To Encourage You

2 Corinthians 12:9 “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 of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”

There are situations that inevitably come into each of our lives that have the effect of exposing our weakness.  At times we must face things for which there seems to be no way out, and we don’t feel adequate to deal with them.  Interestingly, the Bible makes clear that it is in just such conditions that God most wonderfully can work in our lives. 

God is sovereign, which means He is in absolute control. Nothing comes into our lives “by chance.”  Nothing happens of which God wasn’t fully aware “before the foundation of the world.”  God has absolute authority and control over every aspect of the creation, whether it appears that way or not.  But it’s when it doesn’t look like this in any way, shape, or form that those who profess to believe in God, who claim to be His followers, are most tempted to turn and run.  We can be so tempted to give up or to sink into utter despair when life makes no sense to us.  Perhaps we have done our best to love God and our neighbor, just as God has commanded us, and yet we find ourselves facing situations that we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemy.  It’s in those moments that the cry of the heart is very likely to be “Where are you God?!”  Well, the verse above tells us clearly that God is very present in such moments, and the awareness of His presence can become more evident to us than at any other time in our lives. It’s when our resources are at their end, when we are spent, when we seemingly have no strength to go on, that we become aware that it is God who is upholding us all along.  It may not be apparent for some time, but when we look back, so often we can see it.  We see that the ability to endure whatever the trial was surely didn’t come from us, but from God.  It was He and He alone Who so often reveales Himself at such times as the One who – “provide(d) the way of escape, that (we were made able) able to endure it” (1 Corinthians 10:13).”  Perhaps that “way” was a friend who came along at just the right moment. Perhaps it was some unforeseen financial blessing that just “showed up” somehow.  Perhaps it was a sudden awareness of a new way to look at things, something that hadn’t ever occurred to us before. Or perhaps it was an unexplainable peace that came into our soul to give us the confidence that God was in control. Whatever it was, and however it came, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is a “God thing,” for we know like we’ve never known before that, like salvation itself, this grace too was “not of ourselves, it was the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:9). 

But it’s in weaknesses that these things are learned and experienced, never in our strength.  That’s the wonder of how God works so that He alone gets the glory.  And that’s how we should always live, that in whatever we do – even in our weakest moments – we bring glory to our all sufficient God (1 Corinthians 10:31).  The treasure of the glory of God and the power of God – it is most evident in our “jars of clay” at such times, for it is then that the world can see “that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us” (2 Corinthians 4:18).  And that’s what the true believer wants the world to see, anyway.