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One of the traits to which pretty much all of us aspire is strength. We emulate, envy, fantasize about the strong. Someone takes advantage of or bullies us or someone else – O to be Mike Tyson or Captain America. I didn’t want to look like Popeye, but I sure wanted to overcome the Blutos in my life. Our parents even justified the existence of vegetables with an appeal to our inner Hulk. “Don’t you want to grow up to be big and strong like _______?” After all, no one longs to be a ninety-pound weakling.

Now that we ARE grown up – greens eaters or not – our thoughts and attitudes about strength generally become conflicted. This is especially true for Christians. On the one hand, we share a set of visceral reactions to various acts of injustice, to slights against ourselves, to the loss of “face” or place, or stature. We don’t want others taking advantage of us, our families, the church. To complicate matters, strength is one of those attributes that is characteristic of God himself (he is El Gibor – the Mighty One) and of his faithful people.

On the other hand, we often struggle with the call to Beatitudinal meekness. The gospel and pastoral letters are replete with admonitions to imitate the Lamb and those, like Stephen, who followed him in suffering the fate of those who eschew self-assertion. This seems to make no sense in our WWE, Jeff Bezos, prosperity message, winner-take-all culture. You can tell how hard it is to be stuck in the middle by how much time and effort we spend justifying our forays into the world of aggression.

If that’s not enough, we face an immutable law of existence: Human strength is painfully transitory. Frailty is all around and equally within each of us. We endure physical limitations that manifest themselves at any stage of life, but that are especially evident as we age. We want to believe that 60 is the new 40. If that’s really the case, that doesn’t say much good about our 40s. Weakness also assails us on the spiritual level. As Paul baldly describes our condition, “I do the very things that I hate” (Rom. 7:15). Just as in the physical realm, our awareness of such infirmity only grows as we progress to “maturity.”

OK, it’s fragility all the way down: Our bodies, our spirits, our friends and family relations, the very world around us – all manifest the paucity of strength that we possess. We marvel at the great accomplishments of science, technology, the arts – things that are truly wonderful – and we vacillate between flights of hubris and the more than sneaking suspicion that all our prowess masks a profound ongoing deterioration in our ability to hold it all together.

In the midst of all this incapacity, Jesus’ disciples hear God’s word exhorting them to be strong. We strive to be so, and therein is our downfall. We’re singing “We Shall Overcome,” even as we succumb to the knockout punches of temptation, sin, doubt, suffering and guilt, both real and imagined. Since these antagonists promise to attend our everyday reality until death, we have to wonder what it means to stay standing amidst their onslaught.

Enter David, son of Jesse. David fascinates readers of the Bible. By all accounts he was a kind of rough-hewn man – passionate, somewhat intemperate, impulsive. David blurts a lot, often to his own detriment. For all that, he is a man of consummate faith and love for God. A man “after God’s own heart” – one of the greatest tributes given anyone in Scripture – who can ooze weakness and exhibit absurd heights of strength, sometimes on the very same day. In this respect, David is an excellent mirror for us to contemplate (although I have yet to slaughter lion or bear or kill my most loyal friend after committing adultery with his wife).

David’s failings and their sources are there for all to see. That he is strong is also obvious, and the divine origin of his vitality is, on the surface, equally straightforward. He expresses the core of his ability to endure in one desperate moment, when the whole world and every circumstance presses against him. David and his men have lost pretty much everything to their foes; and, as his army takes up stones against him, his future looks like it will end before it even begins. It is there, in the depths of what could have been despair, that Scripture reveals David’s tap root into God’s power: He “strengthened himself in the Lord” (1 Sam. 30:6).

To find strength in the Lord under such trials — what a stirring challenge: to bravely endure trials and misfortunes, to face down fear and doubt, to confidently rise up in our encounters with powers and principalities, all in the grace and zeal of God. How did David live the reality of transcendent trust in the Lord? How do we, and how can we? What in David’s life points to an answer?

The answers lie in what David thinks about himself and what he believes about God and how the two perspectives meet to make a relationship of intimate faith, deeply grounded hope, and persevering love. But a consideration of what it means to so connect to the Lord will wait until my next post. For now, the question is are we ready to adopt the place of surrender in readiness to receive strength from the Place where our pride doesn’t always want us to go? When we return to examine David’s life, we’ll test our hearts and minds in the crucible of God’s call to trust him with everything that we are and have.