Boasting in weakness

I was talking to a friend today and she said this: one of the problems with pride is not knowing one’s weakness; not knowing how frail we are; not knowing we are like grass, here today and gone tomorrow. Yes. And so for such a person who refuses to pay attention to their weakness, they build a false narrative and they build on their own strength. There are many things that can be built on our own strength, and if our strength, then God is not in it. The Lord told Paul that in his (Paul’s) weakness, He was made strong.
Remember King David was already the king of Israel in 2 Samuel 11. It was spring time; the time when kings should take their men to war against their enemies. But David had other ideas. He was king; and so he stayed behind in his own strength. As he lounged, he saw Bathsheba, another man’s wife. He knew this fact very well. Her husband was fighting in a war he had refrained from leading. And yet there he was, he felt he was king, strong enough and powerful enough – and so he took another man’s wife and laid with her. He tried to cover his tracks, but God knows all things. David did not know his weakness. He forgot that he was a mere man, and all human beings have weaknesses.

How many times do we do out of our strength and wisdom – we do simply because we can. Many people do whatever simply because they have the strength to do it. They trust in their own strength.

We have to be cautious of our strength, so it does not give us a false confidence – and so because of our confidence in ourselves – we go outside the will of God. For all those God was able to use successfully, they determined in their hearts that they were weak first. Weakness is strength to God, because it allows Him to do. Your strength in yourself and of yourself is a deterrent to God, because it says you can.

I encourage you to never see your weakness as a weakness, see it as an invitation to God for Him to ‘do something glorious’ in your life. I was reading 2 Corinthians 12:5 and read where Paul spoke of his weakness and even a love for his weakness. He said: ‘I will not boast about myself, except about my weaknesses.’ He went on to say that though he had asked God to take away a thorn in his flesh which represented his weakness, God gave him a new perspective: a perspective of seeing a weakness as an opening for God to be strong in one’s life. Paul said: 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.

I believe when we come to a place where we accept God’s work in our lives, then a weakness will not be a weakness. Only if David had been weak for a moment, he would never have thought he could get away with taking Uriah’s wife in 2 Samuel 11:14, which says In the morning David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it with Uriah.15 In it he wrote, “Put Uriah out in front where the fighting is fiercest. Then withdraw from him so he will be struck down and die.” He was so confident in his kingship that he thought he could hide his wrongdoing by getting Bathsheba’s husband killed.

I pray I will cherish my weakness rather than my strength. And through my recognition of this weakness, invite Christ’s power to rest and shine through me. In this we can truly boast. Yes, because God will truly and can truly only do a great work in such a life.

Linda Faith

Linda faith is the Editor in Chief of Jewels Magazine. She has authored eight books. She is a prolific writer and powerful speaker, inspiring many women to be all God has called them to be. She is the founder of Joy Women’s conference which reaches out to empower, inspire and motivate women in their faith walk. She was a software developer before she started writing.