Wednesday: The Mastery of Inadequacy and Inferiority
WEEK 23
WEDNESDAY
THE MASTERY OF INADEQUACY AND INFERIORITY
1 Corinthians 3:18-23
We come now to meditate upon another mastery found among the people of the kingdom as seen in the Acts—the mastery of inadequacy and inferiority.
I said there were three things accounting for the absence of fear in that society: they were true to God, to themselves, to others. But there was another secret of their complete release from fear; they were adequate. Their level of life within was adequate to meet the problems and possibilities before them.
These men and women did not start out with adequacy for the task before them. They were commissioned to undertake the most impossible of tasks, namely, to change the present world order into the kingdom of God, and this in both the individual and society. This was the biggest task ever entrusted to a group of people, anywhere, at any time. Moreover, no group at anytime, anywhere, were more inadequate to the task assigned them.
They were provincial; none of them probably had been outside one tiny country, yet they were to change the world—a world they had never seen. They were uneducated for the most part, yet they were called on to teach the world, including Greece and Rome and India and China, for they were to go “into the whole world and proclaim the good news to every creature” (Mark 16:15). They were without social standing in the society they were supposed to change; they were mere outsiders. They were from a province that was looked down on by the elite of Jerusalem—Galilee. The leaders complained that Jesus taught the people “from Galilee all the way here” (Luke 23:5). He began with the low castes and not with the upper brackets. And finally, they were inadequate as persons. When they began, their level of moral life within was not appreciably higher than the level around them.
Peter, under pressure, could curse and swear and could fight, drawing his sword and cutting off the ear of a servant.
There was nothing—absolutely nothing—that would make one pick this group to remake the world. They add up to inadequacy. What was the secret of their amazing adequacy?
O Lord God, if these men and women became adequate, help me to find their secret; for they were persons like us, inadequate. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: It is not what I am that is the important thing, but what God is going to do through me.