(By Theanna Joyce)
Have you ever been confronted with your own weakness?
It was my first time grocery shopping in a new city by myself and I was excited to go to Trader Joe’s — a novelty for us Canadians. Thankfully, it was mid-August, so the 17-minute walk there was quite pleasant. I got everything on my list and then some, paid for it, and started back.
But about three minutes into my walk home, I realized my mistake. My arms burned with the weight of my groceries. I hadn’t considered the weight of each item in my cart when I was joyfully taking all Trader Joe’s had to offer. Disheartened, I thought how much further I had to go, and there was nothing I could do but keep walking (and occasionally set the bags on the ground so I could get feeling back in my hands).
In contrast to my weak arms and poor planning, consider Jesus.
Not his physical strength, how many baskets of bread He could carry in one go, but His divine strength. I don’t think we can quite fathom it. His strength was on an entirely different level from ours — in the garden, when the soldiers and officers came to arrest Him, two words from Jesus — “I am” — sent them to their knees (John 18:6). If strength was the measure, He won the contest.
Hebrews 1:3 describes how Jesus upholds the universe by the word of His power, and Colossians 1:16 says that He is actually holding all things together — things on heaven and things on earth, things visible and invisible.
These verses remind me of the Sunday school song “He’s got the whole world in his hands.” It seems almost childish to say, yet we see in Scripture that it’s 100% true. He holds it all in his hands.
This is truth we can cling to when our arms grow tired and our souls are weary.
I wonder if sometimes we try to take His place as the one who holds it all together. Now, it’s good to be organized or responsible, but we weren’t made to hold the world together — that’s a job only God can do, and we must trust Him to do so.
Trusting God is a simple thing. It’s a choice, a decision followed by action, not to rely on self or be overcome by the world, but to turn to God.
Trusting God is such a difficult thing. It means knowing God, listening for his voice, and then obeying it. He might tell you to set something down and step back even when you think that you’re the only one who can do it right. He might tell you to step up when you don’t know where the resources will come from or where the rest of the path leads. It means choosing again and again to find your worth, your value, your direction, and everything else in Him.
He is the one who holds the universe together.
When we come to the gospels and consider Christ on the cross, hanging there in shame and pain, it might seem like He was weak. Yet He chose to stay there out of humility and love for you, not because He was too weak to save Himself, but because of His love for us. Imagine the love and restraint — the strength — it would take to hang there and listen to others mock, saying “He saved others; he cannot save himself” (Matthew 27:42). They didn’t understand that the strength of God is different from the strength of man and their hearts were hard, causing them to miss out on the power of God that raised Jesus from the dead!
We serve a powerful, strong God. Jesus considered the cost of our salvation, of our reconciliation with God, and He did not give up in the face of unimaginable pain and shame. I think that took a lot of strength.
Since our God is so strong, and since He holds the whole world in his hands, we can trust Him. A beautiful truth for us to hold onto when life seems too hard, when the grocery bags are too heavy, is that Jesus offers to carry our burdens with us. We can know with certainty that His strength is sufficient for us and that He wants us to lay down our heavy burdens and take up His light one (2 Corinthians 12:9; Matthew 11:28-30).
As this new week brings new challenges, I pray that you will trust God and depend on his strength.
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