Topic: God Can Use Your Weaknesses for Good [RICK WARREN Devotional 3 February 2021]
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God Can Use Your Weaknesses for Good
“I am with you; that is all you need. My power shows up best in weak people.”
2 Corinthians 12:9 (TLB)God can use all things for good—even your weaknesses. Here are four ways he uses your weaknesses for good.
Your weaknesses prevent arrogance. When you realize you’re not perfect—that you don’t have it all together—you will become a much humbler person. And being humble makes you more like Jesus Christ.
God did some great things in and through the apostle Paul. But Paul had something in his life that kept him from becoming arrogant. He called it a “thorn in the flesh” and asked God to take it away: “Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you’” (2 Corinthians 12:8-9 NIV). God’s grace will always be enough for you too.
Your weaknesses help you value others. It’s okay if you don’t have all the gifts, talents, or answers. That just makes you appreciative of and dependent on the people in your life and their gifts and talents. We need each other. Your weaknesses may be the way you learn to live in biblical community. The Bible says in 1 Corinthians 12:22, “Some parts of the body that seem weakest and least important are actually the most necessary” (NLT).
Your weaknesses make you more dependent on God. A different translation of 2 Corinthians 12:9 says, “I am with you; that is all you need. My power shows up best in weak people” (TLB). If you had no weaknesses, you wouldn’t think you needed God. You’d spend your life being self-sufficient—and that’s no way to live. Paul says, “Now I am glad to boast about how weak I am; I am glad to be a living demonstration of Christ’s power . . . for when I am weak, then I am strong—the less I have, the more I depend on him” (2 Corinthians 12:9-10 TLB).
Your weaknesses give you a ministry. God doesn’t want to use only your strengths in ministry. He also wants to use your weaknesses. God “comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God” (2 Corinthians 1:4 NIV). After God helps you go through a problem or learn to live with a weakness, you can then help somebody else with the same difficulty.
That’s the kind of God you serve. He weaves even the bad stuff in your life to make good. God will use your weakness to make you more like Jesus as you depend on him and the family of believers.
- Can you name your weaknesses as easily as your strengths? Why is it important to be able to identify your specific weaknesses?
- How can you use your greatest weakness for ministry to others?
- Why do you think God designed people with a need to be interdependent in order to thrive?