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God’s REIGN: The Kingdom Among Us
I publish here to provide my readers with what I believe to be a powerful and useful way to engage God and the Bible. Please do not download and share. I pray you will be blessed and that in the blessing you will be inspired to advance God’s Kingdom through loving neighbor.
Empowered, equipped, and enabled are three words used in business management culture to address the mechanisms business leaders deploy to help foster a culture that maximizes potential. Empowered relates to providing a person with resources so they can act in ways that will make them successful. Equipped relates to providing the person with the tools and knowledge to make them successful. Enablement speaks to removing the roadblocks and shoring up their deficiencies so they appear successful, with you backing them up. Enable is the least desirable of the three words because it requires the most outside resources. It also carries some negative connotations related to fostering bad behavior or allowing some deficiency to exist. The word can even be used in psychology circles to describe a dysfunctional relationship. We can enable an alcoholic or a lazy person, for example.
I have been a business leader in Corporate America now for thirty years. I have attended dozens of seminars on leadership and read over twenty books on the subject. These seminars and books speak mostly about moving past enablement to empowerment and equipping. The goal is to help the team be its best self, freeing each individual to make decisions and inspiring rather than controlling them. The theory is that when each individual on the team is at their best, the whole team benefits exponentially. This is easier said than done, but when it happens, it works well.
As I study the New Testament and Jesus’ teachings, I discover a more complete vision of working with people individually to help them become their best selves. The New Kingdom that Jesus calls into existence at resurrection allows the all-powerful God of the Universe to individually live inside each of us and overcome our individual weaknesses so he can enable us to accomplish his Kingdom Purposes on Earth as they are in the heavenly realms.
There is no more effective way to enable someone than to work within their soul and guide their desires and their understanding. This is precisely what the Holy Spirit wants to do for us and with us. This is the best kind of enablement, one that supernaturally overcomes internal character flaws and physical shortcomings using the living, active, Holy Spirit able to help us in our weaknesses. Paul describes it this way:
“In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.”
Romans 8:26-27 NIV
God is compensating for my weakness even when I don’t understand. How awesome is that!
The Holy Spirit faces two significant challenges when working within the human soul to enable us. One challenge is that he is unwilling to go against our will. God will not go against our will, so He waits patiently for us to permit Him. The second challenge is pride. When we finally give Him permission and He acts powerfully through us, we often become puffed up with pride. This I believe, is the more difficult of the two challenges to overcome because it is the one Satan understands and uses against us most effectively. Pride was what caused Satan to fall. Pride is a central component of almost all temptation. When God begins to use us, pride inevitably becomes a stumbling block. I believe this is partly why God chooses to use obviously weak people or to leverage people’s weakness rather than their strengths. In 2 Corinthians 12 Paul says pride was the reason the Holy Spirit gave him a thorn in the flesh. I realize this is completely counter intuitive, and there are exceptions, but great Christian Leaders leveraging their own strength are often the ones who fall hardest and are most vulnerable to pride. I find it useful to remember that God does not need me. He has used donkeys, fish, ravens, and poor widows to achieve his purposes. In fact, it is almost as though the less competent we are, the more able we are to be used by God to accomplish His purposes in us. Paul describes his experience this way:
“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 about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.” 2 Corinthians 12:9 NIV
We Christians have the all-powerful God of the universe living inside us, equipping us for good works. It is hard for me to imagine a more enabling idea than that.
God usually uses weak and incapable people to achieve his greatest works. The person God used to care for Elijah was a foreign widow with only one jar of oil and some grain (see 2 Kings 4). David was so inconsequential to his family that his father did not even list him among his sons (1 Samuel 16). Mary was a peasant teenage girl who conceived a baby out of wedlock in a small, insignificant town in an occupied nation (Luke 1 and 2, Matthew 2). Jesus was that boy who grew up largely unnoticed without a formal education. He grew up as a working-class carpenter whose ministry lasted approximately three years before he died. He died a tortured criminal. And yet, today, he is hands down the most well-known person in history.
Other insignificant people in Jesus’ story include a boy who, with five loaves and two fish, fed 5,000 people (Matthew 14, Luke 9, Mark 6, John 6), and a woman with five husbands who was too afraid of the local gossips to draw water during the cool evening or early morning. Instead, she is relegated to the hottest part of the day to draw water from the well.
Life On the Rock 