SG: What it means to be strong

For SG tonight, we had the IVME guys visiting and had an awesome discussion. A partial transcript of the night follows. Feel free to comment in more thoughts whether you went or not.

Question: What is strength?

Darrell: The ability to persevere and to overcome obstacles.
David Li: How you act when the hammer falls or when you’re dealing with lots of crap in your life.
Josh: The ability to make the right decisions in the face of opposition. Those who can endure are strong, but those who are strong may not be able to endure.
Jon Liu: It’s sort of like the ability to be vulnerable, in the sense that it takes the stronger man to admit he’s wrong or broken. It’s sort of like how Christianity seems like a religion for the weak, but in reality, it takes the stronger man to admit he’s broken and to face reality.
Jae: I believe that a sign of strength is how you use your strengths or gifts. Everyone has a strength or gift, but people use them differently. People who use their strengths to help others are people who understand their strength. People who use their strength to benefit themselves are weaker than people who are weak and ask for help.

Question: Do we have to be strong?
Darrell: It sounds like strength is our ability to achieve. If that is true, then we always need to be strong or else we’ll never achieve.

Question: How do you think Jesus would have defined strong and do you view Jesus as strong?
Jonathan Leo: Well he wasn’t known for his physical strength, but he was definitely known for his spiritual strength.
Darrell: I think the strength he had was the ability to force people to do things. Not in the sense that he bullied people into things, but through his strength, other people around him wanted to do great things.
Johnathan Leo: Jesus would have defined strength as the ability to love. He changed people’s lives simply by loving them.

Question: How are Christian men supposed to be strong?
Darrell: Able to resist temptation.
Dave Johnson: But that only focuses on the sin part.
Darrell: The strength is to resist temptation, but you use love and strength together to overcome it. I don’t want to make it sound like that’s the only thing we can do it. Strength is your backup plan. You use your strength to not let sin affect the path that you’re walking on.
Jonathan: But trouble doesn’t just come from sin. Life throws a lot of crap at us and it isn’t all related to our personal sins. Sometimes we still need to push through.
Jae: I feel like Christian men shouldn’t just keep their strength internal. We should use our strength to help others. Every where in the world around us, there are people who need help from God. When the world turns its back on them, we should still be there.
David: We should always remind ourselves that God is our strength. Our strengths always come from God and we always run the danger of perverting it by making it our own.

-Typed by Jaemin

P.S. Darrell, I have no idea if Jae spelled your name correctly.