The Power of Weakness

One of the blessings that God gives us in our walk with him is to be constantly surprised by the gospel. This Christmas season it happened to me again! It was only a few months ago that we finalised the planning for our Advent series “Knowing for Sure”. I was excited by the idea of slowing down and going carefully through the first chapter of Luke’s gospel After all, this is the way that God himself, through Luke, gets us ready to see the birth of Jesus. What I hadn’t expected to happen is that I was wonderfully shocked by what we read together.

Luke 1 is full of strange contrasts. There is Zechariah the temple priest who should have believed what the angel Gabriel told to him. Instead he doubts and is struck dumb. By contrast Mary, in some little backwater Gentile-country village, is the model of pious Jewish belief. But this is only the start. As Mary sings praises to God she helps us see that God is in the business of strange; the proud are humbled and the lowly exalted, the hungry are fed and the rich get nothing.

Through all these contrasts and reversals one thing appears to be certain: God is going to return in great power to rescue his people. He will show strength with his arm and establish an eternal kingdom.

Yet this leads into the greatest, most surprising contrast of them all. When God the King finally arrives he appears as a helpless baby laid in an animal’s feeding trough.

The reversal could not be more stark. And we should spend some time pondering it because it’s an important central truth about how God actually operates in the world. Yes, he is the mighty powerful one who crushes his enemies – but his great victory is won through an act of weakness and submission. The humble birth of Jesus is just a warm-up for the degradation of the Cross.

It's good to remember that God is consistent. So as we serve him and long for Jesus to be known across Parramatta and beyond our ministry takes the same shape. We will use those things that the world thinks is weak but through which God works so very powerfully. We’ll open up the Bible and tell others what it says about Jesus. We’ll pray that God would use that word to bring them to new life.  The world thinks this is madness but God uses it to change the world!

The weak baby in the manger and the humiliated man on the Cross are not just our message – they’re the method by which we spread the message. Will you pray with me this Christmas that we would be increasingly shaped by this paradox as God works powerfully through our own supposedly weak actions.

David Ould
Senior Associate Minister