6/6/21
Christopher Rich
www.mrcy.life
Good Morning! Welcome to Mercy Fellowship where we are Saved by Jesus Work, Changed by Jesus’ Grace, and Living on Jesus’s Mission. Today we are continuing our series ENDURE: Courage in Weakness. If you’re going to follow someone, or if you’re going to learn from someone, what type of person do you want them to be? If you get a personal trainer, you want them to be jacked right. If you have a spiritually leader you want them to be enlightened, a business coach who is a failure isn’t who we want to sign up for. This assumes we have curiosity at all. Sometimes we think we have all the answers on our own. We are too easily impressed, because we can be impressed with ourselves. This is not a path that will lead to glory or contentment. As this series draws to a close this is the penultimate sermon/text which is the key to the entire rest of the book and how we endure. Central to this letter is the paradox of how we see and relate to our own insufficiency. Paul, writing to this church has just spent the end of chapter 11 talking about all his credentials for ministry. Yes, he’s educated, a citizen, with the right lineage, right training, but what really qualifies him for leadership and why he says they should engage with his understanding of the Gospel is his suffering. He leads with his failures and frustrations as marks of faithfulness. And just so we don’t mistake his faithfulness for pride in his ability to endure, Paul talks about being lowered in a basket fleeing from Damascus as he’s pursued by an vicious enemy. That doesn’t look like victory, that doesn’t look like taking ground, that looks like defeat and retreat. So how do we grow from that? Enduring is our path to ultimate victory. To understand how we endure the Christians life we need to experience strength through weakness.
