Your Weakness Is Not Meaningless

God has given you so many limitations because he loves you.

If you’re like most people, you don’t feel loved by your limitations. You feel confined, stunted, trapped, and exposed by them. You feel discouraged by how weak you are and how many things you can’t do well or at all. You might even be tempted to resent God for equipping you with what looks like a stingy allotment of abilities.

But that’s only because you’re mainly looking at yourself from the wrong perspective, which is looking too much at yourself.

God gave you your finiteness, your very limited strengths and weaknesses, in order that you might know and delight in his glorious love for you in as many of its manifestations as you possibly can. You are so limited because you are so loved.

Where We Experience Love Most

Our finiteness itself is not a consequence of the Fall, even though the corruption that infects it is (2 Peter 1:4). God created humans incredibly limited from the very beginning because we were designed to live in world of love.

What do our limitations have to do with love? Just about everything. Because the way God made us, we always experience love most in the places where grace is most needed. This is true both in how we receive love (from God and others), and in how we give love.

When Do We Love God Most?

Humans always have and always will live only on the grace of God, our “Maker, Benefactor, Proprietor, Upholder” (Valley of Vision, 115). It was true in Eden before the Fall, and it will be true in the age to come when we are finally free from sin.

But it is especially true in this age where we are such great sinners and in need of such amazing amounts of grace. In the Father’s giving his only Son for us in our wretched, undeserving state to die in our place, we have been loved with the greatest love possible (John 3:16; Romans 5:8; John 15:13). And our response of gratitude-drenched love to him for his gracious love to us produces a holy reverberation of love-infused joy between God and us. We gratefully love God because he so graciously and sacrificially loved us first (1 John 4:19).

The more we grasp his incomprehensible love for us in our immeasurable need (Ephesians 3:19), the greater our love for him grows. That’s why the woman forgiven by Jesus of her great sins had the greater love for God than Simon the Pharisee (Luke 7:47). Our greatest experience of God’s love for us is in the place of our greatest need for his grace.

When Do We Love One Another Most?

It’s also true that we experience the most love for one another in the places of our greatest mutual needs.

When God gave me my strengths, few though they are, his purpose wasn’t to give me some basis on which to feel good about myself. He gave them to me so I could have the astounding privilege of loving someone else by graciously serving them in a place of their need, and then by receiving their grateful love in return.

And when God gave me my weaknesses, which are legion, his purpose wasn’t to make me ashamed and discouraged. He gave them to me so I could have the astounding privilege of humbly receiving someone else’s love as they graciously serve me in a place of my need, and then joyfully responding to them with grateful love in return.

And just like the vertical reverberation of love between God and us, there are horizontal reverberations of love between us as we extend love to one another. And since God is love and all love originates in him (1 John 4:7–8), the vertical and horizontal reverberations all meld together into one glorious song of love to God.

Do you see God’s beautiful design of love in our limitations? The transactions of love occur in the very places of our various and different needs. As John Piper so helpfully says, “Love is the overflow of joy in God that gladly meets the needs of others” (Desiring God, 119). There it is: the dynamic melding of the vertical and horizontal love of God. God’s glory is revealed when, however imperfectly in this age, we obey the greatest commandments (Luke 10:27).

A Body of Love

God has given you so many limitations because he loves you. He wants you to experience as much of his love, in as many ways as possible. And for that to happen, he must provide you a never-ending river of reasons, and an enormous range of diverse ways, to receive and give love.

And this is just what he’s done! He has made you a very limited part of his body, the church, and he places you with other parts that are also very limited in different ways (1 Corinthians 12:18, 27). As the interdependent parts work together, the whole body functions (Romans 12:4–5) and displays the love of God (John 13:34–35). Your unique strengths and weaknesses are indispensible gifts to this body. Without them the whole body suffers because unique expressions of God’s gracious love will be missed.

If you’re frequently discouraged over your limitations, it’s an indicator that you’re looking at yourself from the wrong perspective, and looking at yourself too much. You’re not seeing what God sees; you’re likely feeling discontent from comparing yourself to other people, other parts of the body.

A wonderful treatment for such discouragement is prayerfully meditating on 1 Corinthians 12 and 13. And also it’s likely time to reframe the question from “Why can’t I be more like that?” to “What opportunities is God giving me in my limitations to experience more of his gracious love?”

Because the truth is, you are so limited because you are so loved.

True Compassion Will Cost Us: Refugees, Widows, Orphans

Marco Silva / February 1, 2017

Our seam-bursting schedules scream for attention. Work deadlines demand, school assignments summon, and social engagements expand our already overburdened loads. Even if we really wanted to, how could we possibly make time to care for someone in need? Can we really make a difference in that struggling teen’s life? Do we compromise the safety of our own family if we invite that stranger into our home for dinner? Can we make any difference in the lives of refugees, even as they feel the new threat to their sojourning among us?

Whatever our excuses — and surely we have some good ones — texts like James 1:27 call us as Christians to reassess our priorities:

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world

Good Deeds with Side Effects

Let’s face it: compassion is always costly. And not just in dollars dispensed from our bank accounts. Like the list on a medicine label, compassion has side effects. Common side effects may include:

• discomfort
• reduced time for recreation
• increased exposure to awkward situations
• feelings of helplessness
• and any number of other inhibitors.

Like the medicine behind the warning label, however, compassion is good for you. But we have to be willing to invest ourselves. Caring for the hurting is more than a recurring withdrawal. Helping those in need will require more than the extra bit of time and effort it takes to pass a granola bar through your car window to a panhandler. Much good can come from donating money and offering a handout, but God inspires more. Visiting orphans and widows demands more than the swipe of a Visa. Tweeting about refugees is of some value. Caring for refugees — specific displaced men, women, and children — will require much more of us.

Biblical compassion compels us to invest in the lives of real people around us in a way that may cost us much but reaps eternal rewards beyond anything we stand to lose today.

Good Samaritan, Costly Compassion

In our vernacular, a “Good Samaritan” helps a stranded motorist with a flat tire or maybe carries a heavy box up a flight of stairs for an old woman. Lending a hand is always good, but the Good Samaritan from Jesus’s parable provides costly compassion. When Jesus spoke this parable to a predominantly Jewish audience, Samaritans and Jews hated one another. Jews regarded Samaritans as apostates headed for hell, and yet, the Samaritan in our parable has compassion on this Jewish man left for dead (Luke 10:33).

The Samaritan tenderly treated the wounds of his ethnic archenemy. What’s more, this caring man placed the desperately wounded man on his own transport and purchased a room for him at a nearby inn where he continued to provide care. The Samaritan goes so far as to leave behind two days’ worth of wages to ensure the Jewish victim of injustice recovers well. The Samaritan moved toward his enemy in need and painstakingly spent his precious time and money with no regard for the cost.

And Jesus says, “You go, and do likewise” (Luke 10:37).

God in the Garden

We even see the divine design of compassion in places we might not quite expect, like Genesis 3, when Adam and Eve first sinned. God clothes them with animal skins (Genesis 3:21) and provides for an immediate need. Our minds can jump through the immediate context to the way this scene foreshadows a greater atonement, but let’s not leave Eden too quickly.

Adam and Eve just destroyed the perfection of paradise. And God moves toward them in compassion. Our first ancestors audaciously disobeyed their Creator, and yet he cares for their immediate needs. God slaughtered an animal from his pristine creation to clothe the very pair through whom sin brings death and destruction all the way down to the present (1 Corinthians 15:22). God moves toward his enemies in costly compassion.

Great Need, Grand Opportunity

Acute needs might not greet you at your doorstep, but you are most likely surrounded by people in difficult, even dire, circumstances.

• Every minute, nearly twenty people become victims of domestic violence. Thirty-three percent of women and twenty-five percent of men have endured abuse. More than likely, someone you know quietly suffers domestic abuse.
• In 2014, over 47,000 people died from drug overdoses — more than any other year on record. According to the New York Times, “Death from overdoses are reaching levels similar to the H.I.V. epidemic at its peak” — and there are no signs of slowing. More than likely, someone you know quietly suffers through addiction.
• There are more than 400,000 children in foster care, due in no small part to the opioid epidemic. More than likely, your county has children in desperate need of loving homes.
• The suicide rate in the United States recently hit a thirty-year high. More than likely, someone you know is at risk of harming themselves — possibly fatally.
• Even with Trump’s reduced refugee program, the United States likely will still accept 50,000 refugees in 2017. That’s more than 130 souls a day. More than likely, you can make a difference in the life of someone who may have never even heard the name of Jesus.

This list could lengthen with problems like homelessness or hunger and poverty, and that’s just in America. The global needs are staggering.

Such massive suffering is a cause for lament, but it’s also a call to arms for the church. When we serve the needs around us, we provide an opportunity for those sufferers who do not yet know God to turn to him and bring him glory (Matthew 5:16; 1 Peter 2:12). The hurting and suffering around you can serve as a bridge to the gospel so that present suffering will give way to relief in eternal joy (2 Corinthians 4:17).

Go and Do Like God

Jesus carried out the costliest act of compassion, not for his companions, but for criminals guilty of high treason. How much more should we who were once enemies with God (Romans 5:8, 10), who have reaped eternal benefits from God moving toward us in Jesus, jump at the opportunity to move toward the needs of those around us?

Compassion will cost us our time, money, and comfort, but we’ll gain irrepressible joy in serving and not being served (Mark 10:45). We can imitate God’s costly compassion by serving the orphan, the widow, and the refugee because Christ purchased an indestructible treasure for us in heaven beyond anything we might risk losing in the vapor of this life (Matthew 6:19–20). In fact, we’ll find that the path of greatest service is the path of maximum joy for our own souls because, after all, “it is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).