When Under Great Pressure

Over the past month, I had the opportunity to preach a 3 week series by that title. (You can watch them on our church website, http://www.bethanychurch.com/media/sermonarchive.cfm) Many of the thoughts are from session 5 or 6 (depending on the version you have) in the First Loved to Loved Experience workbook. The difference is that in the sermon series, I had more time to explore and dwell on the key ideas that the apostle Paul gives us for, not just surviving great pressure, but thriving in our walk with Jesus because of it. How?

Paul said that, when we are weak, then we are strong because it's when we are weak that Christ's power rests on us and reaches full measure in us (2Cor 12:9-10). Without the weakness that pressures of various kinds produce, we have no need to rely on God and thereby experience his presence, his power and love.

One scholar truly grasped this truth when he said, "Paul teaches that God's way of exhibiting power is altogether different from human ways. People try to overcome their weaknesses. God is satisfied to use weaknesses for his own special purposes. God's means of working, rightly understood, is not by making people stronger, but weaker and weaker, until the divine power alone is seen in them" and I would add, experienced by them.

So may your heart be strengthened and encouraged by the Father's words of love for you today: "I know you are under great pressure, far beyond your ability to endure so that despair even of life. Indeed, in your heart you feel as though you have been sentenced to death. But it's in times like these when you cannot rely on yourself that you learn to rely on me, your God, who raises the dead" (2Cor. 1:8-9).