When I Am Weak, Then I Am Strong

When I Am Weak, Then I Am Strong

God’s strength is made perfect in weakness. 2 Cor. 12:9-10. If God is to reveal His strength in us, then He must first make us weak. Strength is received through faith. Eph. 1:19. I do not need to believe, neither can I believe, if I have strength in myself. But when I am weak, then I have no other way of escape except to believe in Him who has given the promise. Therefore, when God takes an interest in a person in order to reveal His Son in him, His first work is to make that person weak. This is the breaking-down process, which most people don’t want to know about. Man, who is so knowledgeable, thinks that he understands everything, and so one person exalts himself above the other. In such a state one is unreceptive to God’s wisdom and strength. God has to get us down to a state where we consider ourselves worse and more wretched than anyone else, even to the point where we are not sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves. 2 Cor. 3:4-6. Only then are we in a state where we can receive God’s wisdom and strength. There is no other way of escape but to believe in God and to put all our trust in Him. Then we have become weak in Christ, and only then can we live with Him by the power of God toward men. 2 Cor. 13:4.

When a person falls in manifest sin and then comforts himself with Paul’s words, “I will not boast, except in my infirmities,” he has gone astray, because God’s strength was made perfect in Paul, and he was victorious in temptation. People fall when they are strong in themselves, when they want to push their own will through and rely on their own understanding and strength. They do not run away from the corruption that is in the world, and they do not depart from it with all its lusts, and so they fall in sin.

If they had been weak and insufficient in themselves, they would have obeyed God, become separate, and run away from the sinful desires that are the cause of sin. Then they would not have fallen, but would have lived in the power of God.

Why does a person get angry and seek vengeance? He does that because he is strong and takes matters into his own hands. The one who is weak and insufficient in his own eyes believes in God and leaves the matter in the hands of Him who judges righteously. He doesn’t have a will he wants pushed through, but he commits his soul to the faithful Creator and does the good. 1 Pet. 4:19.

When we are weak, then we are truly strong. Then God’s power is made perfect. Such souls can truly say as Paul did: Thanks be to God who always leads us in a triumphal march in Christ and lets the fragrance of His knowledge be known by us in every place. 2 Cor. 2:14.