“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.”
2 Corinthians 12:9-10
Weakness is strength.
Think about it. We grow through our struggles. What we are naturally good at we often take for granted, but the things we struggle with are the things we nurture in order to overcome.
While this may be true, we don’t always handle struggles and weaknesses with the grace that we should. If we could see to the other side of our struggles, maybe we would be better able to do so.
I began thinking about this in my Spanish class the other day. I have been taking Spanish classes since I was a sophomore in high school, and here I am in my senior year of college, and I still feel like I’m struggling through it. I am getting ready to begin reading a novel in Spanish, and thinking about how hard that is going to be for me makes me want to cry a little (dramatic, I know). But I also know that on the other side of this class, I will have learned so much. I may have to look up every other word in the dictionary, but in the struggle, I will know more than I did.
Spanish major example not cutting it for you? Think about it this way. A bodybuilder doesn’t just wake up one morning with biceps the size of Texas. He also doesn’t work out for only a week to become an Olympic powerlifter. It takes years of hard work to get to that point.
Strength comes as a result of 2 things: resistance, and consistency.
Strength, whether physical, emotional, or spiritual comes from pushing back against resistance. And it comes from pushing back over and over and over again. And when you’re tired of pushing back, you keep pushing. That’s where strength comes from.
As Christians, we are always going to have something coming against us. If we are doing work for the Kingdom, satan will be fighting against it. But the struggle makes us stronger. The next time we face opposition, we can face it with a little more maturity, a little more confidence, a little more strength than we had the previous time.
And the incredible thing is, God takes our weaknesses and allows us to minister to others through them. There are so many times when God has used someone to minister to me during a hard time and that person had already overcome what I was walking through in that moment.
God doesn’t just patch over our weaknesses, He uses them as a way to show his glory. This takes the focus off of us and places it onto the most High King.
