12. Power in Weakness— The Spirit, Present Weakness, and Prayer
12
Power in Weakness—
The Spirit, Present Weakness, and Prayer
Present eschatological existence is lived in the radical middle, in the midst of all kinds of present weaknesses knowing the power of the Spirit, who especially comes to our aid in prayer.
Two true stories. The first took place in the dim past when I was in college. Stan was in his mid-twenties, married, a vital member of our local church, but he lay dying from a large tumor on his spine. I went to visit him with fear and trepidation. I was scarcely twenty, knew little about death and dying, and certainly knew that I was too young to be of much comfort. But I went because he was also my friend, and I am a Pentecostal, who believes that God heals the sick.
I have never forgotten my experience that day, for what happened to me happened to all who visited him. We went with due apprehension, not knowing what to say; but Stan’s own experience of Christ’s presence, what he was learning about God’s love, and his readiness—dare I say a kind of Pauline eagerness—to be with his Lord was so infectious that we all left Stan’s presence built up in our God. We went to comfort him; we left having been ministered to by him. He died three months later, a Pentecostal who also trusted to the very end that God might show him mercy through healing; but he died without disillusionment, because he was ready to enter his eternal reward.
The second story happened many years later, when our oldest son was in college and home for the holidays. It was a Sunday morning, and he had decided to “have church” in front of the TV, located in the basement family room. He let out a whoop, which caused Maudine and me to rush pell-mell downstairs. There on the screen was the wife of one of the then well-known televangelists. When we got there, she was pointing her finger at the television audience with a brittle harshness. “If any of you out there are dying of cancer,” she nearly shouted, “it’s your fault, not God’s. God wants to heal you.”
Two stories; two followers of Christ. I prefer the first.
At issue in this chapter is the relationship between the Spirit as God’s empowering presence and the theme of weakness in Paul. Here in particular it is easy to miss the radical middle in which Paul himself walked and to err with un-Pauline emphases on one side or the other. My point, one will not be surprised to read by now, is that our present eschatological existence—our experience of God’s kingdom “already but not yet realized” in the life of the church—is also the key to this final set of contrasts in Paul. Again, the presence of the eschatological Spirit plays a major role, although in this case also resulting in some tensions for later believers.
The Present Situation
There are two more or less clearly defined sides on the issue of the Spirit and present weakness. On the one hand stands a view that by default is easily that of the majority. This view has a subtlety to it that makes it look more Pauline than it actually is; indeed, it leans toward a defeatism that is especially difficult to square with Paul. At issue here is a tendency on the part of some to confuse the term “weakness,” that is, life in the flesh, with life according to the flesh. When Paul says, for example, that “the Spirit assists us in our weakness” (Rom. 8:26), “weakness” is taken to encompass all of our present existence, including our sinfulness. Paul’s glorying in his weaknesses is then seen to embrace the alleged Spirit-flesh struggle as well as the various bodily weaknesses and sufferings to which Paul actually refers.
But Paul never makes that equation, as any careful study of the term “weakness” in Paul demonstrates. This term does indeed apply to life in the flesh, that is, our present human life that is still lived in the context of suffering and disability. But as noted in the preceding chapter, life in the flesh is not the same as life according to the flesh, which in Paul means to live in sin.
The best evidence that Paul does not include an inner Spirit-flesh conflict within his understanding of being empowered in weakness is that he can speak positively of living in weakness, so much so that it is for him a cause for “boasting/glorying” and thus for joy. It is unimaginable that he should rejoice over life according to the flesh—nor in fact does he do so.
The result of this view is an under-realized eschatological perspective—with so much emphasis on the not yet that there is little on the already. Even though there is much talk about the Spirit on this side, there is a strong tendency to leave God’s people to slug it out in the trenches more or less on their own, with some lip service paid to the Spirit but with little of Paul’s experience of the Spirit as the empowering presence of God.
On the other side lie some equally strong tendencies toward triumphalism—an exaggerated, sometimes exclusive, focus on the already. This extreme is a special temptation in a culture like late-twentieth-century North America, which rejects pain of any kind as a form of evil and avoids suffering at all costs. Here the difficulty is not between an internal struggle and a human tendency to sinfulness but between the promised—and experienced—power of the Holy Spirit and our culture’s view of suffering and pain as inherently evil.
That suffering and pain stem from evil is not to be doubted; that they are the direct result of our own evil—or lack of faith, as some would have it—is not only to be doubted but to be vigorously rejected as completely foreign to Paul. The result of this view is something of an over-realized eschatological perspective, emphasizing the already to the neglect of the not yet, resulting in an un-Pauline view of the Spirit as present in power while negating weakness in the present as dishonoring to God.
The problem here lies with the tendency to separate some realities that in Paul gladly coexist. Paul knows nothing of a gospel that is not at the same time God’s power, power manifested through the resurrection of Christ and now evidenced through the presence of the Spirit. That includes “miracles” in the assembly (Gal. 3:5), to which Paul can appeal in a matter-of-fact way as proof that salvation in Christ is based on faith, not on Torah observance (“He who supplies you with the Spirit and performs miracles among you, is it on the basis of works of law or of the hearing of faith?”). It also includes the effective proclamation of Christ accompanied by the Spirit’s manifest power in bringing about conversions (1 Thess. 1:5–6; 1 Cor. 2:4–5), despite the obvious weakness of the messenger himself (1 Cor. 2:1–3; 2 Cor. 12:7–10).
For many, especially the Corinthians (and their legion of present-day followers), the latter seems a contradiction in terms. How can there be miracles, but no miracle in one’s own behalf? How can one glory in the power of the resurrection and the life of the Spirit and not have that power applied to one’s own physical weaknesses and suffering? “Physician, heal thyself” was not just a word spoken to Christ. It is always the bottom line of those for whom God’s power can be manifest only in visible and extraordinary ways, who never consider that God’s greater glory rests on the manifestation of his grace and power through the weakness of the human vessel, precisely so that there will never be any confusion as to the source!
The Spirit, Power, and Weakness
We begin by looking at the word “power,” since part of our problem is again one of definitions. We cannot always be sure what power might have meant for Paul. It refers frequently to visible manifestations that reveal the Spirit’s presence (e.g., 1 Cor. 2:4–5; Gal. 3:5; Rom. 15:19). The evidence from 1 Thessalonians 5:19–22; 1 Corinthians 12–14; Galatians 3:2–5; and Romans 12:6 makes certain that the Pauline churches were “charismatic” in the sense that a dynamic presence of the Spirit was manifested in their gatherings. Even where power means that believers grasp and live out the love of Christ in a greater way (Eph. 3:16–20), Paul recognizes here a miraculous work of the Spirit whose evidence will be the way renewed people behave toward one another. This dynamic, evidential dimension of life in the Spirit probably more than anything else separates believers in later church history from those in Paul’s churches. Whatever else, the Spirit was experienced in Paul’s churches; he was not simply part of a phrase in the creed.
Nevertheless, Paul also assumes the closest link between the Spirit’s power and present weaknesses. Without explicitly saying so, passages such as Romans 8:17–27 and 2 Corinthians 12:9 indicate that the Spirit is seen as the source of empowering in the midst of affliction or weakness. In Paul’s view, knowing Christ means both knowing the power of his resurrection and participating in his sufferings (Phil. 3:9–10); indeed, one needs to know the former to embrace the latter. God’s concern for us in the present is that we live cruciform, “conformed to Christ’s likeness in his death” (Phil. 3:10), as that has been illustrated in the glorious story of Christ in 2:6–11. Suffering means to be as the Lord, following his example and thus “filling up what was lacking in his sufferings” (Col. 1:24).
Nonetheless, Paul also expects God’s more visible demonstration of power, through the Spirit, to be manifested even in the midst of weakness, as God’s proof that his power resides in the message of a crucified Messiah. In 1 Corinthians 2:3–5, therefore, Paul can appeal simultaneously to the reality of his own weaknesses and the Spirit’s manifest power in his preaching and in the Corinthians’ conversion; and in 1 Thessalonians 1:5–6, he reminds these new believers that they became so by the power of the Spirit but in the midst of suffering that was also accompanied by the joy of the Holy Spirit.
All of this reflects Paul’s basic eschatological understanding of Christian existence as already/not yet, a tension that Paul was able to keep together in ways that many later Christians cannot. For him it was not simply tension in which the present was all weakness and the (near) future all glory. The future had truly broken into the present, as verified by the gift of the Spirit; and since the Spirit meant the presence of God’s power, that dimension of the future had already arrived in some measure. Thus present suffering is a mark of discipleship, whose model is our crucified Lord. But the same power that raised the Crucified One from the dead is also already at work in our mortal bodies.
This paradox in Paul’s understanding is what creates so many difficulties for moderns. We have tended to emphasize one to the neglect of the other. Paul, and the rest of the New Testament writers, hold these expressions of Spirit and power in happy tension. After all, for Paul, the preaching of the Crucified One is the working center of God’s power in the world (1 Cor. 1:18–25), and Paul’s own preaching in a context of weakness and fear and trembling certified that the power which brought about the Corinthians’ conversion lay in the work of the Spirit, not in the wisdom or eloquence of the preacher. Paul thus steers a path through the radical middle that is often missed by both evangelicals and Pentecostals, who traditionally misplace their emphasis on one side or the other.
Whether or not a (sometime) companion of Paul, the author of the epistle to the Hebrews seems to capture this paradox in a slightly different way, through the several examples of faith (= faithfulness, perseverance) in 11:32–38. Some lived “in faith” and saw great miracles performed; others also lived “in faith” and were tortured and put to death. But all were commended for their faith, the author concludes. So with the Spirit and power in Paul. The Spirit means the presence of great power, power to overflow with hope (Rom. 15:13), power sometimes attested by signs and wonders and at other times by joy in great affliction. However, precisely because the Spirit has not brought the final End, but only the beginning of the End, power does not mean final perfection in the present age; rather it leads to maturity in Christ.
Thus the whole of Paul’s understanding of our present life in the Spirit, paradoxical as it may seem at times, is put into proper perspective if we begin, as we should, with chapters 2 and 5 above—by realizing that the Spirit is both the fulfillment of the eschatological promises of God and the down payment on our certain future. We are both already and not yet. The Spirit is the evidence of the one, the guarantee of the other.
To our great delight we are not left to ourselves, looking for ways merely to cope as we live in the radical middle. Nor is the Spirit present simply to give us a show of power now and then as a reminder that we belong to the future after all. Rather he is present as our constant companion, both to lead and to empower us. At no point is this empowering more significant than in our life of prayer.
The Spirit and Prayer
Throughout this book I have tried to point out that the division often perceived in the church between the corporate people of God and the individual is a false one as far as Paul’s experience and theology are concerned. Those who emphasize more the corporate side of things also sometimes shy away from, or are uncomfortable with, personal piety, including “Spirituality.” All pietistic movements (historical movements strongly concerned with individual spirituality) come into being in reaction to a tendency for the individual’s relationship with God to get lost or swallowed up in some form of churchiness. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the attitude of some toward prayer.
One of the more remarkable inconsistencies in studies on Paul is that thousands of books exist that search every aspect of Paul’s thinking, while only a few seek to come to terms with his life of prayer. Indeed, most people’s understanding of Paul is limited either to Paul the missionary or to Paul the theologian. But what is clear from Paul’s letters is that he was a pray-er before he was a missioner or a thinker. His life was devoted to prayer; and his relationship with his converts was primarily sustained by way of thanksgiving and prayer. To eliminate prayer from Paul’s personal piety would be to investigate the workings of a gas-combustion engine without recognizing the significance of oil. Paul did not simply believe in prayer or talk about prayer. He prayed, regularly and continuously, and urged the same on his churches (1 Thess. 5:16–18). Although this is undoubtedly a carryover from his life before Christ, what we need to note here is that for Paul prayer has been radically transformed by the coming of the Spirit.
Whether set prayers were ever said in Paul’s churches cannot be known; in any case, spontaneous prayer by the Spirit is the norm. The beginning of Christian life is marked by the indwelling Spirit’s crying out “Abba” to God (Gal. 4:6; Rom. 8:15). “On all occasions,” Paul urges elsewhere, “pray in/by the Spirit”; this injunction applies to every form of prayer (Eph. 6:18), including prayer for the enabling of evangelism.
With prayer in particular the Spirit helps us in our already/not yet existence. Because in our present weakness we do not know how or for what to pray, the Spirit himself makes intercession for us with “inarticulate groanings” (Rom. 8:26–27), an expression that most likely refers to glossolalia (speaking in tongues).
Prayer (and praise), therefore, seems the best way to view Paul’s understanding of glossolalia. At no point in 1 Corinthians 14 does Paul suggest that tongues is speech directed toward people; three times he indicates that it is speech directed toward God (14:2, 14–16, 28). In verses 14–16 he specifically refers to tongues as “praying with my S/spirit”; and in verse 2 such prayer is described as “speaking mysteries to God,” which is why the mind of the speaker is left unfruitful, and also why such prayer without interpretation is not to be part of the corporate setting. Paul himself engaged in such prayer so frequently that he can say boldly to a congregation who treasured this gift that he prayed in tongues more than any of them (1 Cor. 14:18). To be sure, he will also, he insists, “pray with my mind.” What he will not do is engage in only one form of prayer, as most later Christians have tended to do.
Further, prayer in the Spirit does not mean to be in “ecstasy”; it means the Spirit’s praying through his spirit without the burden of his mind and in conversation with God. We can trust the Spirit in such prayer, he argues in Romans 8:26–27, precisely because such prayer is a form of the Spirit’s assisting us in our weaknesses, and God knows the mind of the Spirit, that he prays in keeping with God’s will.
Praying “in the Spirit” (however that is understood) is also God’s provision for his people in another area of weakness—in the ongoing struggle “against the principalities and powers.” Besides the defensive armor provided by the gospel, Paul urges the believers to use their two “Spirit weapons” as they engage the enemy: the message of the gospel (penetrating the enemy’s territory and rescuing people who are captive to him) and “praying in the Spirit” (Eph. 6:18–20).
Here in particular the Spirit is our true friend and aid. Precisely because we do not know how to pray as we ought, we need to lean more heavily on praying in/by the Spirit to carry on such spiritual warfare more effectively. Prayer, therefore, is not simply our cry of desperation or our grocery list of requests that we bring before our heavenly Abba; prayer is an activity inspired by God himself, through his Holy Spirit. It is God siding with his people and, by his own empowering presence, the Spirit of God himself, bringing forth prayer that is in keeping with his will and his ways.
It is probably impossible to understand Paul as a theologian if one does not take this dimension of his “Spirituality” with full seriousness. A prayerless life is one of practical atheism. As one who lived in and by the Spirit, Paul understood prayer in particular to be the special prompting of the Spirit, leading him to thanksgiving for others and petition in the Spirit, even when he did not know for what specifically to pray. Whatever else life in the Spirit meant for Paul, it meant a life devoted to prayer, accompanied by joy and thanksgiving.
Prayer, after all, is the ultimate expression of our life between the times. It is evidence of our utterly dependent status; as it is also evidence of our continuing in the present in recognized weakness. Prayer in the Spirit does not make demands upon God (though our prayers often do) but humbly waits and listens to God—and trusts God the Holy Spirit to intercede for us in keeping with God’s own will and pleasure.
In this context we should perhaps also include one of the dimensions of Paul’s Spirituality that is most difficult to evaluate, the place of visions and revelations. We know about these only because Paul is stepping over onto the Corinthians’ turf momentarily in order to persuade them that it is totally inappropriate to use such experiences to authenticate his—or anyone else’s—apostleship (2 Cor. 12:1–10). What we need to note is that Paul clearly affirms that he has had such experiences and apparently has had them often; but he disallows that they have any value at all in authenticating ministry.
Much as with glossolalia, therefore, we learn about such matters in his life in the Spirit only because the Corinthians made too much of them. Obviously for Paul both of these kinds of Spirit experiences belonged to his private relationship with God; thus he simply never speaks about them on his own. “Ecstasy” for him was a matter between himself and God; before others he will only be “sober-minded” (2 Cor. 5:13).
How different from so much of church history! A parade of private Spirit experiences has all too often been the first credential brought forward to authenticate ministry or spirituality. Paul could point to plenty of Spirit activity that had to do with God’s dealings with others, usually from within a context of personal weakness. Thus such moments as those described in the modest terms of 1 Corinthians 12:1–6 were undoubtedly moments highlighting the richness of his life in the Spirit, life for him in the personal presence of God. But these were too private to be either promoted or paraded. That he “knew such a man” who had been “transported to the third heaven” must have been a regular source of personal encouragement. But he also knew how to keep quiet about it, because being conformed to Christ’s death through the power of the resurrection is what life in the present is all about.
* * *
At the end we need to note again, however, that even Paul’s own life of prayer in the Spirit is known to us because the Corinthians were blowing it in their corporate life. That is what he speaks to in 1 Corinthians 14; we learn of his private practice coincidentally as he addresses what for him was the larger issue. That brings us to the final matters regarding the Spirit in Paul—the gathered church as a place where the Spirit is manifestly present, leading the church to praise God and edify one another.
Reflection Questions