Rejoicing in Our Weaknesses

 

"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

 

We all have areas and times of weakness in our lives. They may be personal areas of weakness that we struggle with such as anger, fear, arrogance, greed, laziness, stubbornness, selfishness,  or impatience. Or, it can be a situation that we go through that we allow to consume our life such as disease, job loss, or the death of a loved one.  Often we use these things as excuses for our behavior, or as reasons we are not accomplishing more in our lives. 

 

As long as we try to hold on to these things, we can never overcome them. Our weaknesses become burdens that we carry around with us and pull them out whenever we need an alibi; "You know how I am" or "What I have been through..." Instead of  wallowing in our weaknesses, Christ says we are to rejoice in them and to trust in Him, for our weaknesses are made perfect in His strength. Our weaknesses are blessings; they show us our need for complete dependence on God. When we try to make it on our own we will always fail, but He takes the most wretched things in our lives and makes them into something beautiful.

 

"Blessed is weakness, for it draws to itself the strength of God!,,,The best thoughts, the richest life lessons, the sweetest songs that have come down to us from the past—have not come from lives that have known no privation, no adversity—but are the fruits of pain, of weakness, of trial. Men have cried out for emancipation from the bondage of hardship, of sickness, of infirmity, of self-denying necessity; not knowing that the thing which seemed to be hindering them in their career—was the very making of whatever was noble, beautiful, and blessed in their life." ~J. R. Miller