When God is able to move through us in our weakness, we find that we rely on his strength to get us through, not our own. Actually, I believe – as Paul does - that it is when we are at our weakest that God can shine the most. It is in times of incredible difficulty, hardship and struggle, that we seem to stop trying to fix things in our own strength. We rely on God and trust him to take over. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12:9-10:
"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 weakness, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weakness, in insults, in hardship, in persecution, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong."
These verses are written right after Paul explains that God gave him a thorn in his flesh to keep him from becoming conceited. And in that weakness, he was able to let go and let God take over. You see, when we are weak, we somehow move out of the way and begin to put our total trust in God because we know that he is our only salvation from our dilemma. We are at our best when we are weak, because that is when God can move without us hindering his plan. And when the smoke clears, our pride is nonexistent, because we know that we were too weak to contribute anything to our deliverance. We learn that it truly is all God, all the time.
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Paul says that he is strongest when he is weak. That may seem like a contradiction, but it is when we are weak that we stop trying and pushing in our own strength. You may even be able to reflect in your own life that when things are at their worst, we stop whatever we are doing and cry out to God, because we know that our own efforts are useless. By crying out to God and trusting him, we are doing the very thing we should’ve been be doing all along. We operate in God’s strength and provision, not our own.