Text: 2 Corinthians 12:1–10
Topic: Our weaknesses can be much more useful for Christ than our strengths.

• Illustration: In her book Tramp for the Lord, Corrie ten Boom tells the story of an old woman she met in Russia in the time of the Communist persecution of Christians during the Cold War. Because the woman had multiple sclerosis, the secret police never paid her enough attention to realize she was translating Christian literature.
• Has it ever occurred to you that the very thing you most want removed from your life might be the very thing God uses in the greatest way for his glory?
• The apostle Paul tells us that every believer should glory in his weaknesses far more than in his strengths, because it is in our weaknesses that Christ is most clearly revealed.

• Have you ever noticed how unlike the world Christianity is? The world wants ambition, power, and wisdom, but Jesus wants us to seek servanthood, weakness, and the foolishness of the gospel.
• Paul's opponents in Corinth talked about their strengths and attacked Paul. They said he wasn't an impressive speaker.
• As many times as Paul had been beaten, stoned, and shipwrecked, by the end of his life he was scarred and bent and twisted. Not only that, but there was something about him that just did not stir passion in an audience.
• But Paul answered his opponents.
• We've become churches that glory in power and strength and displays. How unlike Christ that is!
• What distinguishes us from the world is that it is not our gifts, our strength, our power, or our intellect in which we glory. We can never be so impressive that the world will accept Jesus.
• Paul says that Christ's strength is made perfect in our weakness. So if we are going to distinguish ourselves from the world, we had best embrace our weakness.

• It might be easy for someone who has no strengths to say we should glory in our weaknesses. But Paul was certainly not in that company.
• In 2 Corinthians 11 Paul says: Okay, you want to take on somebody? You want to talk about strengths? We can play that game.
• Paul says: Many boast according to the flesh. I, too, will boast. I am a Hebrew, an Israelite, the offspring of Abraham. I have endured imprisonments, beatings, and have often been near death. Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one.
• If any one of us had ever been beaten for the gospel like that just one time, that experience would become the sermon illustration for life! We'd speak at churches, people would read our books and come to our seminars.
• But Paul says: You want to boast about pedigree? I can keep up with you. You want to talk about persecution? I can outdo you. You want to speak of performance? I've done all right. You want to talk about pressure? I've stood up underneath it.
  • 2 Corinthians 11:24–29
• But then he says, "If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness."
• Then he invites his readers to go back in time 14 years and speaks about a personal experience in the third person. He says: I knew a man who was caught up to the third heaven.
• Paul figured out something that a lot of Christians never understand: you will learn a lot more about God in the thorns of life than you will in the third heaven experience. Fourteen years ago he had this incredible experience, yet he doesn't claim any extra authority because he went to heaven. He's not giving seminars in how to get caught up to Paradise.
• Sometime after that experience, something took place in his body that hampered him. It got in the way of his ministry and distanced him from his strengths.
• Three times he asked God: Lord, please get rid of this thing that hampers me. It makes me far less effective.
• Even though Paul was a man of great faith and had absolute conviction of God's power and ability to take this thing away, God said, "No."
• Wouldn't you like to see one of these healers on TV put their hands on somebody and say, "Just a minute; God says you've got to stay sick"? That just doesn't happen.
• But here is arguably the greatest servant of the Lord Jesus who ever lived, and he's got some malady about which God says: I want you to keep it. I've given that to you.
• I see a pattern in Paul's life that many of us follow. First he had a clear revelation. Then, perhaps, he responded with conceit. So God intervened with a controlling reminder that elicited a compliant response.
• When that happens to us, we realize we're no longer too big for our britches, and that's when we finally have a close relationship with God—which is what Paul was after all along.
• Your greatest enemy to service is self and pride.
• We often identify ourselves more with our abilities and gifts than with our role as the servant of God.
• When we receive gifts and revelations, God often has to interfere with our direction. He has to give us that controlling reminder that he wants us to move beyond mere relationship with him to true intimacy with him.
  • Illustration: York shares his experience of entering seminary overconfident and then becoming unemployed. He got a job as a janitor and shares that cleaning toilets prepared him more for the pastorate than anything else.
• God responded to Paul's plea by saying: No, Paul, I'm not going to remove that from you, but my grace is sufficient.
  • Illustration: York shares about a small creek by his house. That creek didn't need the Golden Gate Bridge. It just needed a small bridge. God's grace is sufficient for whatever you need.
  • Illustration: The Toyota plant in Georgetown, Kentucky, has an assembly line that puts the right part in the right place at exactly the right time to create a car. God's grace always comes in the right measure at the right time.
• People spend a lot of time trying figure out where their illness comes from. It doesn't matter.
• Often the same event is used by God to strengthen you, and by Satan to tempt you.

• When God explained to Paul that his strength is perfected in Paul's weakness, he changed Paul's attitude toward the thorn.
• Paul realized that the very thing that had so troubled him was the thing that God used to move him into intimacy with Christ.
• We have to learn what Job learned when he cried out to God because of all the things God had allowed in his life.
• We must learn what Habakkuk learned when he looked over across the Euphrates and saw Babylon getting stronger and wondered why God was allowing that.
• We must learn what Paul learned when he looked at the thorn in his flesh and wondered why God would allow such a thing to hamper his ministry.
• God's answer was the same to each one of them: I'm God and you're not.
• When we understand that, it changes everything.
  • Illustration: David Miller has muscular atrophy and has had to endure a great deal. He and his wife have a son named Josh, their only child. Josh had an accident and was paralyzed. David was able to encourage, love, and comfort his son with the love of the Lord Jesus Christ and speak to him of the graciousness of God. That's what it means to display the power of Christ.

• Illustration: G. D. Watson wrote a pamphlet entitled "Others May, You Cannot," which York has adapted. It speaks of the limitations of following Christ, but also the reward gained from that life: "the strangest gift—the ministry of weakness."