“But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness.’ Therefore, I will most gladly boast all the more about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may reside in me.” (2 Corinthians 12:9 CSB)
Devotional
I have asked God to remove the same weakness more times than I can actually count. Not a dramatic one, most days, just the ordinary kind, low patience, limited energy, a tendency to fall apart under a certain kind of pressure. I keep bringing it back to him like maybe this time the answer will be different.
Paul had something like this too, a thorn in the flesh he begged God three times to take away. Scripture never tells us exactly what it was, and maybe that is its own kind of mercy, because it means this passage fits whatever ours happens to be. God’s answer to Paul was not removal. It was something else entirely: grace that is sufficient, and power that is made perfect specifically in weakness, not despite it.
We tend to treat our weaknesses as the thing standing between us and being useful to God, something to apologize for or hide until we’ve managed to fix it. We picture him waiting for us to get stronger before he can really use us. This verse says almost the opposite. The weakness we’ve been resenting might be exactly the place we get to watch his power the most clearly, not because weakness is good in itself, but because it strips away the illusion that we were ever doing any of this under our own strength.
What changes, practically, is what we do the next time that same weakness shows up. Instead of only asking God to remove it again, we can also ask him to meet us in it, trusting that his grace was never rationed out based on how strong we managed to become first.
God is not disappointed by our weakness, and he is not waiting somewhere off in the distance for us to outgrow it. He is close in exactly that place, and his grace for it does not run dry no matter how many times we’ve had to come back and ask for it again.
Reflection
I know exactly which weakness I keep bringing back to God hoping for a different answer this time. I am starting to wonder if the answer has actually been the same one Paul got all along, grace that is enough, not removal. I don’t fully know how to boast about a weakness the way Paul did. But I want to stop treating mine like evidence against me and start seeing it as a place his power shows up.
Prayer
Father, thank you that our weaknesses have never disqualified us from your love or your use. We bring you the same limitation again, the one we’ve asked you to remove more times than we can count. Would you meet us in it instead, the way you met Paul. Let your power be made perfect in exactly the places we feel least capable.