How Does God Enable Your Weakness to Become Your Strength? Here's How

They say a picture paints a thousand words.  So, let me ask you.  Can you remember having a day like this?   On that day, you felt on top of the world.   You felt like you could do anything because anything and everything seemed possible.     Or maybe it was a day where you felt incredibly close to God on a spiritual high or maybe just an emotional high or a day where everything went right.   I love days like that.

But how many days like that do you have?  No one stays on the mountaintop forever.  Even that guy had to come down at some point.   

So that means, you likely have a lot more days like these. These days aren’t terrible.  They’re days

where the road seems long, days where you get weary, days that become one foot in front of another.    But those valley days wear you down.  They drain you. You feel your weaknesses more, and your strengths less.

Yet, these valley days open you to abundance and fulfillment in ways mountaintops never could.  How can that be?  How can every day, even dull days in the valley become days of fulfillment and blessing? In these words God shows you the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say. 

2 Corinthians 12:1-10

In these words from Paul, God gives you a crucial insight for the road that leads to abundance.  God tells you.  Don’t ignore your weakness.  Embrace it.  For in God’s hands your weakness becomes your strength.  How can that be?

Before you can see that, you need to understand how your strength can become your greatest weakness.  Do you see how Paul starts out?  He tells you of “someone” who had this incredible spiritual experience.  But you know who he is talking about.  He is talking about himself.  He is just doing a false modesty thing.

And Paul is talking about something awesome.  I hope everyone has at least a glimpse in their life of what Paul describes.   Like any relationship, a relationship with God has its high points, its times where you feel deeply God’s love.    But like any relationship, high points don’t last. 

They didn’t last for Paul.  No matter how high Paul remembers this spiritual mountaintop to be, he knows.  He ain’t there now.   And he knows too.  Not being there is a good thing.  Why?

Have you ever gone to see a film you loved?  This movie rocked your world.  So, you decided.  I’ll see it again.   But this time, it didn’t rock your world so much.   It wasn’t as good the second time around.  

And even for the rare film that you can watch again and again, you know.  As much as you love it, you have to move beyond it.   You have new movies to see.   The same holds true for everything, new books to read, new places to visit, new friends to meet.  The list goes on. 

But when it comes to God, you can get stuck looking for God in all the places you experienced God before, that song that touched you, that book you read, that place you went, whatever it is.  But do you know what usually the greatest obstacle to the next experience of God is in your life?   It’s your last experience of God.  You make an absolute out of it, as if, that’s the only place God can show up.   But your experience isn’t God.  God is God.  Experiences come and go. God doesn’t.  But Paul could easily have been tempted to get the experience and God confused.  Maybe he did.

Maybe that’s why God allowed that thorn in the flesh, something that limited his life, made his life harder.  Maybe God used that thorn so Paul could find God again. 

I am not a fan of statements where folks ascribe horrible things to God.  Some child dies of cancer.  And some well-meaning person says “Well, God needed another angel.”  No God didn’t.  And even if God did, God wouldn’t give a kid cancer or for the matter anyone cancer to add to his angel ranks.  In cancer, your own cells attack you.  And God never intended that ever.  Cancer is evil.  And God never authors evil.  God fights evil.  God defeats evil.  But that doesn’t mean that God can’t use evil things that happen for good. 

Years ago I remember something that a colleague told me that I can’t forget. We were attending several days of church meetings.  And one night after a particularly long day, she and I and several others got together to drink.  When preachers and alcohol come together, you’re gonna get some theological shop talk.  That night, we were talking about how irritating we all found those comments like “God needed another angel.”  

That’s when she spoke up.   She said to some of the folks in the room who knew her well.  “Do you remember last year, when my home burned down.”  They all nodded, remembering how horrible it was.   She said.  “It was awful. Thankfully none of us got hurt.”   But then she went on.  She said.  Even as I faced the painful loss of so much stuff, I remembered.  I remember what I had been asking God for months before.   I prayed about how my life had become so cluttered, so packed full of stuff, and how it overwhelmed me.  Then she said.  “Well, after that fire, I didn’t have that problem anymore.”  And I realized again how God works in our lives.  God can and will take anything and everything and find a way to use it for good.   Look at what lies at the center of our faith, this cross.  Look at how God used that.

So, I get what Paul means, by God using this thorn in the flesh.   In life, you will encounter hard things.   In those things, you can wonder where God is working.  But God is working, often working most powerfully in the middle of your hardest things, in your deepest thorns.

Years ago, long before I met my wife, I fell deeply in love with a woman I thought I would spend the rest of my life with.   I thought that until she gave me the ring back.   I have never felt as devastated as I did after that loss.   In the midst of that pain, I landed at a family reunion.   As soon as I got there, my cousin Martha reached out to me.   But she didn’t do it to comfort me.  She did it to tell me she envied me. 

Years before her marriage had collapsed.  She discovered the man she married was far from the man she thought he was.  Much had changed since that loss.  She had remarried, begun a family.   But when she reached out to me, in the midst of my pain, she said.  She envied me.  Why?  

She said.  I know how God came to me in the middle of my heartbreak.  I have never felt closer to God then I did in those days.   And as she said it.  I knew exactly what she meant.   In my heartbreak, in my weakness, with my defenses down, God drew nearer to me than God ever has.   Or you more accurately, I drew nearer to God than I ever have.  But it took the most devastating loss of my life to bring me there. When you are weak, in God’s hands, you become strong. 

Still, those moments, thank God, come along rarely.   Much of life, you face the more day to day thorns, the sort of thorn that plagued Paul.   And in those thorns, in that weakness, God can seem hard to find.   But if you look, if you let go, if you’re willing to become weak, God’s strength comes.

Over the last five years, one thorn in the flesh has plagued me like no other.  It has cost me.   It has drained me emotionally, financially.  And it has deeply embarrassed me.   For the last five years, I have hardly gone four months without having an auto accident.  No matter what I do, I can’t catch a break.  If I don’t hit anyone, someone hits me.  Just this past Thursday morning, I took our new car, the one we got after I totaled our old one, for an oil change.  I went to pick it up.   I discovered that someone had dented it, while it was parked at the dealership.      

And later that afternoon, on Valentine’s Day, I gave my wife a new car.   But I didn’t intend too.  I was driving my son to his swim lesson.  And a van turning left crashed right into us.  It ripped apart our front end.  Then it slid all the way down the driver’s side and then pushed us into yet another car.   It was terrifying.  I never saw what hit me.   The first thing I remember was finding myself sandwiched between two cars with my son in the back seat. 

Thankfully everyone walked away.  But my son was so scared.  I tried to comfort him.  At the same time, questions were coming at me from deputies, insurance representatives.   That’s when Nathalie showed up.  One of her friends had been in the accident.  And she came to me and said.   I’m a mom.  Let me take care of your son.  I have a four-year-old in my van.  And in my weakness, I let her, a stranger.   And on that afternoon, Patrick got a new friend named Jacob.  He got two home-baked chocolate chip cookies.   And Patrick and Jacob might get a play date soon too. 

And what I got, what I got was hope.  Earlier that week, I learned a colleague of mine had done a reprehensible thing and caused deep damage to another person.   The news shook me.  And then of course, this Valentine’s Day, how could I forget what happened only a year ago here in this county?   But that day, in the aftermath of a horrible accident, a mom named Nathalie stopped with her two kids, Jacob and Benjamin.  She gave a refuge to my son in his fear and dismay.   She stayed there as long as it took for my wife to arrive.  She was kind and patient and giving.   And she reminded me. Goodness lies all around me.  And God shows up everywhere, including in a Jewish mom taking care of a Presbyterian preacher’s kid.   I learned that in my weakness, God’s strength always finds a way to show up.

So, wherever you are, however weak you feel, whatever thorns plague you.  Know this. When you are weak, God is strong.  If you doubt that, look at this cross. There in the seeming weakness of that broken man, God was strong, so strong that on that cross, in that broken man, God made you and me whole.   In that dying man, God gave you life.   On that day surrounded by hatred, that dying man showed you how powerful God’s love can be.   On that day, God became utterly weak so that, in Jesus, you could become utterly strong; so that no matter weak you feel, you can know, God’s strength will never ever leave you behind.