So far in our study, we have seen that God’s Kingdom and Gospel are counterintuitive to human nature. We naturally are attracted to riches, good times, having our own way, putting ourselves first, grabbing a variety of self-absorbing pleasures, and avoiding conflict and pain at all costs. We naturally seek a religion that helps us feel good about ourselves, strokes our egos, justifies our lifestyles and makes God obligated to us because of our own effort. Jesus’s Kingdom and Gospel thoroughly sift out every person with these tendencies. Instead, we learn that the poor in spirit, those who mourn over their broken lives, those who hunger for Jesus’s righteousness and despise their duplicitous heart end up receiving a Kingdom of unimaginable greatness. The person who embraces a Savior while despising their old life, experiences the life-changing power of the Gospel and never looks back.
This week, as we peer deeper into the counterintuitive nature of the economy of God, we will attempt to embrace one of the strangest of attitudes. We all need energy to run on. We need resources to power our lives. The more resources we have, the more life we have. We quickly move from lemonade stands and lawn mowing routes, to degrees on our walls and accolades on our resumes that convince us that we are well resourced. We get bigger homes, more toys and more capacity to produce valuable work. And as these short little lives of ours reach their zenith of productivity, some of us might tend to become a bit proud of our accomplishments. This is, as we will find out from Scripture, perhaps when we become most vulnerable to being drawn down the broad road of destruction that Jesus warned His hearers about. Jesus’s disciple Matthew lived this lie and escaped its clutches by embracing Jesus and forsaking his tax-booth. Paul escaped this lie by counting as “dung” one of the great resumes of the 1st century. In fact, one of Paul’s favorite verses of Scripture to meditate on belays this truth normally hidden to the world’s powerbrokers:
This is what the Lord says: “Let not the wise boast of their wisdom or the strong boast of their strength or the rich boast of their riches, but let the one who boasts boast about this: that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight,” declares the Lord. (Jeremiah 9:23-24)
Look at that last phrase from the very mind of God: “for in THESE I delight.” God is looking for and completely enjoys a certain kind of person on the earth! He is not impressed with the wise, the strong or the rich. Instead, it is the person who KNOWS God (and is known by God), that becomes the Lord’s delight. Jesus would pray 700 years later, that “this is ETERNAL LIFE, that they know You, the only true God, and Jesus whom you have sent.” (John 17:3)
To the ancient, “boasting” is an important nuance of honor/shame culture. Status and position were fixed by the size of one’s herds, the wealth in one’s pockets and the relational proximity to the king. Armies and armaments, the size of the city wall and the accolades of war all were part of the composite mix of security and boasting. But God’s economy is different. Jeremiah knew it, and so did Paul.
In 1 Corinthians 1:31 and 2 Corinthians 10:17, the apostle quotes Jeremiah 9, applying it to his most worldly church-plant. Plain as day, Paul sees a God who chooses weak things to use, instead of strong. This week, we want to understand why this is. Our prayer is that in seeing God’s propensity to using weak things, you’ll be encouraged to give up trying to live out of your own strength. This lesson lies at the heart of our study. Our natural tendency to power up and try to live the Christian life in our own strength is futile and exhausting. There is a WAY better life waiting on the other side of this truth! God’s power is perfected in weakness.
As you prepare for tonight’s home group, look back over the devotions from the past week. Which devotions were most meaningful to you and why?