Good morning!
Welcome to your morning coffee! May our Heavenly Father remind us both that we are weak, and that He is strong. Father, please help us to acknowledge our desperate need for your daily help. We are so quick to trust ourselves, and then accuse you of not being there for us when we fail. Help us too ourselves rightly, as weak and desperate. Help us to see you rightly, as strong and trustworthy and loving. Please let this happen before we suffer, as we all surely will. So that when our weakness is exposed by our suffering, we will rejoice that you love us like you do! In the powerful name of Jesus, help us Father!
Your Morning Song: "Great Is Thy Faithfulness" by Maranatha! Music
Your Morning Scripture: 2 Corinthians 12:7-10
So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. 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 of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
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Something special happens to us, in us, and through us, when we see the truth about our own weakness. We are daily and desperately dependent on God's sustaining power and life-giving grace.
And this is true for all people, believers or not.
But when we do not see our weakness rightly, then we begin to confuse some of God's power with our own.
His power and grace are made perfect in our weakness because then there can be no mistaking just who is responsible for holding us up, for saving us, for sustaining us and filling our hearts and minds with spiritual fruit and growth.
Only God.
The beauty of our weakness, in this way, is similar to trying to look outside at a sunrise through two different windows.
One of the windows is smudged and clouded. You can still tell that there is light, and perhaps you can even see that it is a sunrise. But all the depth and the lines and the beauty are blurred by the messy state of the window.
The other window is clear and clean. There are no smudges and there is nothing on the window to obscure the view.
Our own strength is never strong. Our own abilities and attitudes and agendas apart from God's power can never do anything more than obscure our view of what He is doing in our lives, in our weakness. We smudge up the window of our hearts when we do not admit our weakness and our desperate dependence on Him. And so we can still know God and see that He is certainly up to something. But we are missing so much.
When we fall on God's grace, desperate and exhausted and without any sense of pride in our own strength, we can see God's power clearly, without the smudges and cloudiness of pride. And instead of despairing we will rejoice. Instead of becoming bitter we will be satisfied.
For just as God chose the Israelites because they were small and insignificant, we too have been chosen, as God's children, to be living testaments to His great power and grace to meet our great and eternal need.
So no matter what you are going through, rejoice, for God's grace will always exceed your need. His power will always be more than problem.
You can rest in Him and trust in Him. He loves you more than you do. He is doing more for you than you are. For He has claimed you as His child, His son, His daughter. And His name is now at stake.
And our God is always faithful. He never fails. No matter what.
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