Power in Weakness

 “Power in Weakness”

 Message @ Jericho Ridge Community Church – Sunday, July 5, 2013

Text: @ Cor. 12:9 // Day Camp Sunday (Family Inclusive)

Camp Video:

Well, parents and kids, you can see from those photos that we have had an absolutely amazing week together learning all about God in action.  The superhero theme has been lots of fun – some kids have really gotten into it – look at this snazzy cape Seamus made.  He let me borrow it.  Pretty cool, huh?  Good morning, friends. My name is Brad and I’m part of the teaching and leadership team here at Jericho Ridge. 

Now, speaking of super heroes, how many of you know that every super-hero has not only incredible strengths, but also every superhero has a weakness?  A chink in their armor, as it were.  Let’s think together of some of them…  Shout them out as you think of them.

• Superman – kryptonite   
• Storm – She can control the weather, but just don’t get her in a small space.  Her weakness? Claustrophobia!
• Iron Man + Batman – their super powers seem to be money, so I guess running out of it is their weakness?  J.  Let me give you a few of my favorite silly superhero weaknesses…
• Power Girl (superman’s cousin) – She powers are pretty much the same as Superman’s but they had to choose another weakness for her other than kryptonite.  So she can stop a bullet with her bare hands, BUT if you touch her with any raw, unprocessed natural materials, she’s dead.  Hit her with a twig and boom, she’s down.    
• Thor – Super strength, flight, control of lightning.  Pretty much one of the more powerful superheroes.  But, his weakness?  Letting go of his hammer for 60 seconds or more the mighty Thor becomes mortal and vulnerable again.   
• Venom – From Spiderman.  He’s one of the bad-est comic villains of all time, and apparently, he’s afraid of fire and loud noises.  So all it takes to scare him off is a $1 lighter!  Seems it bit silly (it gets worse) 
• Thanos – Here’s a super-villain that is basically unstoppable.  His superpowers include matter manipulation, time travel, teleportation, telekinesis and, oh, immortality. He's also a super-genius in basically every field of science.  But yet the good guys manage to defeat him every time.  Why?  Because his weakness is A subconscious desire to lose (its like they were running out of ideas).  He gets defeated because, deep down, he knows he doesn’t deserve to win. And my favorite super hero weakness?... 
• Captain Marvel Jr –He’s the junior sidekick of Captain Marvel, clearly the fashion inspiration for Elvis.  When he says “shazam” he inherits super strength and super wisdom except that when he says his own name, that same powerful lightning turns him mortal again and he loses all of his super powers.  Really?  That’s his weakness!?

The point is that even super heroes have weaknesses.  Some of them may not be plausible, but they all have to have them.  Which perhaps is why we’re drawn to them and their stories.  In many ways they mirror our own life experiences.  We’re all pretty good at some things, and pretty un-super at other stuff.  We all have weaknesses in our own lives as well, don’t we?  And just like with superheroes, there’s a relationship between our areas of weakness and areas of strength.  Often we’ll use our areas of strength to cover up our weakness.  The same is true of people in the Bible and some of their experiences from history that we looked at this week. 

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I look at people in the Bible and I think “wow.  Are they sure super.  They have super-amazing faith.  I could never trust God like that.  Or I read their stories and see how they were used by God in amazing ways to do amazing things.  And I think to myself, “I’m pretty ordinary.  I don’t think God would ever use me in that way.”  But if we’re thinking this way, we may only be looking only at their strengths and not at their weaknesses. 

Take, for example, a person who I think is one of the most super and amazing heroes of the Bible. The Apostle Paul.  We learned about his story on Friday, didn’t we?  Paul was a man who went from being a skeptic to being one of the leaders in the early Christian movement.  He was a man who did amazing things for God.  He travelled all over the world teaching, writing, doing powerful signs and miracles by the power of God.  Looking at all of that, you might think “now there’s somebody who is pretty powerful and strong!”  But listen to how Paul describes himself in one of the letters he wrote – this is from 2 Corinthians 12:9&10. God said to Paul:

 “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me. 10 That’s why I take pleasure in my weaknesses, and in the insults, hardships, persecutions, and troubles that I suffer for Christ. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

When I am weak, then God is strong.  This link between my weakness and God’s strength is totally counter-intuitive and goes against everything our culture of super heroes tells us, doesn’t it?  Our world says that if we have an area of weakness, we should cover it up lest it be exploited or I look weak in front of other people.  The world suggests that you and I should put on our strong faces not matter what and not be vulnerable or talk about areas that we need help.  But Paul’s experience was quite different.  Though he had incredible gifts and areas of strength, Paul decided that calling attention to them or boasting about them wasn’t the way God had called him to live.  He knew the power of living in weakness.  In fact, in verse 9, at the beginning of that quote, He is mentioning that God actually gave him an area of weakness, which Paul refers to as a thorn in his side.  We don’t know what that was – some historians and biblical scholars speculate that it was a significant health challenge or a physical limitation of some kind.  Some suggest that even though he could write well, perhaps he couldn’t speak very well publically.  Whatever his weakness was, he says in this chapter that one of the purposes of his weakness was to keep him humble.  But even more important than that, the real purpose of his weakness was to let God’s divine strength and power work in Paul’s life.     

You see, if I’m always strong, then I don’t need anything or anyone else.  I will try to do everything in my own strength.  I don’t need your help and I certainly don’t need God’s help!  That was kind of the attitude that Super Steve had this week wasn’t it, kids?  He felt he could do everything on his own.  But one of the things that each of us will come to realize at some point in our lives is that we don’t have the strength & power necessary to face everything on our own.  Life is too messy and complicated and the challenges that come our way are too tough to just rely on our strengths.  We weren’t designed to endure hardships, persecution and troubles and death by facing them with our strengths: we were designed to embrace weakness.  God extends the same invitation to us today as he did to Paul: “My grace is all your need.  My power works best in weakness.”          

There might be an area of your life where you feel very weak & broken today.  It might be in the area of relationships.  It might be in the area of finances. It might be in your spiritual life, you may feel way out of your depth or your comfort zone here this morning.  Our temptation is often just to push through and be strong, but God’s invitation is to embrace His grace and His power at work to change every area of your life.  If you and I are humble enough to admit it, our areas of weakness become the perfect opportunity for God to show His strength.           

This is the way it has always been, this curious relationship between strength and weakness.  Perhaps the ultimate expression of God’s power at work in weakness was what the kids were singing about from John 3:16.  That some 2,000 years ago, in the person of Jesus, God Himself took on our weakness when He became human.  As the son of God, Jesus lived the perfect life and in the strongest and most sacrificial act ever imaginable, he took upon himself all of my weaknesses, my sins, my frailty when He died.  And yet in the strongest act of God’s power ever displayed, after 3 days, Jesus rose again from the grave, vindicating God’s power over everything, including death.  Flowing from the midst of what looked like an act of weakness, comes incredible divine strength and power.  Power that gives you and I the ability to face whatever comes into our lives.  Power to transform our weaknesses and our when we let God into those places of doubt, fear, uncertainty and unbelief.  I invite you today if you have never considered that to pray with me and invite God’s power to transform your life today.  It’s a profound act of weakness – of admitting need for God – but in that place of weakness, you’ll find what many people here at Jericho have found: that God’s grace really is all you need.  And that His power really does work best in weakness.  Let’s pray together as the team comes and leads us in two songs of response that talk about this intersection of strength and weakness. 

Prayer for salvation