The Problem: Feeble Arms and Weak Knees

Editor’s Note: As Journey Pastoral Coaching begins 2020, we do so with an article written by a JPC member. In it, the author has one eye on the past and one eye on the future: the past – the troubling announcements in 2019 by celebrity leaders in the church that they are “leaving the faith;” the future – what all of us can do to stay strong in The Faith once delivered for all by the One True God of heaven and earth.

The Author: Pastor Matthew Ford and his wife Tonya live in Perrysburg, Ohio where they serve as High School Pastors at Calvary Church in Maumee. A graduate of Central Bible College, Matt enjoys keeping an active body and mind through soccer, basketball and reading any book he can get his hands on. You can follow his other writings @mondaymusingswithpmatt.wordpress.com”

I’m tired of hearing about Christians whose faith “fails” them. 

We all struggle, I get it. Taking care of my physical health through exercise, eating healthy, and lifting weights is not something I enjoy doing. Every morning I hit the snooze button at least 12 times before rolling out of bed. After that, I participate in the inner dialogue between lazy me and semi-motivated me about whether morning exercise is worth it or not. Often, to my disappointment but not my surprise, “lazy me” wins. My goal each week is for “lazy me” to win a little less often and “semi-motivated me” to win more and more. Whenever I do motivate myself to work out, I am miserable doing it. The only things that help make exercise tolerable are walks with my wife, podcasts, organized sports, and playing with my dog. I force myself to workout because I know that the pain and suffering I experience today at the gym strengthen me and produce a healthy body for me in the future. 

I was reading in Hebrews chapter 12, and it caused me to think about my own wrestlings with working out, living a healthy lifestyle, and my journey of faith. I can see how my own story connects to humanity’s wrestling with faith. Throughout my life, I have observed many church attenders, who proclaim the Christian faith, crumble in the face of pain, adversity, and tragedy. It makes me wonder what are the pre-conditions of a life that makes the foundations weak enough to collapse their faith in God? 

I want to focus in on Hebrews 12:12 as the crux of the modern Christian’s problem as it describes the response and the antidote, for those who have weak foundations and are poisoned by the troubles and tragedies of their life… “12 Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees.” 

4 Practical Ways You Can Strengthen the Arms and Knees of Your Faith 

1. Focus Your Spiritual Eyes

The modern Christian sometimes experiences an exciting moment of conversion to Christ that only results in a lifetime of weak faith because of a lack of focus on the ultimate goal of faith itself. 

Hebrews 12:1b-2: 

“And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer, and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him, he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”

The best way to set spiritual goals is to first to lift your eyes to the heavens and set your sights on Jesus. This journey of better vision is best focused through personal devotional and prayer time. It’s a moment in your day where you take your eyes off your timelines, deadlines, and self, and instead fix your eyes on what’s really important in life: who you are becoming as you follow the words and way of Christ. There is not a time that I open the word, settle my heart and fix my mind on Jesus that He does not show me something that I could correct, improve or refocus to become more like Him. 

Every Christian wrestles with focusing his or her life on Christ. Focusing your eyes often feels like a daunting and impossible task; how do I become perfection like Jesus? I think of it this way, if you want to be a great basketball player who do you idolize? The kid down the street who can’t dribble? Of course not?! Instead, you think of the best possible basketball player imaginable, and you idolize them! Someone who wants to be a great basketball player might be heard saying: “I want to drive to the basket as Lebron James does, shoot like Steph Curry and be a legend like Michael Jordan.” Then they go work out and work on their basketball skills. Why do they say those things and idolize those people? It’s because if they mimic the actions of the great over time, they can become like those they imitate. It is the same with Jesus. When we live as he lived and act as he acted, we, over time, become more and more like him, So why do we fix our eyes on perfection and strive to be like Jesus? 

Philippians 3:12-16: 

“I don’t mean to say that I have already achieved these things or that I have already reached perfection. But I press on to possess that perfection for which Christ Jesus first possessed me. No, dear brothers and sisters, I have not achieved it, but I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us. Let all who are spiritually mature agree on these things. If you disagree on some point, I believe God will make it plain to you. But we must hold on to the progress we have already made.”

I set my eyes on Jesus, I idolize or imitate Him. I change my habits to reflect His. Not that I have already obtained perfection but, aiming at Him, it will result in living the best possible present and future for my life. This is the key; if you idolize the ideal, it propels you towards that ideal. This striving of the ideal begins by pausing and considering what it means to live for this ideal. It’s a dedication and strength that comes from your relationship with Christ. If stopping is difficult for you, or you don’t know where to start, begin reading Jesus’ first sermon in Matthew 5. Allow yourself to hear his heart of how he says is the best way to live as a human being. Then write a prayer or say a prayer of thanks and reflection on what you took away from your reading. That five minutes is a small step that will make a massive difference in the focus of your day. This devotion will fix your eyes on Jesus and will help you to see your circumstances more clearly through His eyes. The ultimate goal of faith on earth is making us become like Jesus. Your daily focus on Jesus and His words put you in the right place to be able to strengthen your spiritual arms and knees. 

The process of daily devotion and focus on Christ gets you to the gym, but once you are there, you still have some heavy lifting to do. I believe that many Christians have no problem “going to the gym with Christ” in their devotional times, but once they are there, they either don’t know how to or refuse to “workout” their faith.

2. Throw Off the Unnecessary Baggage 

The modern Christian would rather carry the weight of their sin in secret than experience freedom through open repentance and confession. 

Hebrews 12:1a,3-4:  

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.” 

The heavy lifting begins with the repentance and removal of what you carry that is either sinful or unnecessarily hindering your pursuit of Christ. There are two different kinds of baggage that the writer of Hebrews is pleading with every Christian to throw off of their life. 

First, throw off anything out of your control that weighs you down in your faith. Whether that be tragedy, death, betrayal, unanswered questions, victimhood, the evil actions of another person or you fill in the blank. Anything that brings unnecessary heaviness and destruction to your faith or consistently leads you to a dark place, leave it at the feet of Christ. He suffered all these listed troubles and more and carried them on the weight of the cross so that you don’t have to carry them anymore. Is what you went through still painful? Yes. Is what you went through unfair? Probably. Will you just be over it when you lay it at His feet? most likely not, but you will feel the weight be lifted as you give it over to Him. As Peter says in 1 Peter 5:7, “Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.”

In closeness and honesty with the Father the weight is lifted off and peace takes its place. 

Secondly, throw off anything in your control that weighs you down in your faith. The sins that you get yourself into are the things that so easily entangle and burden your journey with Christ. They are the constant stumbling blocks for you in your faith. The more you participate in them the more often you find yourself on the ground struggling to walk with Christ. The best thing you can do when dealing with sin in your life is to recognize your sin and repent from it. Then accept forgiveness from Christ. Find someone you can be honest about your struggles with who will encourage you in your faith. Then allow your focus on and closeness to Christ to begin to change your lifestyle and habits If it’s a person who is leading you to sinful situations stand firm in what you believe, do not waiver, and leave the relationship if necessary. If it’s an internal wrestling or struggle, run as fast as you can from any situation or location and don’t allow the enemy to isolate you from other Christians. Find a community of people who you can confess your sins to so that they can strengthen you and lift you up. Create new healthy habits in place of where the old sinful habits used to be and watch your life change forever. 

When you are carrying all that junk there isn’t much space to carry the things that Jesus is calling you to carry. The lessons and disciplines that strengthen spiritual arms and knees are heavy and if you have extra unnecessary baggage the weight can become unbearable. Those burdens that Christ calls you to bear, bear willingly, so that you can be strengthened and persevere when you journey future roads that are more difficult. When you carry unnecessary, sinful baggage it’s no wonder you collapse when difficulty arises. The unexpected events of life tests the stability of your faith and the strength of your arms and knees. If you are carrying unnecessary baggage it will weigh down your arms and knees so much that you will not be able to move effectively through the tough roads that God leads you to travel. 

The repentance and removal of sin and the constant laying down of our worries and burdens at Christ’s feet is the heavy lifting that a Christian should do every day in order to “workout” their faith and strengthen the arms and knees of their faith. 

3. Suffer With Purpose 

The modern Christian simply blames God for the pain and quits instead of wrestling with the complexities of His discipline and learn from it. 

Hebrews 12:7-11: 

“Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined—and everyone undergoes discipline— then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of spirits and live! They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” 

This idea is where it gets tough, my thought process so far as I read through Hebrews 12 has been, “Cool God I can work on focusing my eyes on you, check, and it makes sense that I should throw off the stuff that weighs down my life, check, especially the sins I commit that I know are wrong, check, and creating new habits is tough but worth doing, check. I am cool with that, but this ‘Endure Hardship’ as discipline stuff, I don’t like that because hardship and tragedy sucks and it hurts. The icing on top of the proverbial suffering cake is that I should view it as an opportunity for learning??? No way, I don’t think I can do that, that doesn’t sound worth it…” 

As I continued to consider what I was reading in these verses I started to think about what the opposite reality would be to “hardships that are painful for a season but result in me becoming more like Christ” (righteousness). The more time I spent thinking about it, the scarier and scarier that reality became. I concluded that the opposite of “hardships that result in righteousness” are “hardships that result in unnecessary suffering that continues for an indefinite amount of time and results in wasted time, directionless suffering, and unending despair”. Any person living in that hopeless reality for an extended period of time will inevitably lose the will to continue on. Since life is always going to have tragedy and hardship, I find solace in knowing that all my suffering will not be for nothing, and that if I persevere, despite all odds, I will have a harvest of righteousness and peace at the end of the dark season. 

The seeds you plant in suffering will grow into the plants you enjoy in the pleasantries. The Word says no suffering seems pleasant at the time, but if you commit to seeing your suffering as an opportunity to plant seeds of growth into your life today, you will reap a harvest of personal growth and peace with God tomorrow. 

My plea for you is not to suffer meaninglessly since all people suffer. I am sure you know people in your life whom in their suffering they planted seeds of bitterness towards others and hatred towards God. Now 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years past that experience they are harvesting that bitterness and hatred and it is manifesting itself in their disjointed relationships and lack of intimacy with God. The decisions they made in the midst of suffering altered the trajectory of their entire life. 

Do not let that happen to you, wrestle with the complexities of discipline and suffering and allow God to show you how your pain and trouble is an opportunity to plant seeds for your future. Use that knowledge to strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. 

4. Take Action to Create a New Path 

The modern Christian grows weak and tired in the cyclical ruts of their faith instead of strengthening themselves by creating new paths. 

Hebrews 12:12-13: 

“Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. “Make level paths for your feet,” so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed. 

Many Christians spend so much time frustrated and wondering why they spiritually fail over and over again. The same sins, the same struggles, the same anger issue and the same irritations with no progress. The problem is they never put in the work to work out their faith. When things are going well in their life, instead of learning and trying new tactics to strengthen themselves and invest into their spiritual life and connection with God, they just put their life on cruise control… no worries no problems… The results of this “cruise control” faith is truly tragic. 

According to the second law of thermodynamics, everything in nature is trending towards disorder and decay. I see evidence of this not only in my faith but also in other parts of my own life when I put things into “cruise control” and ignore them for a while. My closet that was once clean becomes messy and disorganized, my car that I just swept collects dirt, dust, wrappers, and smells like gym socks. My best friends in college become people that I haven’t talked to in years and are now strangers. My daily devotional turns into a once a week devotional, then once a month, then a once a year and then whenever I can get to it. The list could go on and on. Here is the key to the defying the second law, you keep the law at bay when you take intentional action to keep growth sustained. Something isn’t in the process of dying if it is in the process of growing. My closet doesn’t become messy if I keep putting my clothes away properly, my car stays nice if I throw out the trash, sweep it, maintenance it and give it a wash, my friends stay friends if I actually take the time to talk to them, and my faith is enriched when I spend time with Christ and His words. 

I am tired of the modern Christian whose faith buckles in the midst of adversity! I have been in those difficult moments when I have felt like God has failed me, that He has abandoned me, and I wanted to quit. I fixed my eyes the best I could and kept going, I didn’t give up hope, I held onto Christ with the little faith I had left and did my best to apply these principles to my life. 

That is why I am echoing what the author of Hebrews is urging you to do: Take intentional actions that strengthen your faith in the midst of troubles. Create paths before you that are better than the path behind you. Don’t put unnecessary obstacles in your own way, the path of life is already hard and the burden of suffering often overwhelming. See the troubles of this world as an opportunity from Christ to grow in Him. Don’t get weighed down by the sorrows and troubles of this life. Don’t buckle under the weight of tragedy and trials. Don’t abandon walking with your loving Father. In pain and darkness don’t choose the path of the meaningless wanderer who suffers in despair and helplessness. The treacherous path that leads to a dark, foggy valley of hopelessness where meaning and direction is not easily found. Don’t give up on your loving Father. You can do this, you can make it through your present suffering, stay close to Him and strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. 

The Solution to the Problem 

When you are suffering, do not lose heart or faith in your loving Father, instead fix your eyes on Him and follow Him through the darkest parts of your life. Find Him in the darkness of your suffering, when you find Him there you can find Him anywhere. Do yourself a favor, don’t idolize the modern Christian rather strengthen yourself by focusing your spiritual eyes, throwing off unnecessary baggage, suffering with purpose, and taking action to create a new path.

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“In the early years when I was becoming a pastor, I needed a pastor.” 

 Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir