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Speaker 1: Life audio strength is easy to admire. Honesty is harder. In our world and sometimes even in our churches. Leadership is measured by competence, confidence and visible results. But the Gospel begins somewhere else. It begins with confession, with need, with mercy. The leaders who endure are not those who have mastered the illusion of self sufficiency, but those who have learned how to receive. If Christ is truly alive, present, active, speaking, then leadership is not first what we accomplish for him. It is how awake we are to His life at work within us and among us. Hello friends, I'm Alan Faddling, and you're listening to the Unhurried Living Podcast, where we inspire you to rent us deeper, live fuller, and lead better. If you're carrying responsibility today, guiding others, holding tension, feeling the quiet pressure to keep everything moving, this episode is for you. We're going to explore shared weakness, a living Christ, and the kind of spiritual receptivity that sustains a burning heart over the long haul. After a word from our sponsor, I'll move into our theme for today. In nineteen ninety six, seven Trappist monks were martyred in Algeria. One of them described his calling in this way. He said, a monk is simply a sinner who joins a community of sinners who are confident in God's mercy and who strive to recognize their weakness is in the presence of their brothers. Now that vision is not just for monks, It's a vision for the whole church. Shared weakness, though, is not the story America tells about leadership. We prefer personal strength. We admire competence, certainty, and visible success, and we are not always sure we want to share our strength with anyone else, let alone our weakness. But Christian leaders are still sinners in need of mercy and grace. I have been a Christian leader for more than forty years, and I feel my need for mercy more deeply today than ever. In recovery groups, I have witnessed something quietly transformative. Men and women introduce themselves not with their achievements, but with their truth. They name their need, they confess their brokenness, and together they learn to trust that a merciful God is truly present among them. Not once they improve, but right there in the middle of their honesty. It will require real courage to embrace this kind of leadership in a culture that prizes impressive competence over honest confession. But this is the leadership our time requires, and it may be the leadership our souls have been longing for all along. That kind of honesty only works if mercy is more than an idea. It only works if God is not distant, not theoretical, not waiting for us to get our act together. Shared weakness would be crushing. If all we had was a memory of what Jesus once did, it would leave us trying to manage a legacy, trying to keep something alive through our own effort. Our faith does not rest only on the memory of Christ's life, but on his present life among us now, and Christian leadership is not primarily our effort for him, but our openness to what the living Jesus longs to do within us and through us. Andrew Murray once asked a piercing question in a little book titled Jesus Himself. This is what he wrote. What is the difference between a dead Christ whom the women went to anoint, and a living Christ? A dead Christ I must do everything for a living Christ does everything for me. Of course, Murray is picturing that quiet Saturday between Crucifixion and Resurrection, when the women went to anoint a dead by. In that moment, love looked like tending something lifeless, caring for what could no longer act, honoring what once was but was no longer. And if we're not careful, that is how our faith can begin to feel. We admire Jesus, we serve his mission, we intend to carry his work forward. But underneath it all there can be a subtle assumption that everything now depends on us. We must keep the movement alive. We must compensate for our weakness by working harder for him. But shared weakness only makes sense if Christ is not a memory we maintain, but a presence who moves among us. If Jesus is alive, truly living and risen and at work, then we Caniness is no longer a liability. It becomes the place where Jesus meets us. I am not tending a body in a tomb. I am walking with a risen lord. I'm not preserving a legacy. I'm participating in a life Jesus has invited me into. Now. The writer of Hebrews tells us that the Word of God is living and active. And perhaps that's not first the description of a book bound in leather, but of the Sun himself, present, speaking, acting. The question for me is not simply what I will do for God today. The deeper question is whether I will recognize what the living Christ is already doing. I find myself praying in this spirit. Lord, awaken my heart to all of this. Free me from the exhausting illusion that everything depends on me. Teach me to notice You at work. May my leadership, my service, even my repentance begin not with my effort for you, but with your life and me. And yet, even if we affirm that Jesus is alive, many of us would admit that we do not always feel like he is. We confess the resurrection, but we still wake up as if everything depends on us. We speak of his presence, but we can move through too many of our days largely unaware of it. The issue is not whether Christ lives. We know that he does. The issue is whether our hearts are awake to the one who lives among us, who lives within us. Andrew Murray understood this gap. He knew there is a journey between knowing the doctrine of a living Christ and experiencing the reality of his living presence. And he described that journey in three simple stages. Let me read something from him, and then I'll unpack it. He says. The first stage is ignorance. The second stage is that of unbelief, the doubting heart that cannot take in the wonderful truth that Jesus lives. But then comes the third stage, the burning heart. Murray suggests that awakening to the living Christ is not instantaneous. There is a progression in the soul. First, as he said, comes ignorance, not defiance, not rebellion, just simple unawareness. Christ is alive, but we move through our days distracted, preoccupied, absorbed in tech asks and outcomes. We confess his presence on a Sunday, but by Tuesday afternoon we may be functioning as practical atheists, not because we deny him, but because we are inattentive to him. Ignorance is where we all begin. Then comes on belief. We begin to sense that something more is possible, that Jesus is not merely an idea, but actually a present Lord. And yet somehow we hesitate, We struggle to trust what we cannot see or measure. We believe in the resurrection historically, but we find it harder to believe in resurrection power in our meetings and our conflicts and our fatigue. The doubting heart cannot quite take in the wonderful truth that Jesus, and then Murray says, comes the burning heart. That's not a matter of manufactured emotion. It's not spiritual hype. The burning heart is a gift of grace. The spirit warms what has grown cold. Awareness deepens. We begin to notice Jesus scripture may come alive in some new way. Prayer feels responsive, our obedience feels more relational than just duty. Weakness no longer feels like a threat because we are no longer alone in it, and this burning heart is not sustained by intense moments, but by daily dependents. Murray writes further, what we need every morning is to meet Jesus and to say, Lord, here is the day again, and I am just as weak in myself as ever I was. Come and feed me this morning with yourself and speak to my soul. Do you see how that prayer circles back to where we began, This sense of shared weakness he says, I am just as weak as effort. He's not pretending progress has made us more sufficient, especially not self sufficient. And we don't graduate from dependence. We just keep on returning to it. This is why Murray's vision resonates so deeply with the spirit of the Twelve Steps of Recovery. In them, we admit our powerlessness, not once, but daily. We come to trust that God can restore us, not abstractly but concretely, and we turn earn our will over again, not dramatically, but quietly. We are fed, we are led, we are loved. The burning heart is not the reward for strong people. It is the gift given to those who remain receptive. If the burning heart is given to those who remain receptive, then receptivity is not a minor virtue in the Christian life. It may be central. What distinguishes spiritual maturity may not be productivity but openness. Now, when we think of the saints, we often remember what they accomplished, but aw Towzer suggests that beneath all they did was something deeper, a sort of openness to God that shaped everything else. This is something he wrote once I venture to suggest that the one vital quality which great saints had in common was spiritual receptivity. Something in them was open to heaven, something which urged them godward. Without attempting anything like a profound analysis, I shall say simply that they had spiritual awareness, and that they went on to cultivate it until it became the biggest thing in their lives. They differed from the average person in that when they felt the inward longing, they did something about it. Now that phrase of Tozier's arrests me open to heaven. He says the saints were not first remarkable because they were driven, but because they were attentive. Their gaze settled on God before it turned toward outcomes. They cultivated awareness until it became the governing reality of their lives. What followed their courage, their endurance. Their impact was fruit, not proof. But what does that kind of openness actually look like? What is spiritual receptivity in lived experience? Again, toza Rights, receptivity is not a single thing. It is a compound, rather a blending of several elements within the soul. It is an affinity for a bent toward, a sympathetic response to a desire to have. In other words. Receptivity is not passivity. It's a posture, it's a leaning, It's a holy inclination of the heart. It is the quiet decision to turn toward God again and again and again. It is is the willingness to admit weakness without panic. It is the choice to believe that Christ is not absent but alive. It's that daily prayer, feed me, speak to me, lead me. Now, this is not dramatic spirituality. It will not trend on social media, it will not always feel electric. But it is how saints are formed shared weakness, confidence in mercy, trust in a living Christ, a burning heart sustained by daily surrender. And all of it depends on receptivity. And perhaps that is the gentle but profound invitation before us, not to become more impressive, but to become more open, Not to work harder for Jesus, but to learn how to notice and respond to the life of Jesus already at work among us. So tomorrow morning, before the emails and the meetings and the weight of leadership descend, Perhaps the simplest and bravest prayer we can pray is something like this, Lord, here is the day again. I am just as weak as ever, Come and feed me with yourself, Speak to my soul, make my heart receptive. And then not in frantic effort, but perhaps in quiet trust, we rise and walk with the Living Christ into our new day. Thank you for listening to the Unhurried Living podcast. To learn more about us, visit Unhurried living dot com. In the show notes, you'll find helpful links and information about our partner, Live Audio and all of their other faith centered podcasts