Strength Made Perfect

I want to be strong. I want it for the people I love, for the cause I care about, and for a world of young leaders who have an ever-eroding confidence in leaders of any kind. I want to be strong, not because I am afraid of being weak, or because of some perverse need to be better or above anyone else —maybe those motivations linger somewhere inside me, but mostly I think, I want to be strong for the weak.

I want to give away power, I want to build trust, and I want to establish something that lasts — and I just can’t see how those things can happen without some consistent moral, emotional, and intellectual strength from primary leaders.

And then I read this:

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. 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.

It isn’t irony or even paradox that threatens my house of cards, it is the raw brutal truth that when I am weak, God can be stronger. Maybe I want to be strong for the sake of the people I lead, but Paul says it is “for Christ’s sake” that he delights in weakness. I wonder if when I am strong, all I offer my people is “my strength alone” and when I delight in my weakness, I am actually offering them Christ Jesus instead. It is a strange truth that to be a flawless leader threatens the kingdom of God inside the people and organizations we lead. It isn’t possible of course, but it is possible to erroneously strive towards it and believe it is a real possibility. In the end, people might become disillusioned with us or our leadership, our decisions, or even our mistakes. When that happens, it leaves them running back to Jesus himself. Which is, I think, the point; to lead people to Jesus. I don’t think Paul is talking about sin here. I don’t think he wants to delight in his moral weakness, but I do think he would include mistakes, insults, hardships, persecutions, and difficulties. In that case, the weakness he is embracing is feebleness of his own soul to carry it all, his weakness to bear the weight of everyone else’s expectations, never mind his own.

I think he is tired, defeated even. This was written to the Corinthians, the first church he planted after the staggering failure he experienced in Athens. When he comes to them he says, “In weakness and with great fear and trembling.” God speaks to him in response to a mysterious problem from which he has prayed three times for deliverance and not gotten any, but this is the word he holds on to.

When I am weak, then I am strong.

He doesn’t stop hoping for strength. He doesn’t stop wanting it as an outcome; he has just discovered that he is stronger when he allows himself to feel the weakness, the pain, and the brokenness of this world and even the brokenness of his own body. When I want to be strong for those who are weak, I forget that I am one of them. I am tempted to forget that grace is for me too.

Maybe Paul remembers that he is not anyone’s savior, and that he is himself actually someone who needs to be saved. The struggles of our lives remind us that we are not the hope of the world. They remind us that his grace is what everyone we love needs, and it is what we need as well. It is enough, and it perfects in us that incomplete desire to be strong. That desire we have to love and lead, and not fail.

I know that I have and — will continue to — fail the people I love. I have failed myself. That is a hard pill to swallow, and of course I want to be better, but I am learning that the only way to do that is to be weak first.

To be the one who needs and receives grace. To be filled with his strength, exerted in and for me.

Not in mine exerted for others.

This is strength made perfect.