It's interesting that one of the criticisms of non-religious folks is that we're using "religion" as a "crutch." Years ago, I would have become defensive and argued at the idea, but today I happily admit that Jesus is like a crutch but so much more. Why the change of heart?
Often we're tempted to think that our spiritual walk with God is a lot like physical therapy for person recovering from a crippling injury. When many of us first come to believe, we imagine we're like someone who just awakened from a horrible accident and received the diagnosis that our legs don't work. We rely heavily on God, especially at first, like a recovering man would with crutches or a walker. And we imagine that as we work our spiritual muscles, as we do our disciplines and try hard to be good people, as we do more spiritual therapy, we get stronger. God lets us walk through some hard times too, perhaps, and that gives us the extra push to work out a little harder and strengthen ourselves, to ultimately realize how strong we are and can be. As we get better and better, stronger and stronger, we imagine we need those crutches and that walker less and less. With this view of spirituality, of course the idea that we need a crutch is offensive. That would be a sign of weakness, not strength; a sign that our progress is lacking, that we're not "all better, now."
But this picture is the exact opposite of what it is to walk with God. First, God comes to us, not at the top of a ladder, calling us to get stronger and climb up to Him, but rather in weakness, as a man hanging and bleeding on a cross, dying in suffering and ignominy. Second, we didn't just wake up from a terrible crash and lose the feeling in our legs. It's more accurate to say that coming to faith is waking up on the operating room table, having been resuscitated and brought from death to life. Third, our walk of faith, our growth in the Lord, is a constant stripping of all the things we trust in outside of Him. It is a constantly increasing process of unveiled weakness and foolish self-sufficiency. Rather than awakening from our crash to get strong enough to ditch the crutches and walker, the Christian walk is a life of learning, by daily repentance, to shift our weight off of ourselves and onto Him, a life of repeatedly experiencing just how utterly absent of life we are in ourselves. Rather than growth being indicated by appearing to need Him less, it is indicated by depending upon Him more and more, by trusting in Him, His death for our sins, His resurrection, and those things worked by Him into our lives more and more.
I am weak, in myself. The difference between a Christian and a non-Christian is not that one is weak and the other one isn't, so argue about which is which. It's that we know we are weak, we know that our imaginations of strength are fragile and faulty at their best, we know we have no life in ourselves, but we have the One who is strong to stand and rest upon. Put a bit more bluntly, if being a Christian is being resuscitated in the operating room, unbelief is staying dead. The first happily admits they are weak, for they have the prize of He who is Above all things. The second is just spiritually dead.
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