What are your strengths?
What are your weaknesses?
How do you feel about your strengths and weaknesses?
Perhaps you are a wife or mom. It takes special talents and abilities to manage a family and coordinate their various activities. Maybe you are a great cook who loves to bake. That will require some coordination to buy the right ingredients, follow the recipe, and instructions for baking. This talent may not be immediately obvious because most of the time we overlook our strengths and focus on our limitations.
A Listening Heart
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We all have areas of struggle in our lives that make us feel inadequate.
My strength is doing things well with excellence, but it has a flip side. When taken to the extreme it can frustrate me, slow things down, and limit my productivity. On the surface pursuing excellence is good, but in excess, it can be a weakness. I cannot begin to tell you all the headaches this has caused me.
Joseph’s strength was his ability to dream and his weakness was pride. He didn’t know how to handle the secrets God revealed to him in the night. In his pride, he was not sensitive in the way he shared his dreams with his family (Genesis 37:5-8).
Peter asked to join Jesus while he was walking on the water. Initially, Peter was courageous but shortly after he got on the water, he became afraid (Matthew 14:28-30). There are several instances in the bible that portray Peter as an impulsive guy and this weakness tripped him up many times.
How about you? What is your Kryptonite, weakness, shortcoming, deficiency, flaw, imperfection, or thorn in the flesh?
Here is the good news…
Our imperfections do not have to hold us back. By His grace, God can transform our flaws and help us live victoriously.
Tope Keku
Paul, who wrote a main portion of the New Testament received many wonderful revelations from God. Because of this, he had a thorn in the flesh to keep him from becoming proud. We don’t know the exact nature of his thorn, but I imagine it could be a physical limitation. He pleaded with God to take the thorn from him, but God responded, My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness (2 Cor 12:9 NLT).
The truth about our Imperfections…
Our weaknesses keep us grounded in the reality that we need help. Though Satan will do everything to use our flaws to frustrate and condemn us, God will use it to drive us to our knees to depend on him.
So, while our imperfection, may look like a curse, it is actually a gift. When we recognize our imperfection as a gift, we will focus less on it as a negative and begin to appreciate it. This is what allows Christ’s strength to move through our weakness and transform us so we can live victoriously.
Let’s look at Paul’s response to God.
Once I heard that I was glad to let it happen. I quit focusing on the handicap and began appreciating the gift. It was a case of Christ’s strength moving in on my weakness. Now I take limitations in stride, and with good cheer, these limitations that cut me down to size—abuse, accidents, opposition, bad breaks. I just let Christ take over! And so the weaker I get, the stronger I become (2 Cor. 12: 9-10 MSG).
Paul was thankful for his thorn and was glad to it surrender to Christ.
What does living-victoriously with imperfections look like?
I saw this principle in action at a recent Christian conference. A lady was presenting and sometimes when she lost her thoughts or couldn’t find the right word, she paused and said Father, help me here.
As I watched her, I thought, that is my kind of woman. She is leaning into the Father for help in real-time. Not only was her presentation informative, but she also modeled dependence on Christ. She connected with Him moment by moment during her talk. His light shone through her.
Friend, how can you and I allow Jesus to take over and let his transforming grace help us live victoriously with our imperfections? We don’t have to be self-sufficient and worry about our weaknesses because God’s grace is sufficient.
In what ways could you release your imperfections and fears to Jesus and let him strengthen you?
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