What do you do, how do you react when your strength isn’t equal to the task?

Driving through a village in Ghana I saw this little girl trying to lift this large plastic container.
It’s too heavy for her.  She’s too weak to get it up on her head and follow her Mom.
But she’s trying.

We spend a lot of our lives doing what she’s doing.
Her Mom was walking away with an expectation that she will follow bringing her brother and the container.
It didn’t happen.

God is never like that with us.
But He does let us try to go it on our own when we get it in our minds that we can, or we should.
My expectations of myself are often so clearly inflated above reality.
I still fight the tendency to go it alone.  Alone in my own wisdom, strength, and resources.

And God lets me fall.
Or drop ‘it all’.

That’s when the teachable moment finally makes an appearance.
The Holy Spirit gets my attention and I hear the old truth, “”Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit says the LORD.”
Zech. 4:6

The Christian walk isn’t about learning to do it on our own, it’s about learning to get out of the way.
Learning to surrender, to receive, to be simply a vessel for God to fill.
Apart from Him I am always running on empty.

One problem with the necessity of dependence is that it runs so counter to our American culture and tradition.
We value strength and personal reliance.
We scorn the weak, the feeble.

Who wants to be needy or inadequate?
The thought is so negative and deeply etched in our minds as wrong.

Jesus spent 3 years trying to demonstrate to his disciples His reliance, complete and total reliance on God.

In 2 Corinthians 12 the apostle Paul talks about his ‘thorn in the flesh’.
He’d asked to be delivered from it 3 times, but God said—“My grace is enough for you because My strength is made perfect in weakness.”

So why am I surprised when I feel my strength in short supply?
If it doesn’t happen on its own, God will allow a circumstance to bring us to empty.

Only then can He fill us.

Are you feeling like you’re running on empty?
That’s exactly where God wants you.

For I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground:
Isaiah 44:3

 Water is a common metaphor for divine grace and the empowering of the Holy Spirit in you and in me.

A doctor once told me that most Americans are chronically dehydrated.
I think most of us Christians are too!

“Come to the fountain, there’s fullness in Jesus, all that you’re longing for, come and be glad.”