"when I Am Weak..."

“When I Am Weak”

2 Corinthians 12:2-10

It’s the most dreaded question of a job interview, and when it comes, many of us can hardly push the words out of our mouths.

“Tell me,” the interviewer asks, “what’s your greatest weakness?”

How do we answer that question?

I hate that question, how about you?

I mean, if you don’t come up with something, you sound arrogant, but if you come clean with your weakness, they might not hire you.

Career counselors offer various strategies for answering that question.

One way is to disguise your weakness as a strength.

For example, you might say, “I’m such a perfectionist I sometimes expect too much of myself or others.”

Another strategy is to minimize your weakness by explaining how you have already overcome it: “I can be very a very task-oriented person, but I learned that working with people is the most effective way to accomplish a goal.”

A third strategy is to share a real weakness, but make sure it is completely irrelevant to the position.

If your applying for an accounting job, for example, you don’t want to admit that you aren’t a detail person.

For most of us, revealing our weaknesses is one of the last things in the world we want to do, whether we’re looking for a job, trying to get a relationship going, or just talking with friends.

If you are like me, we don’t like to admit our weaknesses to ourselves, let alone to other people.

That’s one reason we stack resumes with degrees earned, awards received, and professional accomplishments.

I mean, if you were on a dating site trying to find a mate, you would probably not lead with: “Neurotic, out-of-shape slacker looking for a relationship that will last longer than my previous four marriages.”

For most of us, weakness is bad, and is to be avoided at all costs.

Strength is good, and something we all want.

Which helps explain why most of us do everything we can to avoid or overcome or conceal our weaknesses.

They make us feel vulnerable.

They frighten us.

As a result, we might come up with all kinds of strategies to try and protect ourselves from our weaknesses and the vulnerability we feel.

We try to control our lives.

We hide our true thoughts and feelings for fear of getting hurt.

We do anything we can to avoid or overcome being weak or vulnerable in any way, shape or form.

I mean, from our natural perspectives: “When I am weak, then I am strong,” makes no sense.

But with all that controlling, and hiding and protecting going on we close ourselves off to life.

I’m not saying we have to broadcast to the world every single weakness we have—but there can be no doubt that some of our deepest spiritual insights can come through our vulnerability, through our suffering, through our pain.

When my mom was passing away, for instance, one good thing I was able to rejoice in during the experience is that I would be better able to minister to others who were dealing with such pain.

Because I now knew how they felt.

In our Scripture Lesson for this morning, the church in Corinth was under attack by what Paul termed so-called “super-apostles.”

They claimed they were better speakers than anyone else.

They claimed to have supernatural visions and powers.

Apparently, these “super-apostles” were leading some of the folks astray from what Paul calls “sincere and pure devotion to Christ.”

They were building themselves up or boasting about themselves and preaching, what was according to Paul, “a Jesus [different] than the Jesus we preached.”

He says such people are “false apostles, deceitful workers, masquerading as apostles of Christ.”

They were full of themselves, trying to make people followers of them rather than of Christ.

And so what Paul is telling them is that if there is any boasting to be done, it is to be a boasting in the Lord—not in the self.

As an example, Paul describes a remarkable experience he had 14 years before, in which he was “caught up” into what he calls the third heaven and given insight into spiritual realities.

For some reason, something about this particular spiritual vision was so amazing and extraordinary that Paul says he was afflicted by a “thorn in [his] flesh” to keep him from boasting about it—to keep him humble.

There’s been tons of speculation about what Paul means by a “thorn in the flesh.”

The word we translate as “thorn” could just as accurately be translated as a “stake” or “spear.”

The word was used to describe a sharp instrument that caused pain, lodged deeply, and was difficult to remove.

So, Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” was not some minor annoyance; it wasn’t just “a pain in the neck.”