Many years ago, I was rocked to discover that God’s power rested on me when I was at my weakest instead of at my strongest. My God-given faith and refusal to quit had helped me but not enough to get the victory over persistent attacks. Then I read that God had allowed the apostle Paul to be weak enough for the power of Christ to rest on him (NT Greek: “to enclose him like a tent”).
I discovered that Paul writes of himself in the third person — “I know a man” — when recalling his extraordinary visit to Paradise (“the third heaven”), but speaks of himself in the first person “I” when recalling his ongoing battle with “a thorn in the flesh” that the Lord refused to remove, and said to Paul “My grace is sufficient for you”.
In other words, the great apostle diminishes himself when relating to himself being taken up into Paradise and exalts only in his inability to cope with an ongoing struggle on earth.
Since then, I have loved Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 2:7-16 on things the eye has not seen (invisible), the ear has not heard (inaudible), and the heart has not known (inconceivable). The Spirit of God reveals these to us when we are “in fear and trembling” because of our own inability – especially when ministering on the other side of the world and far from those who are especially supportive.
We tend to forget that Paul’s decision to (a) preach Christ crucified rather than the worldly wisdom so prized by the Greeks, and (b) his refusal to demonstrate the power so sought after by Jews as proof which opened up the “hidden wisdom” of Christ: God’s wisdom and God’s power!
God’s sublime wisdom and dynamic spiritual power begin at the point where self-assurance and self-reliance end; and it’s then that the Lord Jesus — as always, and much to our relief — gives us victories of the kind that inspired the great apostle Paul to praise God! It’s one of many great paradoxes in the New Testament. So, thank God for your obvious weakness because it’s your secret strength.
But you need to ignore the first to witness the second.