Weakness IS the Way
Quick Take: Weakness is the way we discover the sufficiency of God's grace.
In his ‘hidden’ years – before his missionary journeys – Paul discovered something that radically changed his life. He talks about this in 2 Corinthians 12. He recounts the moment he was caught up to the third heaven and experienced ecstasies beyond human language.
And then, Paul writes, “a thorn was given to me.” That’s a nice way to put it. “Given to me.”
What was ‘given’, Paul describes as a messenger of Satan! This so shook him, that he sought God three times to take the thorn away. Thorns weren’t supposed to ‘stick’ around. Thorns – suffering – happened, but they were to be overcome, broken through, eliminated by faith.
Back up a second. This particular letter of Paul’s to the Corinthian church was a very personal – and painful – letter. Written to a church he had fathered. A church that had marginalized and demeaned him.
So, in this letter, Paul was going deeper with them and becoming more vulnerable. It was in this letter, Paul had explained that in Christ we are now new creations, new creatures (2 Corinthians 5.17). Not just improved humans, not even just Spirit-filled humans – a new species entirely.
So how does a new species roll? How does a ‘new creation’ live?
That brings us to Paul’s amazing discovery. During his third wrestle with God, desperate to be rid of the thorn, Paul was jolted by what he heard: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is make perfect in weakness.”
That was the amazing discovery. Paul wanted God to remove the thorn. What he got was God’s grace to embrace the thorn, embrace weakness. And he underwent an astonishing shift in his thinking! For one verse later he says, “I boast gladly about my weaknesses, I delight in insults and hardships… for when I am weak then I am strong.”
You don’t talk like this unless you’ve been literally turned upside down.
And I suggest that it was here, in the nagging aggravation of a persistent thorn, that Paul discovered this: The Cross of Christ is not just the source of our salvation, but it is our new way of doing life. The new way of being human!
We’ve read this passage and focused on the power we experience through weakness; Paul boasts in the weakness itself. From this point on weakness was the way!
This is why for Paul the Cross became so central. He would know nothing among the Corinthians except Christ and Him crucified (1 Corinthians 2.2 ). He was revved by the fact that he was crucified to the world, and the world crucified to him (Galatians 6.14). He reveled in his crucifixion with Christ! (Galatians 2.20)
It wasn’t that he was not into The Resurrection… of course he was. But Paul found that being crucified with Christ was his new way of living, and the daily experience of resurrection life was the God-graced consequence of living crucified.
We get nervous about Christ crucified – afraid that we might become Catholic. So, we stress the empty tomb all the time. And ironically we seldom get weak enough to actually experience resurrection life!
I think I’d like to hang a Crucifix in the lobby of our Church – or at least in my office. Not just a vacant Cross, but Jesus hanging there. A vacant Cross tells me that Jesus was the sacrifice for my sins. Glorious! But Jesus bleeding on The Cross reminds me of my new way of life.
So, how exactly is The Cross our new way of life? It’s first not about trying to suppress our will. If Jesus is your Lord, then your will should be ‘suppressed’ already. Being crucified with Christ is not trying to die to ourselves; it is the freedom to be poor in spirit, helpless, surrendered.
Jesus shows us this ‘Cross-way’ of life: the Slain Lamb, accepting utter weakness, but fully surrendered to The Father, embracing the Cross with a confident peace that is beyond human comprehension.
Once we surrender to Christ, this becomes our way of life, our daily pattern of living!
So, this thorn business. How did this come to be so transformative for Paul?
First, Paul didn’t passively accept this thorn. He wasn’t resigned to his weakness. He pressed into God. He knew God’s power to heal and liberate. He tried to overcome it. Twice he seeks God to free him from his thorn. He was – to put it in language we sometimes use – contending for breakthrough.
For all his spiritual depth, Paul couldn’t quite see God in this thorn. That tells me just how counterintuitive this idea is that suffering and embracing weakness is a work of God! I mean He is The Father who if we ask for bread won’t give us a stone, right? Paul surely thought so – that’s why he prayed so hard! Surely God meant to deliver him from this thorn.
Paul prayed for ‘breakthrough’, but – and this is my second point – his ‘breakthrough’ was realizing he wasn’t going to get his breakthrough. On his third round with the thorn, He got it. God’s grace was sufficient. But how did He awaken to grace? By seeing his thorn differently. He stopped trying to breakthrough.
“Wait a minute! The whole reason Paul got a revelation of grace is because he broke through in prayer.”
I would see this differently. He broke through in his thinking. His mind was renewed. I think the grace he got from God was precisely in seeing the value of the thorn!
His breakthrough was seeing the value of suffering! And that’s why from then on, he delighted in weakness! His breakthrough revelation was not about getting God’s power through weakness; God didn’t say “My strength is made perfect through weakness, or out of weakness.” He said, “My strength is made perfect in weakness.”
The grace was in embracing the weakness, not in the power that came out of it. That’s why Paul gets all excited about weakness in the next verse:
“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.”
[12:10 NIV]
This passage is not about endurance or perseverance. Paul’s zest, here, flows not from the power that comes out of enduring weakness. It’s about celebrating weakness.
Celebrating thorns! Why? Because this is what awakens us to our ‘new creation way of living!’ It awakens us to The Way of The Cross, by making us helpless enough to depend on God! It plunges us into crucifixion intimacy!
But this isn’t what a lot of us would value. I think had we written this letter, we would have emphasized God’s POWER made perfect in weakness.” And said something like, “When you’re weak, seek God’s power.”
That’s because our focus is the power that we get out of weakness, not the weakness itself. And we miss the point.
Which takes me to my third observation and that is, for Paul weakness was the key to experiencing God’s power. Because it was only when Paul embraced weakness that His eyes were opened to grace. I mean, he apparently never did get free of his thorn!
So, Paul had to have accepted weakness first; then and only then could he have recognized grace. As long as it was about getting rid of the thorn, Paul was blind to the grace right in front of him. That third time he prayed, he must have had to come to the point to let go of the fight and stop contending.
(By the way, I know we are to contend for things, like healing. But unless we really let The Holy Spirit lay this foundation of delighting in weakness, we will often find ourselves spiritually contending in our own strength over the course of our lives and eventually burn out.)
For many of us, when we’ve suffered in the past, grace was there for us but we did not recognize it. Where is God’s power made perfect? In weakness, not in spite of weakness!
The reason why power is found in the weakness itself, is because power is not just a resource. It’s a by-product of peace. Let me explain.
One of the reasons why it is difficult for us to get excited about this story of Paul's thorn, is because we automatically think of ‘power’ as a resource from God. When we hear, "My grace is sufficient for my power is made perfect in weakness” we look for the power to rise in us. In this way, we’re treating power as a resource that we get from God rather than the overflow of peace that comes when we surrender to God. It’s like we say," OK God, I feel very weak right now, when do I feel power?"
Ironically that's the way an independent person thinks. I am not saying power is not a resource; I'm just saying that it's far more than a resource. I think when God says my grace is sufficient, he gives us an understanding of true power. The power is the sense of God's presence in that moment of weakness!
It is not power to overcome weakness, but a power in which weakness cannot overcome us; because we’ve settled into shalom.
Weakness creates the moment in which the felt presence of God becomes more pleasurable then getting answers to your suffering. Paul is clearly suffering from whatever his thorn was; you would think that the most pleasurable thing would be relief from the thorn.
But finding ultimate pleasure in the relief of your suffering is the way that an independent thinks, because his highest good is himself. God uses suffering to show us the there is an even greater pleasure than personal pleasure, and that is Presence-pleasure.
Finally, Paul realized in this thorn experience that he could be free from changing himself. All he had to do going forward was surrender to weakness for Christ’s sake. He found that the freedom in it was the freedom to deny yourself – including the freedom to deny your efforts to change yourself.
Clearly Paul came to value weakness. He learned to boast gladly about his weaknesses and delight in hardships. And as he did, he discovered how The Cross was intended to be the center of practical spiritual life. Paul saw suffering as a teacher that leads us to weakness, and that that weakness grounds us in The Cross, which is our very freedom!