Pricked by my starting point

The Galilee speaking tour was a wild success! So Jesus lived the sweet life from one success to the next, right?

It’s easy to think that way, especially when you hear the phrase, “I can do all things through Christ.” There’s a song, a poster, t-shirts, etc. How can we not experience success!?

But wait… it follows that if Christ can do all things for us, then he should have been able do all things for himself, too. So I assumed that Jesus’ experience was not subject to suspense or uncertainty. He never got into a jam. Logically, I then wondered why I had so much anxiety and gridlock in my life if Christ could just bail me out like he did himself.

Either something was wrong with me or something was wrong with him.

I took a second look at the context of the phrase, “I can do all things” and was shocked by what I found.

What I understand now, I will try to explain with a picture of the phrase from the original Greek. The circled words below mean “all,” so there are three references to “all” in the context of the “can do” phrase.  When it says, “I can do all things,” the “all things” summarizes the preceding the sentence, which includes

• living in humble circumstances
• times of surplus resources
• having plenty of food
• going hungry
• times of surplus (repeated)
• going without

This list seems closer to my experience.

It’s easy to see Jesus’ experience without any friction, like he was just acting out a movie script that he had already read. Sure, he put in a fine performance, but where’s the suspense?

But as we follow Jesus for a year, we rediscover the suspense. And ultimately, we see the same high’s and low’s, the same busy and quiet, the same gains and losses that mark the seasons of our lives–and along the way we learn not to get too fixated on one extreme or the other.