The Truth About Vulnerability: The Grace-Lined Protection We Need

There’s a great harvest waiting in the fields, but there aren’t many good workers to harvest it. Pray that the Harvest Master will send out good workers to the fields.

– Luke 10:2, The Voice

Here stands Jesus amongst 70 commissioned and expectant hearts. We feel the grave concern in His words. The world is ripe. Many await the good news that Jesus came for them too, came to supply every need and heal all the broken and see the unseen and tend to the overlooked. And yet, too few are those willing to be good-news bearers.

Perhaps a piece of their hearts feels discouraged. The “Harvest Master” Himself deems this a necessary but overwhelming task. Can their rag-tag numbers make a dent in the mission? 

But maybe, colliding with that thought is a wisp of pride. Jesus says good workers are hard to find, yet here they are, chosen by Jesus. Picked before most everyone else. Surely that means they are something.

And we get both–the imposter syndrome and the subtly-inflating self-impression. We shame and doubt ourselves, wondering who we are to think God can use us for His grand purpose. And we’re also guilty of esteeming ourselves too highly, as if our value has anything to do with us and not the One who breathed undeserved worth into our lungs just because He loves us so.

Let’s sit with these tensions as the story unfolds because Jesus is talking to flesh-and-blood humans with struggles similar to what you and I face. Jesus knew their every inner thought just as He knows ours.

An Unlikely Pairing

We’ll pick up in verse 3:

It’s time for you 70 to go. I’m sending you out armed with vulnerability, like lambs walking into a pack of wolves.

– Luke 10:3, The Voice

Hold up! Did you catch the phrase “armed with vulnerability”? What an unlikely pairing!

When I think of armor, I picture metal:

Unbendable. 

Unbreakable. 

Impenetrable. 

Everything opposite vulnerability. 

Never would I use the word vulnerability to describe armor. Armor is what protects what’s vulnerable beneath. 

And yet, Jesus didn’t mix up His words, and I feel something unknot inside me.

Jesus says to leave behind the list of preparedness. Of comfort. Of cushion. He gets really specific in the following verses, if you want to read it. But basically, anything you can do without, leave it behind.

Even self-doubt and that sneaky pride.

Vulnerability: An Invitation to Trust

Jesus knows our tendency to hang onto what weighs us down, to turn our eyes inward instead of on Him.

Vulnerability reminds you who to trust—God or yourself. And trust in an unbreakable God with never-conditional love will never, ever leave you defenseless.

You’re not unarmed when you’re in the arms of God Himself. Ann Voskamp says it this way: 

Answers are rigid, unmovable things. But arms? Arms can reach out to defend you. Arms are weapons against adversity. Arms can move around you and hold you. Arms give you withness, which is what you ache for more.

– Loved to Life, p. 8

It’s He who shields us, the Great I Am, the Worthy Lamb, the Waymaker, the “long arm of Love,” as Ann says. We’re protected, not by armor of wrought iron, but by one willingly given heart. 

Because vulnerability is the way to see that He’s all we need. It’s the recipe for God-turned attention and Spirit-sensitive ears. The way beyond our bent to cower or tower rather than step into the mission seared into our souls before our first breath: to love God and make Him known.

Anything less than vulnerability lessens our reliance on God. And this vision burning deep in the recesses of God’s heart–to fill the earth with His glory so that we may know Him and know that we are His–is only possible through Him.

Jesus didn’t arm his 70 with anything less than the fullness of Himself–because that’s what we get when we bend in joyful surrender, when we wildly trust that God’s more than capable, that His hands can hold all the unknowns, all the coming rejections, all the heavy-hard ahead.

Grace-Lined Protection

The truth about vulnerability is that it’s the grace-lined protection we need. It’s the surest way for our God-identity–as chosen and beloved–to seep through the bandages and barricades we’ve placed on our wounded hearts. 

When God gets in, God is what ripples out through our kindness and confessions, our declarations that God gets the glory, and the way we value the people in front of us.

Offer your tender heart, your transparent honesty, your self-reliance, self-doubt, and self-centeredness–and you stop keeping God at arm’s distance. Relinquish what you can make of yourself, your motives, your mission, and take one step at a time in trust, and you find your worries and unworth are wrapped round with the very arms of God.

He sent the 70. And He sends you.

To the people across the street and around the bend, in the carpool line and the row of lawnchairs on the edge of the soccer field.

But you don’t need quick-fire answers or a polished-on-the-outside life. What’s truly needed is vulnerability.

Maybe what your heart needs to know is that Jesus went first. He’s not recommending vulnerability as a yet-untested battle plan.

Jesus came into this busted world swaddled in vulnerability, in the stench of a stable, in the arms of a mother whose reputation was untrusted. He ate with us on our worst days, prayed for us when we least deserved it, loved us when we couldn’t return it. Jesus chose the humble ride of a donkey, took the lowest of jobs as a foot-washer, held His tongue when He could rightly declare His own innocence.

He knows. Knows that it’s not the easy path. But also that it lets His light shine extra bright through you.

Let’s pray.

Jesus, we hear You calling as in the book of Isaiah, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for Us?” May we, who are practicing vulnerability, repeat Isaiah’s answer, “Here I am! Send me” (6:8, The Voice).

Just a friend over here in your corner,

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