I picked up a really good book from the library the other day on parenting teens. I’ve always liked the teachings I hear come from Love and Logic. I first learned about them when I read Danny Silk’s book “Loving Your Kids on Purpose.” Excellent book, by the way. They have a Facebook page, too, check it out. There was one sentence that really stuck out to me the other night and I’ve just been meditating on it for a few days. The author said this: “I will never require myself, or one of my children, to work on more than one weakness at a time.” This one statement is really challenging me. It feels like this is another piece of the puzzle that the Lord has been putting together in my mind to make sense of something… something big.
I considered my own life and my own walk with the Lord. How often do I scatter for something to study each day? I’ve finally gotten better at setting time apart every day at a certain time to read and pray. But I felt a tug to go further. I just didn’t know how to go further. I wanted to go further, but the way that I want to go forward in my own strength isn’t always the same way God is calling me to go forward. It’s an upside down kingdom. His ways are higher. So, here I’m sitting on this sentence: “I will never require myself, or one of my children, to work on more than one weakness at a time.”
What is my weakness that I’m trying to improve right now? I know exactly what it is. I also know that I haven’t been leaping over the mountains of this one weakness just yet, either. A friend of mine was teaching a couple of months ago and she said something else that stuck out to me. I felt the Holy Spirit bringing it up in my spirit this week. She said, “The problem is, we read a book and we think we got it.” At the time the book I was reading then was Bob Sorge’s: Secrets of the Secret Place. I highly recommend it. As I read it I would apply what I was learning with each new chapter. Towards the end it got harder because I like to read really fast. I was reading faster than I could allow the Holy Spirit to come in and change my life. Most habits take weeks to form, at least. I was trying to eat the words of that book a lot faster than I was willing to apply them. Can you guess what happened when the book was over? I had a great experience reading it, but then only a few things really stuck. I had read the book and I was ready to get my hands on something else that was really good. Never mind the weaknesses that reading it exposed. They would sit there, waiting on me to fix them as I tackled another book to see what else was in my heart that I could work on. How it must have looked in the spiritual realm to see my heart exposed, weaknesses bleeding, conviction wanting to work, (eventually turning into condemnation when it couldn’t) and my flesh left completely unable to tackle all of them at once. Of course I had no idea that was what was going on until I read that one sentence: “I will never require myself, or one of my children, to work on more than one weakness at a time.”
I know what the one weakness is that God keeps pulling me back to work on. I can also recognize all the other ones I think I should work on, too. Those things seem to loom over me like a dark cloud telling me that I can’t do it all. But that’s not the truth at all. It’s not that I can do it all, it’s that He’s already done it all. Because of what Jesus did I am clean before Him, so long as I repent and walk before/with Him. But, there’s that ‘so long as’ that seems so often overlooked. Let’s be real, sometimes we want to run before Him and not with Him. Like I said earlier, book after book, bible study after bible study, conference after conference, in our heads thinking, “glory to glory!” When all the while, our Father is behind us calling us to slow down. I’m finding that there’s so much to deal with when it comes to exposing just one weakness. I don’t know much about military strategies, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a good idea to keep sending troops into battle only to let them have partial victories. God wants us to walk in the victory He already has for us, but we keep running around from battle to battle. We think we just need to raise a white surrender flag when God is calling us to raise a crimson red one. We can’t raise both when we stop short of victory by simply reading a book then moving on. It takes time to allow the Holy Spirit to work things into our lives. Time. It takes time. One weakness at a time.
For me it’s been one big one. It’s been almost a year now that I’ve been working on it. I keep thinking I should move on to something else by now. I keep thinking that my close friends that I discuss spiritual things with are going to get tired of the same old subject. Maybe I need a new one. Maybe I could learn something else. Maybe I could see something else. But then there stands my weakness, still weak. I try to read what everyone else is. I start to and then I start meditating on that thing instead of the thing that I really need to think on to overcome that one weakness that I’m trying to walk out. Then I find myself thinking and praying about the other thing, “Lord, is that still in my heart, I thought I dealt with that, already?” And the answer surprises me, “I wasn’t calling you to go back there.” Oh, that’s right. That was me. That was just me wanting to be ever learning and never coming to a knowledge of the truth. I realize that in context that scripture is talking about the backsliding, rebellious, foolish people in the end times, but here I was thinking about that scripture. That’s exactly what I was doing. I was just wanting more knowledge and more knowledge and more knowledge. I had even colored it ad good and righteous in my mind. The more I knew about God the more I would know Him. The thing is, God could teach me more than I ever could imagine by simply walking out my one big weakness with Him. If I’d only give Him the go ahead. If I could just slow down. If I could just stop trying so hard to be, to know so much. That one weakness is all God needs me to surrender to Him right now. He doesn’t want my ‘yes!’ on all those other things I think I want to say yes to, He wants my ‘yes!’ on that which He called me to. That one weakness.
When I step ahead of God, I’m exalting my own wisdom over His. When I step ahead of God, I’m saying that I can conquer my own weaknesses without Him. When I step ahead of God, I’m saying it’s okay to just try to be good, that it’s okay to settle. When I step ahead of God, I leave all of my weaknesses exposed and not dealt with. I’m determined to stay in one place and work on my one weakness until God’s power is made perfect in my body. I’m determined to fight this fight even if it means meditating on the same scripture for months. I’m determined to walk with God and not sprint ahead in my own strength. I’m in this thing for the long run, anyway. And at the end of this battle, the authority that comes to release power into other people’s lives struggling with the same weakness I conquered, that testimony is worth it. Jesus alone is worth it. We don’t really see the depth of our one weakness when we’re fighting to overcome. We don’t see things like our Father God does. We don’t understand all the thinking patterns, all the strongholds formed around our one weakness. But my Best Friend who is walking me through this is the Almighty God, the creator of the universe. He sees straight into my heart and has no problem spending time with me to breathe life into my dark places. And the really cool thing about all of that is that He delights in me throughout the whole process. Even in my weakness He loves me. And here in this weakness I will press on, waiting and watching for God to move. And here in my weakness, I will remember, that “I will never require myself, or one of my children, to work on more than one weakness at a time.”
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