You Must Empower Yourself. Um, No.

We should empower ourselves. That’s what we are often told. We should empower ourselves politically, personally, and at our workplaces. For heaven’s sake, don’t let those in power take advantage of you or push you around.

This idea of empowering oneself has, of course, like so many other things in our culture, absolutely nothing to do with the Christian God. We think one way. He thinks in another that is incomprehensible to us. The Lord says so Himself.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8–9).¹

Jesus, our example, had no interest whatsoever in empowering Himself when He walked on the earth. Instead, He demonstrated His Messiahship through miracles, by spiritual power. Even when His life was on the line, instead of using power, He responded this way when Peter cut of the ear of a man in the crowd that came to arrest Him.

“Then Jesus said to him, ‘Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so?’” (Matthew 26:52–54).

Hmm. Six thousand Roman soldiers were in a legion. Multiply that my twelve, and the answer is seventy-two thousand angels. Think they would have been able to take on this evil bunch? Now, that’s empowerment.

Our simple response to such situations is much like Peter’s: Fight until you die on this ground. Better to die fighting than surrender like a wimp.

Empower yourself.

Jesus’ responses: Do not fight earthly power at all. My power is spiritual. There is more going on here than you know.

The Apostle Paul had an experience like many of the prophets in the Old Testament did, as well as John, a disciple of Jesus. Paul was caught up into paradise or heaven. While there, he “heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter” (2 Corinthians 12:4).

This is what happened after Paul’s experience:

“So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:7–10).

Wait just one minute. God’s power is made perfect in our weakness? I’m supposed to be weak? Don’t I need to be empowered? I mean, this is Christian ministry! How else will we be influential? Certainly not by being weak.

We are too much like the world.

I urge Christians not to think as the world thinks. Try to think as God thinks. He tells us how to do that. If you want to be empowered, seek to be weak. His power is made perfect in weakness.

¹All Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (2016). Crossway Bibles.

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