With All Your Strength
With All Your Strength
Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. (James 1:22)
The Missing Ingredient
Author Paul Coughlin believes there is a significant and disturbing lack of courage in many Christian men today. He argues that an overemphasis on the mind and heart while largely ignoring the will has left us with a lot of passive men waiting around for God to do something. That’s not how the life of faith is designed to work.
Faith does things. It doesn’t earn things, of course, but it does do things. We men sense this, and we know it by experience. We know that we come alive when we’re out there sacrificing for others and making our little corner of the earth look a little bit more like the kingdom of God. And while we must overcome some fears if we’re going to act courageously, we were made to do just that. God designed us to crave a redemptive adventure that costs us something. Otherwise, we go through life half dead, and the world and our families suffer.
Strength of Will
While we can do nothing spiritually significant apart from Christ, God probably won’t do anything spiritually significant through us apart from us—that is, apart from our cooperation. Seems obvious, right? Mark 12:30 says we’re to love God with all of our strength, not God’s strength. Granted, He gives us whatever strength we have, but He also calls us to use it to love Him and others. The time to act is now.
Bottom Line
God has given us a will as well as the strength to exercise it. Let’s stop waiting around and start taking action.