Recker's World
Reason 33
The Holy Spirit does not strengthen people
Nearer the end of the 90s my wife and I were running a cell group. It provided a real challenge for us and although senior leaders sometimes provided material when they wanted a series done, the material I used was usually my own. I had to formulate my own bible studies and discussions.
The cell group contained a mixture of people. Some of them I found rather intimidating due to being well educated and wealthy people who had been Christians for many years like me. Fortunately, they seemed happy with my leadership style. There were also some who were not well educated and did not have jobs.
We had our share of needy people over the few years we ran the group - people who always had some crisis in their life or who struggled over and over with the same issues. One thing I saw that I never saw before I became a leader was just how average Christians lives were.
When you are a leader, you are confided in a lot more and you start to realise that Jesus certainly isn’t doing anything for most. Many had no ‘Holy Spirit’ wisdom. They were as clueless as anyone and needed human beings to guide them and give them advice. They needed human beings to decipher the bible for them!
What I found weird was that I never needed any of that. Sure, I had problems, but I always went straight to God, not other people. I found my own answers through prayer (thinking about things myself), bible study and through learning by trial and error. I didn’t need other Christians to hold my hand or help me with my problems. So if God did all that for me, why not for these other people?
Of course, now I know full well why. Because many are weak people who are not able to help themselves, so they come looking for a God or other people to help them. They need religion as a crutch, but don’t get any help from God, so they reach out to their leaders or other Christians.
That’s why people like my parents were always dealing with outcasts. They are people who haven’t realised that to make your life better you actually have to take some kind of positive action, not just sit around moaning and groaning and hoping a god will do something for you.
I now realise that the people I dealt with in my cell group were very similar to the way I was in the late 80s. They were people who thought only God could help them achieve their goals, believing that prayer was somehow the magical answer. They were either too clueless (as I was)… or two apathetic to get off their butts and start taking action themselves.