The high jump is a track and field event of soaring proportions.
A competitor must leap unaided over a bar at ever-increasing heights to be the winner.
They can’t touch the bar or dislodge it in any way. If they do, they are disqualified.
Then there’s the pole vault. Using a flexible pole, a competitor can clear a bar three times the height of the high jump.
Let’s apply this to Christianity.
We’re constantly weathering attacks of the enemy. Life wears at us. Bills tatter our endurance. Our children stress our patience. Our boss makes us want to scream.
It seems the stress comes at us in ever-increasing amounts.
The problem is that we’re still at the high jump level. God offers us a flexible pole and says, “There, that problem coming our way. Use this and you can clear it easily.”
God wants us to compete at the pole vault level. What’s the flexible pole God holds out to us?
2 Corinthians 12:9-10 (NIV) reveals our pole to us:
"But he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong."
Picture the Olympics. A pole vaulter runs at full speed towards the bar, but it’s clear he cannot clear it, not on his own. Then he stabs the pole into the ground, it begins to bend, and with incredible grace, it lifts him higher and higher until he flies over the bar.
That’s what grace does for us. This passage says, “My grace is sufficient.” Where we are weak … endure insults … face hardships … suffer persecution … whatever the difficulty, he is strong.
The power of Christ flows through his grace and carries us up and up until our troubles are no longer in our way.
Without God’s grace, we are running at our problems on our own. With God’s grace, we are lifted until we fly over them.
Let God’s grace be your pole to vault into greater things in him.
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