tree because he saw something genuine in the short man’s heart that he did not see in the crowd of people and chose to dine with the men whom many seemed to have disdained?