Below are some awesome quotes by Graham Tomlin taken out of a lecture he gave on the way of the cross and true power in God's Kingdom. Very encouraging and convicting!
Martin Luther suggests to us that the cross is actually the key to understanding the way God works.
God achieves his purposes through suffering, pain, and anxiety. Yet of course, these are not the things in which you expect to find God, and as a result most people do not recognize this is God's work, because they expect God only to be revealed in glory and grandeur and splendor. The way God works confounds human expectations. And so, faith is needed to see past the appearance of things to their true reality.
A person (all of us) has to be brought to a point where he realizes that his actions, goodness, religiosity, actually count for nothing before God, and he, in a sense, has to be made powerless before God. The sinner can only approach God with empty hands, not full hands. Not hands that are full of “virtues” and things that we can offer God and say, “look, you really ought to be pleased with me because of these things I have.” No, they have to be empty. God needs to strip us away from the things that we think are important, virtuous, worthy, etc. Like in the Psalms when God brings them to a point of crying out to God because they have nothing left. The psalmist begins to see that maybe this experience of despair that I'm feeling about myself is actually not a barrier to my acceptance before God, but it's actually the very qualification for it! The very thing I need is this profound sense that I have nothing to offer. As long as I think I have something to offer, there's not a lot that God can do for me.
Defeat is a pattern that is revealed in the cross of Christ. Just as the sinner is made passive and powerless before he or she can be saved, we see the same thing in the cross of Christ. Christ is made passive before God before he can be raised. On the cross, Christ appears to be suffering defeat, and yet to the eye of faith, we can see beyond the appearance of the cross which would tell you that this is the end of the story for Jesus, his ministry has failed, everything he came to do has just completely fallen apart.
Absence of blessing: We often think, “if I obey God, God will just pour blessings upon me.” Well the cross doesn't seem to suggest that, does it? And yet, as we see that with the eye of faith, from the other side of the resurrection, we now see that in the very picture of Jesus hanging on a cross, God himself is present. God himself present in that hidden, mysterious way. Hidden under the appearance of failure is actually the miraculous work of God achieving the most difficult thing in the world, which is the salvation of humankind.
A great paradox of God's Kingdom is this: what appears to be wisdom and good is pretty worthless. What seems to be valuable, what seems to human eyes to be successful, wonderful, impressive, often turns out to be the opposite of that—worthless. And the things that we run away from, the things we tend to think we should avoid as much as possible - suffering, temptation, awareness of sin, failure, and those things that we don't want to have anything to do with - those actually are the most precious things of all.
Luther actually writes, at some point that the true relic God has left behind is the experience of suffering. That God is, in this paradoxical way, revealed in his absence. God works in this hidden way. In precisely the experiences where we think God is not there, the experiences we try to run away from, it is there that God is working for our good, to break down our expectations, to break down the things that we would trust in, the things that we would rely upon, our own identities which we cling to, in order to be able to build them up into something different.
So there's a crucial place in all of this, for - of course - faith. The ability to see beyond the appearance of things, or even the way things feel, and to cling onto and believe the word of God which promises that God is there, that promises forgiveness despite our sins, that promises that he is at work for our salvation despite the fact that it doesn't feel like it. That is why justification for Luther is by faith alone. Of course, faith is this refusal to keep on trying to impress God and to offer him works. It is instead that passive holding-on to the simple promise of God.
Luther says, "God only saves sinners. He only teaches the stupid. He only enriches the poor. He only raises the dead." So what do you want to be if you want to get saved? You want to be a sinner, stupid, poor, and dead. If you think you're anything other than that, there's not a lot that God can do for you…
Luther says, “Only the experience of vexation gives understanding to the hearer so that the word of God becomes intelligible.” It only becomes intelligible to those who experience this same despair and struggle and self-doubt. If we approach Scripture in confidence in our own self-worth, our own works and wisdom and reason, then we will always miss the point. We will not read it right. If you try to read Scripture from a point of view of affluence, you'll never quite understand it properly. You have to read it from the experience of poverty, because that's actually where most of it was written from.
Theology of glory is that we build a picture of God in our own image of what we think God ought to be like. We think, well God is good, and perfect, and virtuous, and wise, and therefore he likes people who are good and perfect and virtuous and wise. He likes good people and virtuous people, and he doesn't like bad and failing and struggling people. So we think the way in which we can know God is by becoming good and virtuous, and wise and perfect. Some people only expect to find God in the glorious and successful things.
Theologians of the cross have learned to understand God, and to see his hand in exactly the opposite of those things. In failure, and despair, and small things, and struggles. So often that is the case, isn't it? That our life can only begin to be rebuilt when we experience some of those things. It's as if God, before he can construct us – or rather reconstruct us into the image of God - he has to deconstruct us first. We have been talking about how we can build churches that enable people to live provocative, transformed lives. What Luther's saying to us here is that the path to that begins, not where you expect, in success and size and getting a big ministry to yourself that has your own name on it, and a big church of 5,000 people straightaway and all that kind of stuff. Actually it starts somewhere very different from that. God has to deconstruct us, before he can reconstruct us. All that pretension to success maybe has to be broken down entirely, before God can really begin to use us in a significant way.
Unanswered prayers: We ask for healing, and we ask for success in our exams, or we ask for growth of our church, or we ask for success in our ministry, or the kind of things that we think, if God is God, he'd like this kind of thing—that’s the sort of thing he ought to give us. Then Luther says, actually, it's very good for us, sometimes, when God does not answer our prayers. Because, he says, "When we get what we ask for, it confirms our sense that we know what is best for us." What is it that we need most of all? What we need most of all is actually, at the end of the day, not for our church to grow, or for healing for our diseases or for success in our ministries. What we really need is God. That is the best answer to a prayer - more of God, and a deeper, stronger trust in him. When God doesn't answer your prayers, you take that as a reminder to you that he is God, you are not, and he simply calls you to trust him. If that's what happens through unanswered prayer, then God is working through exactly the experience of his absence to bring about the very thing that we need most of all: that simple, basic trust in his promise to us in Christ.
Suffering is, in some strange way, says Luther, "God's alien work." It is not something he designs. It is not something good. He's not trying to pretend that suffering is something good, and that God kind of sends it on you and afflicts you. But, he says, God takes this very thing, this very thing that is in the world because of sin, and he works through it, even though it feels nothing like it. He strips away every other motivation, every other bit of self-interest we can have in our religious activity, in our religious life, until you get to the point that the only thing you have left is God. All these experiences that tell me that God doesn't care, that I'm wasting my time, that the Gospel is uncertain, I can't really believe that. Instead, I am to simply listen to that assurance that God gives us in Scripture and in Christ, his word of love and forgiveness and assurance, and trust it.
Appearances deceive. Things are not what they appear. We actually have to have faith to see beyond appearance. Actually the way things are in the world might tell you that God doesn't exist at all, because actually the world is a pretty cruel place a lot of the time. If that's all you do, you try to read off from the nature of the world into the reality of God, well that wouldn't lead you to God at all; it'd lead you away from him. You have to see beyond the appearance of things to the way things are presented to us in the Word of God. The Word of God is a much better, more reliable guide to the nature of reality, than appearance, than nature.
Luther offers here, I think, a very different model for the use of power. For him, power in God’s economy is exercised best by those who have experienced their own radical powerlessness; their powerlessness before God and their powerlessness before other people. Again, it's this deconstruction and reconstruction thing. If power is exercised by those who've not really experienced that deconstruction and reconstruction at all, then it can very easily become an abusive and harsh thing. It's only those who have learned that they, in themselves, have nothing to offer God, and they are simply the recipients of God's grace and God's gifts—those are the best people to handle power, because they know that they are servants of God and servants of others.
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