Beyond a crime or a disease, sin is also a weakness. Anselm of Canterbury, in the 12th century, had an interesting illustration he used to explain the effects of sin. He said imagine if a landowner told one of his laborers to go to a certain area of his farm or ranch, and do some work there, build fences, dig trenches, or whatever, and in sending him, he also warned him of a pit in that area to beware of. If the worker didn’t pay attention, he could easily fall into that pit, and then he wouldn’t be able to get out of it and do the work his boss wanted him to do. The worker goes his way, doesn’t heed the warning, and falls into that pit. So now he has failed his boss in two ways. He can’t do the work his boss wanted him to do, and, even though he was forewarned, he’s carelessly fallen into a trap from which he cannot escape! He’s doubly useless!
Anselm said we are all like that foolish worker. God has a purpose for our lives. He had things He intended us to be and do. We were meant to glorify Him with our lives! Since He created us, we owe Him our allegiance and our service. We were made for a purpose. Jeremiah 13 talks about a beautiful linen belt Jeremiah was to wear, then bury in the ground near a river. When he retrieved it again, it was ugly, rotten, useless! God said He saw Israel that way. He’d made them to be close to Him like a belt, something He would “wear” for its beauty and glory. But instead, they’d become rotten and corrupt, so they didn’t bring Him glory and were useless for their calling. Later in the same chapter, God asks, can an Ethiopian change his skin or a leopard its spots? The obvious answer is, no, because they’re powerless to do such a thing. Likewise, we, like that belt, or like Ethiopians or leopards not only don’t give God His due and don’t produce what He intended us to produce, we have gotten ourselves into a state of weakness and entrapment, from which we cannot even escape if we want to! God says you cannot do good, because you’re only accustomed to doing evil.
Think of how weak we are as sinful human beings, and how useless that has made us for God! We have fallen into all sorts of pits – alcoholism, drug use, addiction to pornography or gambling, materialism, greed, lust, fear, hatred, racism, insecurity, laziness. We were made to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and our neighbors as ourselves, but we can’t even love God, the most loving, generous, and wonderful Person in the universe, much less, our neighbors! We don’t even love ourselves as we should! We’re weak and unable to even love! We find ourselves powerless to do what God commands us to do and be what He desires us to be!
Jesus told His disciples to watch and pray in the Garden of Gethsemane, because the spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak. They didn’t even pray and seek the strength of God when they were told directly to do so! They were too weak, and worse, they didn’t even realize how very weak they were so as to do something about it! They fell asleep! How many of us have a strong prayer life or a disciplined life of studying the Word, memorizing it, sharing it? How many of us are too weak to practice such spiritual disciplines? The disciples exemplify the weakness in all of us. Jesus told them to row across the lake, but a storm came up and they were terrified! Their faith was weak and they didn’t trust the Lord! A man brought his demon-possessed son to a group of the disciples, hoping they’d cast the demon out of him, but their faith was too weak! A young woman told Peter she recognized him as one of Jesus’ disciples, but he was too weak to confess Christ. Just hours before, he’d told Jesus he would go to prison or to death with Him, but when push came to shove, he was just too weak! Jesus warned His disciples to pray, but they were too weak to even seek God’s strength!
If it hadn’t been for the entrance of sin into this world, I don’t believe this weakness would’ve been our common experience. I believe we were meant to have a strong, vibrant relationship of faith with God. Not so we could be independent of Him and do everything on our own – that was never the plan. But I believe our faith and relationship with the Lord were meant to be steadfast and clear, so that we would always depend upon the Lord and abide in His presence. Then He Himself would be our strength, and we would be able to do whatever He commanded and whatever He willed for our lives. Unfortunately, ever since Adam and Eve, weakness has been our fallen nature! Paul said we are weak in our natural selves (Ro. 6:19 NIV). He also said the natural, sinful, fleshly nature we have cannot submit to God or please Him – it’s too weak and corrupted to! (Ro. 8:7, 8)
The will of God for our lives requires spiritual strength. God wants us to resist sin. He wants us to love and serve one another. He wants us to develop our spiritual gifts and let Him use them and work through us to lead people to Christ and strengthen them in their relationship with Him. We were meant to be soldiers of the cross, equipped and faithful in spiritual warfare, pushing back the powers of darkness and establishing the kingship of God in the earth. We were meant to do all for the glory of God, to be witnesses of His power and purpose in our lives. We’re to be the fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, employers and employees, friends and neighbors God intends us to be. But to be a soldier, you have to be in shape. You have to be strong. Let’s face it, everything we’re called to be requires this sort of health and strength. A sick person, a weak person, cannot do what they need to do in life!
That’s why salvation has to deal with this inherent weakness in us, and must involve a “reconnection” to God as the Source of our strength, so that we become empowered to live as He intends. Jesus told His disciples that apart from Him, they could do nothing (Jn. 15:5b). A human being was originally made to be a vessel of God, a sort of instrument or “vehicle” if you will, for God to live in and through. That was the original plan, but our sin disconnected us from the power, so to speak. We’ve become like puppets who’ve cut their own strings and can no longer do anything. Our entire human history has been a story of weakness and failure. The patriarchs did some good things, but they also all failed in many ways. Israel was God’s chosen people, but they failed to be and do what God wanted and had to eventually be discarded. Even the Church has a history of failure, a litany of sins, misunderstandings, corruption and weakness. Every individual has the same failure, the same inherent weakness. We all fall short of the glory God intended for us. (Ro. 3:23)
But Jesus came to do what human beings had failed miserably to do. He “recapitulated” human history, if you want to know the truth, living out what human life was supposed to be but never was. He was fully human, yet lived His life in total dependence upon the power of God. He was conceived by the Spirit, then empowered and anointed by the Spirit at His baptism. He moved about on earth, doing only what His Father showed Him to do, empowered by the Spirit of God. In that way, He demonstrated for us what we’re to do. We cannot do anything right in our own strength. We need the power of God’s Spirit, but we had no access to that power until Jesus died for our sins and took away the barrier between us and God. That made it possible for Jesus to become the One who baptizes us with the Holy Spirit. In all four gospels, we find John the Baptist announcing Jesus as the One who would do this. It’s repeated four times because it’s so important!
Jesus distributes the power of God to those who come to Him by faith! He said it was better for the disciples that He go away so that the Spirit might come upon them and give them power. Peter, on the Day of Pentecost, said the promise of the Spirit was for all whom the Lord our God would call (Acts 2:39). This is the promise of the New Covenant, the Covenant of the Spirit. Jesus has delivered us from the curse of the Law, being made a curse for us, so that now, all who believe might receive the promise of the Spirit (Gal. 3:13, 14). The Spirit is the power we so sorely lack! (Acts 1:8) If we allow Him to fill us, we will find ourselves finally empowered to be and do what God requires. The gospel unlocks this Key to overcome our weakness.
It’s not enough just to be a forgiven sinner. Forensic salvation, important as it is, is simply not enough to get the job done! Neither is it enough to just get healed of the effects and the power of sin and get our loves rightly ordered again. It’s not enough to just get the negatives out of the way. We also need the positive empowerment of God’s Spirit to overcome our human weakness. We must learn to live as Jesus did, depending on the Spirit’s power, if we want to be what God requires us to be and do what He commands us to do. It’s by His Spirit that God lives in us and works through us so His will is done on earth as in heaven. This is the secret Paul understood when he wrote, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Phil. 4:13)
So how do we receive this power and live in it? There is always a human angle or response, a part we must play for God’s will and God’s provision to operate in our lives. There are three aspects to our response. The first is to accept Christ as Lord and Savior. A Christian is a person who has been “born of the Spirit.” That happens when the Spirit has worked in our hearts to show us our sin and need to repent and at the same time, the glory and goodness of Christ and our need to submit to Him as Lord. When we yield our lives to Christ, His Spirit regenerates us, makes new creations of us, and begins to live in us. That’s what it means to be born again.
But the Bible also talks about the infilling, the outpouring, or what we call “the baptism of the Holy Spirit.” This doesn’t always occur when we first get saved; it requires a second experience. For example, in Jn. 4, Jesus talked about a well of living water, and in Jn. 7, He talked about rivers of living water flowing out of a person’s life. A well, and a river. In 1 Cor. 10, the Bible mentions that the Israelites were baptized in the Red Sea and in the cloud, two different “elements” if you will. In Acts 8, people received the Word of God and were baptized. But then they were prayed for and received the power of the Holy Spirit subsequently. Two experiences, not one. In Jn. 20, Jesus said to His disciples in the Upper Room, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” and breathed on them. But then sometime later, in Acts 2, the Holy Spirit came as a mighty wind. A breath, and a wind. In Acts 19, Paul baptized some disciples in water in the name of Jesus. But then he laid his hands on them and prayed and they were baptized in the Holy Spirit as well. There is a lot of evidence for this two-phase experience of the power of God. So we need to seek this diligently and we need to be baptized in the Holy Spirit.
We need to be born again by the Spirit, and we need to be baptized in the Spirit. But we also need to learn to live in the Spirit, walk in the Spirit, be led by the Spirit; in short, we need to live a Spirit-filled life. Eph. 5:18 tells us to be filled continually with the Spirit, and gives us clues as to how that’s to be accomplished. Paul says there that we’re to do things like speak amongst ourselves, sharing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. We’re to sing and make melody in our hearts, to spend time fellowshipping with other Christians, worshipping God, reading and meditating in the scriptures. We’re filled with the Spirit by spending time in prayer, learning to fast from time to time, to confess our sins and interact with God. We’re filled when we witness and use our spiritual gifts. All of these things are what enable the Spirit to fill us. If we don’t participate in these sorts of disciplines and activities, we will be less likely to be filled and stay filled with the Spirit. Passivity is not the way to live the Spirit-filled life. We have a part to play!
We were never made to live independently from God; we were always meant to live by His power. But our fall into sin has brought a crippling weakness upon us, separating us from our Source of power and life. Through Christ, the way is now open to receive power that’s made perfect in our weakness (2 Cor. 12:9). It’s another example of what salvation is and what we’re saved from. We’re saved from the weakness of sin by the power of God’s Spirit!