At school we get rewarded for achievements and at work the self-asserting people get the best jobs. Team building depends on concentrating on the strengths of each individual. The weaknesses are overlooked.

In the Church world they always look for strong leaders and the evangelist with the most powerful ministry gets invited to speak at the great conferences. Even in Church growth manuals they encouraged each church to improve their weakness so that they will be strong in all the different areas that will cause their church to grow! The effort is always from the center of ‘Self’.

Yet the basis of Christianity is the fact that we cannot save ourselves and that we need a Savior! We come to Jesus as helpless and hopeless souls, lost in sin and on our way to hell! Then we cry out: help us Lord and He saves us by His Grace because we put our faith in His completed work on the Cross of Calvary where He shed His precious blood for the remission of our sins. And because we have not been taught the technology of weakness, we begin from that point of salvation, to rely on our own strength to live the Christian life. No wonder most Christians are so frustrated and disillusioned! They are trying to do what they cannot accomplish. They are trying to do what only God can do! So what is the solution most ministers have to offer to their congregations: ‘if it does not work, try harder!’ So we pray more and fast more and cry more, but it is not working. We bind and loose and do everything we know, but don’t you think it is foolish to carry on doing the same thing if it is not working at all?

If there is a door in a wall but you keep on bashing your head into the wall trying to get to the other side, won’t it look foolish?

At school athletic meetings we used to cheer the athletes on by singing foolish songs such as: ‘We are Stoffberg and nothing makes us prouder and if you cannot hear us, we’ll shout a little louder!’

We try to get what we want from God by singing louder, shouting louder, being prouder, trying harder and we reuse to admit it is not working! So we never come to the place where we learn the technology of weakness because the whole earth is based on survival of the fittest species! Everywhere you go in the cities people are attending health clubs to strengthen their bodies, because we have developed unnatural jobs in air-conditioned offices! Everywhere you look people are jogging- even in peak hours where they breathe in the poisonous car fumes!

We all try so hard to stay alive, to survive in this world, and in the church we do exactly the same because we have never discovered the technology of weakness.

We hate to think we are weak. We always want others to think of us as strong! In our relationships and conversations we are forever comparing our strengths and hiding our weaknesses for fear of being rejected by others. So we apply the same principles in our relationship to God.  We are always trying to impress Him with our efforts, just as little kids do to their parents: ‘Look Mom, no hands!’ when they are riding their bicycles!

Jesus once stood in the temple where two men were praying. The one was a sinner and the other a Pharisee. The Pharisee prayed a long, impressive prayer enumerating his strengths. He thanked God that he was not like the other man, a sinner, and he told God how he tithed and kept the law. The sinner simply beat his breast and cried out: ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner!’ Then Jesus asked a question to His disciples: ‘Which of these men would go home justified?’

He was teaching them an eternal spiritual principle of based on the technology of weakness: when you are weak you are strong! When you acknowledge your human weakness you can begin to draw from God’s supernatural strength – not before! While you are depending on your self-righteousness it is like a filthy cloth before God. Self-righteousness makes you a Pharisee. You begin to rely on dead works to please God. Cain and Abel sacrificed to God. Abel’s sacrifice was accepted and Cain’s was not: so Cain hated Abel and murdered him! From then on Cain became a vagabond and there was a mark on his forehead that drove people away from him! Abel sacrificed animals according to the way God thought and Cain placed vegetables and fruit from his own garden on the fire and wondered why it did not catch flame!

By doing things our way, like Frank Sinatra used to sing, ‘I’ll do it my way!’, we cannot find the pleasure it brings to do things God’s way. We need to be taught God’s ways in order to please God. In order to change our ways to God’s ways we need to know how God thinks. God is constantly leading us on and his revelations are progressive revelations, not static! He continually opens up a bit more of Himself so that we can grow in our understanding to become mature believers. Jesus gave the five allotments of his Spirit to men when he gave apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers to equip the saints for the work of the ministry and to perfect the believers until they become mature.

Churches that still do not believe that there are such ministries as apostles and prophets can never come to maturity because they reject the very gifts God has given to lead them to maturity. They are quite contented to be shepherded and pastored, to receive counsel and to be led like sheep to green pastures and quiet waters: they never reach the stage where they become teachers because they do not want to leave the basic things behind to go on to deeper things. They are happy that their ‘Moses’ should go up to the Mountain to hear from God on their behalf, while they worship around the golden calf down below!

The first basic tenet of our faith’s foundation according to Hebrews 6 is to repent from dead works.

It seems so natural that we should rely on our strengths and hide our weaknesses that we do not want to hear the word ‘weakness’ at all. It will just not sell at all! Imagine a series of tapes entitled: ‘The technology of weakness!’ Who on earth would want to buy it? Who would display it on their shelves? Who would encourage anyone else to listen to it? Yet Jesus Christ told the disciples to learn two lessons from Him: ‘Learn from me, that I am meek and humble and you will find rest for your souls.’

How many sermons do you hear on humility and meekness? Probably none because it does not appeal to our sensibilities to even consider those subjects. They have the smell of weakness to our western mind-sets.

Matthew 11:28,29  “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.29 “Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

We have been so indoctrinated by the thoughts of men and religion that we cannot even begin to consider what Jesus tried to teach his own disciples who were always comparing themselves with one another to see who was the greatest. No wonder they never found rest for their souls! They were always competing to see who would sit on either side of Jesus when he sat on his throne. They were willing to die for those positions! Even their mother got in on the act and interceded on behalf of them when she had an opportunity to speak to the Master! Imagine that: the only time that your mother’s words were recorded in the Bible showed her ambitions for her own sons!

The kingdom of God is not of this earth. Jesus said so when Pilate asked him if He was a king. Jesus said: ‘If my kingdom was from this earth, my followers would fight for it!’ But his kingdom existed in another realm, operated on a completely different set of values and priorities and the natural mind cannot conceive it nor enter it. He told Nichodemus:

John 3:3-6  Jesus answered and said to him, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”4 Nicodemus said to Him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”5 Jesus answered, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.6 “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.

Self-effort is born of the flesh and can only produce fleshly results! In order to see ‘spiritual results’ we need to operate according to a new set of rules! That which is born of the spirit is spirit! We have to die to self and become alive in our spirit-man! We have to find out how God, who is a spirit, thinks and operates in order to relate to Him. His ‘spiritual’ thoughts are higher than our ‘natural’ thoughts and His ‘spiritual’ ways are higher than our ‘natural’ ways. We need the Word of God to come down like rain upon us in order to begin to understand the ways of God. We need the Holy Spirit who knows the mind of God to reveal the present truths to us. Present truth is truth that already existed but that God emphasizes with greater clarity for a specific purpose in a chosen generation so that He can fulfil His redemptive purposes in the earth through people.

Jesus constantly taught self-denial: the world teaches self-assertiveness. Jesus taught how to loose your lower, sinful life-style in order to find your higher spiritual life in Christ, but the world teaches you how to win through manipulation and control! People feel nervous when they are not in total control of their own lives and every situation. So you always have someone who tries to dominate a conversation, tries to dominate a church board meeting, tries to become president of an organization by putting others down. The big businesses compete for the greatest deals, sportsmen always compete to see who will win, children always fight for the attention of the parents. And here comes Jesus and teaches something that goes against our human grain: he says, deny yourself, lay your life down to find it!

The world cannot understand the ways of God because it does not know God. There is a way that believers can get to know the thoughts and operations of God it is called the way of the Lord. His ways and His thoughts are above our thoughts as high as the heavens are above the earth. His ways are past finding out.

Isaiah 55:8-11 “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord. 9 “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways, And My thoughts than your thoughts.10 “For as the rain comes down, and the snow from heaven, And do not return there, But water the earth, And make it bring forth and bud, That it may give seed to the sower And bread to the eater, 11 So shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth; It shall not return to Me void, But it shall accomplish what I please, And it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it.

We cannot think God’s thoughts with our human minds and we cannot walk in God’s ways by sheer will-power. If Christianity was only for the strong willed people where would you and I come in? My granny used to say, ‘If salvation was something that money could buy, the rich would live and the poor would die.’

I want to bring an apostolic paradigm shift, a change of thinking, a present day truth that the Holy Spirit revealed to me, that will transform all your ways to be more like God’s ways. New ways of thinking are always resisted at first. People hate change, even if God brings it! One of the most stressful things in life is to move! It takes effort! You have to leave the old behind in order to move on to the new! You must call the old obsolete before you can embrace the new. You must acquire a taste for the new wine or you will always go back to the old.

Traditions of men nullify the power of God because God always moves in new ways and traditions are so predictable that the devil already knows how to interfere with those dead routines! He knows we do things the same way we did it yesterday. Our church services have become predictable. There is no element of spontaneity or surprise. It has become religious clubs where we pay our club fees and call them ‘tithes’ and we meet on a certain day to play our club games: we sing, we bring offerings and we preach. Then we go home and our lives have not been affected at all because our thinking did not have to change!

In order to change your ways you have to change the way you think. It is very difficult to interfere with the way people think. They have reasons to believe that what they know is right because someone else passed it onto them.

Let me ask you this: when you got saved, did you have to change the way you thought? When you got baptized in water did it change the way you thought? When you received the baptism in the Holy Spirit, did you think differently than before? When you discovered the truth concerning tithes and offerings and willing sacrifices, the financial operating system of God, did you have to change the way you thought and lived?

Every bit of progress is monitored by changed minds, whether it is in the field of technology or in the scientific field, the field of mining or computers; in the field of religion or social sciences. There is only one sure thing in life besides death and birth: and that is certain change.

Unless you change you cannot grow. Unless you change your way of thinking you cannot make any progress. Those who stay behind loose out on what is busy taking place.

There are still some people today who do not believe that a man walked on the moon! They still think it is a communistic plot to deceive the people! The found a man in the Burmese Jungle that was still fighting the Burma war twenty years after it was over because he never received the news that a peace treaty was signed!

There are still some pastors who refuse to use computers because they think that it is the anti-Christ! They still use typewriters and roneo-machines!

Unless we change our thinking to what is taking place technologically in the world today we can no longer operate in the world. The same applies to the church world: unless we change to the present revealed truth we cannot reach this generation for God. We cannot appropriate what God is doing in in the 21^st Century with a 1950 mentality and keep on singing ‘Give me that old time religion – it is good enough for me!’

Jesus rebuked Peter for thinking the thoughts of man and not knowing the thoughts of God and told Peter who was influencing him to think that way: ‘Get behind me Satan!’ Satan tempted Jesus in the desert and failed but waited for a more opportune time, in other words, he would find a better opportunity to tempt him: he would not tempt him in person again, but through Peter who thought the thoughts of men rather than the thoughts of God. How many times does Satan tempt us that way? He tempts us not to do the will of God for our lives because he deceives us to think in the natural and we miss the spiritual ways of God! He keeps us bound in self-effort so that we can never see how God really operates. He trapped Adam and Eve that way in the Garden of Eden by telling them if they disobey the commands and the thoughts of God they would become like God through their own self-effort! People still believe that lie today. Religion makes them practice dead rituals to try to reach perfection in God through their own self-discipline!

In the New Testament Paul explains to the Corinthian Church that they cannot find out what God has prepared for them by their own self-effort.

1 Corinthians 2:9-11 But as it is written: 1 “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, Nor have entered into the heart of man The things which God has prepared for those who love Him.”10 But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God.11 For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God.

I want you to climb into the apostolic mind of Paul, the apostle. He thought differently. He thought and operated as an apostle and the Churches that related to Him received this grace to change their way of thinking and operation.

1 Corinthians 4:9,10 For I think that God has displayed us, the apostles, last, as men condemned to death; for we have been made a spectacle to the world, both to angels and to men.10 We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ! We are weak, but you are strong! You are distinguished, but we are dishonored!

2 Corinthians 4:8-10 We are hard pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair;9 persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed—10 always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body.

2 Corinthians 4:12,13 So then death is working in us, but life in you.13 And since we have the same spirit of faith, according to what is written, “I believed and therefore I spoke,” we also believe and therefore speak,

2 Corinthians 13:9 For we are glad when we are weak and you are strong. And this also we pray, that you may be made complete.

We hardly ever hear preaching like this from our local pulpits because we do not want to be like that! Yet Paul urges the Corinthians to imitate him!

1 Corinthians 4:15,16 For though you might have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet you do not have many fathers; for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel.16 Therefore I urge you, imitate me.

Why should we imitate you Paul?

2 Corinthians 4:17,18 For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory,18 while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal.

We need to start looking at life from God’s point of view and not just from our point of view in order to begin to think like God! He sees things from the point of view of eternity and we look at the temporal world. That is why our thinking has to change. We can only see the effect of something for a short while, but God knows the end from the beginning!

There is a pre-determined end that God wants to lead us to: but in order to arrive we have to change the way we think!

The story of a man who wanted to climb to the summit of Everest without an oxygen tank or mask is a good example of someone who reached new heights. He had to change his way of thinking before he could do that!

Everyone told him that it was impossible to do that. But he insisted that it was possible. He kept on doing research and interviewing people until he finally came in touch with a family of Tibettans at the foot of the Himalayan Mountains. They told him with great assurance that their family members have been climbing to the top of Everest for several generations.

What was their secret? They finally shared it with him: climb till you cannot climb any more. Get to the place where your lungs feel like bursting and your head like exploding! Climb till your legs can no longer move forward. The air higher up on a mountain gets so thin that you can hardly breath. The oxygen content decreases as you go higher and higher. When you get to that level, camp there for two or three weeks till you can breathe normally again. Then you can climb to the top without extra oxygen.

It seemed too good to be true! It was like a fairy tale in a modern world. When that climber took the answer to medical scientists they conducted some experiments and concluded that the story was true! They explained to him that the human body was made to adapt to its surroundings. By camping at that high altitude you allow your red blood corpuscles to multiply so that you can inhale more oxygen than before. The thin air does not affect you any more! But when you come down from the mountain the secret is to wait at that exact point again so that your red blood corpuscles can decrease otherwise blood would spurt out from your ears and nose because of the lower pressure and the oxygen enriched air at lower levels!

What was the secret? Waiting…

Isaiah 40:30,31 Even the youths shall faint and be weary, And the young men shall utterly fall, 31 But those who wait on the Lord Shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and not faint.

This is the basis of the technology of weakness: while we wait upon the Lord we receive his strength into our weakness through a spiritual osmosis process called impartation!

Paul, the apostle, understood the spiritual technology of weakness very well and tried his best to explain it to his followers.

“Weakness” does not speak of infirmity, but being placed in a position of full dependency on God. In other words: I am in situations where if God does not help me, I cannot get out! This is part of the inner configuration of an apostle. He is constantly positioned in a place of utter dependency on God. If God does not help him, he will not make it. He has to wait upon the Lord until the Lord gives him new strength. He empties himself so that the Church can be filled! (I am weak, but you are strong!)

The apostle gets beaten and that which is beaten out of him floods into the church. That is how apostolic ministry transfers the grace that is upon his life into the Church.

Daniel 6:10 Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went home. And in his upper room, with his windows open toward Jerusalem, he knelt down on his knees three times that day, and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as was his custom since early days.

Daniel knew the decree of the king: anyone who prays to another god will be cast into the lion’s den. It seems like he deliberately walked into death: he put himself in a vulnerable position trusting God. That is meekness: putting your strengths at God’s disposal!

Paul urges the church to develop his mentality. He desires to change their value system from false to true apostolic values.

Imitate means to pluck out the principles of character and impute them into other lives through genuine relationships. Emulation, a work of the flesh mentioned in the list of Galatians 5, is to try to do what you see someone else doing for your own advantage without paying homage to the one you learnt it from. It is saying, anything you can do I can do better!

Paul says he is hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed, perplexed but not in despair. His life is not the normal life people desire, yet he still has joy! He has a special grace to remain constant under pressure.

2 Corinthians 4:10 always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body.

Carrying the death of the Lord is a lifestyle to Paul. As long as you are doing apostolic work you will be dying to something! Your reputation normally goes first! Yet it is only in the eyes and opinions of men that you suffer! In God’s eyes you are promoted if you are persecuted for righteousness sake! In spite of all the suffering Paul had to go through he was continually receiving fresh revelations from God! In spite of being called a false apostle he received new revelation to strengthen and instruct the Churches.

Carrying the death of Christ in our bodies means death to the world, death to ambition, death to what people hold dear, death to your will and desires, so that God’s will can be done in you.

In every new realm of anointing you will make new friendships because many people do not want to go on with God and you leave them behind. The demand of the new realm keeps you away from the previous one.

Paul understands that his suffering for the Gospel’s sake has meaning and purpose:

2 Corinthians 4:12,13 So then death is working in us, but life in you.13 And since we have the same spirit of faith, according to what is written, “I believed and therefore I spoke,” we also believe and therefore speak, 2 Corinthians 1:5-7

2 Corinthians 4:18 while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal.

Paul does not keep on looking at his suffering, but sees how the crushing of his spirit pours life into the Church. He sees the kingdom perspective rather than his own. Death has no power over him until he has completed his course and run the race. An apostle does not fear death because he is already dead…dead to this world and the things of this world…alive to God only!

Philippians 1:12,21 But I want you to know, brethren, that the things which happened to me have actually turned out for the furtherance of the gospel,21 For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

Paul literally allows situations to press out of him this grace that was bestowed upon him to get the Church where it belongs: in Christ! You can only perfect saints with this kind of grace, not with mere words!

The church needs an apostolic mentality so that God can dwell in it.

As a local church receives an apostle in the name of an apostle they receive this grace that prepares it as a habitation of God in the spirit: the house of God. The more a local church releases an apostle to do the work of an apostle the more of his mentality stays in the church. As you support an apostolic ministry through prayers and financial contribution you partake of this grace. As you participate in the apostolic work you become mature. This is how the grace is transferred from the apostle to the church.

A true apostle is not concerned about himself. His concern is that the church will receive the full measure that he carries, even though it might make him look foolish. He does not mind dying so that others might live.