Facing Your Weaknesses and Embracing the Impossible

Facing Your Weaknesses and Embracing the Impossible                     by Rabbi Dr Stuart Dauermann

I want to talk today about our weaknesses and the great things they can do for us. If you will follow me, you will have a new handle on your life and be less conflicted. So let me take you there.

I am grateful that some years ago I discovered "Strengths Psychology" which, in its popular expressions, encourages us to not spend our time working on our weaknesses, but rather to invest ourselves in capitalizing on our strengths. This was a welcome message for me at the time. Let me tell you why.

I was working for a boss who believed that anyone who worked for him could do whatever needed to be done if they were manageable and well trained. Therefore, if the boss appointed you as a Whatsit Manager, you would become a successful Whatsit Manager provided you were manageable and well-trained. But what if you were unsuccessful at Whatsit managing?  Well, according to this boss, there were then only three possibilities:  You had made yourself to be unmanageable, correct training had not been properly administered, or both. And if the training program was good, then there was only one possibility for why you were failing: you had made yourself to be unmanageable. And the boss did not tolerate unmanageable people. So, no wonder I don't work there any more. There's only so much of that kind of environment a person can stand.

Whenever and wherever a worker is being punished for not performing well in an area where he or she lacks the appropriate gifts, skills, or natural abilities, what you have is what we call hell on earth. You and put such a worker through the finest course in Whatsit Managing, but really you will be wasting time and your money. Why didn't it work for me?  Because willing or not, no matter how hard I flap these wings, I am not flying--Whatsit Managing will forever lie outside my competencies. And perhaps yours too.

People like Tom Rath and his book Stengthsfinder 2.0 offer to rescue us from this dilemma, encouraging us to maximize our strengths and recruit to our weaknesses. It was a welcome message when I read it.  A relief. It still is for many people.

But when it comes to living with the God of the Bible, it's dead wrong.

And therein hangs a tale.

Proceed with Caution

I am trying to take you through a paradigm shift. The strengths psychology paradigm is true, as far as it goes. It is true that we should operate out of our strengths rather than obsessing about our weaknesses. And my mentor, Dr Bobby Clinton, wisely taught us that we who serve God should operate out of our giftedness set--our combination of natural abilities, acquired skills, and spiritual gifts. However, that is not all. God honors these factors, After all, he created us to be this way. But that's only part of the picture.

As singer-songwriter Sally Klein O'Conner reminds us, the God of the Bible delights to use "Improbable People for Impossible Tasks." Yes, He does. With this in mind, God invites improbable people like you and me to embrace the impossible.

And you can easily prove this to yourself from looking at the two greatest leaders in the Bible, besides Yeshua, that is: Moses, and Paul.

We should all remember that when God called to Moses and commissioned him to "tell old Pharaoh, 'Let my people go,'" Moses offered five excuses for why he was the wrong guy: (1) I'm a nobody, Ex 3:11; (2) I don't know enough. Ex 3:13; (3)  Nobody will believe me, Ex 4:1; (4) I am not eloquent, but am slow of speech and of tongue, Ex 4:10; (5) I don't want to go, send somebody else, Ex 4:13.

We've got to sympathize with Moses in his crisis of  confidence. After all, he is eighty years old, he has spent the past 40 years doing grunt work: tending sheep, and they are not even his own sheep, but those of his father-in-law!  In that culture at that time, this was equivalent to having pursued a career as a parking lot attendant. At God's insistence, he does hit the road to go back to Egypt, but the scene is unimpressive. Here is what it says, "So Moses took his wife and his sons and had them ride on a donkey, and went back to the land of Egypt." An old man, two kids, a wife and a donkey. Not exactly impressive.

Then there's Paul, who was not an eloquent speaker in Greco-Roman terms, whose appearance was unimpressive, (2 Cor 10:10). and who apparently had some kind of loathsome eye disease. This is why he says, to the Galatians, "You know that it was because I was ill that I proclaimed the Good News to you at first, and even though my physical condition must have tempted you to treat me with scorn, you did not display any sign of disdain. . .  for I bear you witness that had it been possible, you would have gouged out your eyes and given them to me" (Galatians 4).

Sure, he was brilliant, but his contemporaries gave him low marks for appearance and eloquence. A late second century apocryphal book, The Acts of Paul and Thecla, describes hm this way: "He was a man of middling size, and his hair was scanty, and his legs were a little crooked, and his knees were projecting, and he had large eyes and his eyebrows met, and his nose was somewhat long." This is no Clint Eastwood or Tom Cruise. Paul was more of a Dustin Hoffman.

Yet despite all of this, he was a man of tremendous power and influence. He still is today.  And Paul tells us of the secret of why God uses "improbable people for impossible tasks," why God not only can use us despite our weaknesses, but why he actually prefers to use such people. And in the process of answering that question, he also clues us in as to Moses' secret weapon--and ours as well.

Here it is. Go!

In his Second Letter to the Corinthians, Paul gives us the secret to his own power, and ours, I will quote that material here and then draw some lessons for all of us.

About myself I will not boast, except in regard to my weaknesses. 6 If I did want to boast, I would not be foolish; because I would be speaking the truth. But, because of the extraordinary greatness of the revelations, I refrain, so that no one will think more of me than what my words or deeds may warrant. 7 Therefore, to keep me from becoming overly proud, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger from the Adversary to pound away at me, so that I wouldn’t grow conceited. 8 Three times I begged the Lord to take this thing away from me; 9 but he told me, “My grace is enough for you, for my power is brought to perfection in weakness.” Therefore, I am very happy to boast about my weaknesses, in order that the Messiah’s power will rest upon me. 10 Yes, I am well pleased with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions and difficulties endured on behalf of the Messiah; for it is when I am weak that I am strong.

Here is the secret, in three parts:
1. We can and should come to terms with our weaknesses. This is what happened for Paul. We don't know what his thorn in the flesh was. It may have been his eye problems, which in turn may date back to his encounter on the Damascus Road after which he was blind for three days. At any rate, this weakness bothered him greatly, and he sought the Lord for deliverance from this problem on three separate occasions, perhaps three seasons of protracted prayer. But in our passage we see that now he is reconciled to this weakness--he has come to terms with it. How about me? How about you?
2. We may find that God permits these weaknesses to remain in our lives in order to keep us humble. This is likely to be especially the case for people who, due to wealth, social station, or apparent strengths might be apt to be conceited.
3. Our weaknesses form a space in our lives where God can display his power. In part this is so that when great things happen or great power are displayed, it will be apparent that God is the Actor and not you or me, or even Paul. This is why Paul says in his First Letter to the Corinthians, "God chose what the world considers weak in order to shame the strong; and God chose what the world looks down on as common or regards as nothing in order to bring to nothing what the world considers important;  so that no one should boast before God." It is God who gets the glory when he uses "improbable people for impossible tasks." 
It's all rather enigmatic, isn't it?  Paul summarizes this lesson by stating the enigma this way:  "When I am weak, then I am strong."  And that's the way it can be for me and for you as we face the challenges of life, and find that we feel insufficient for these things. Paul himself states in 2 Cor 2:16: "Who is sufficient for these things." But he goes on to say in 2 Cor 3: 4-5, "Such is the confidence we have through the Messiah toward God. It is not that we are competent in ourselves to count anything as having come from us; on the contrary, our competence is from God."

So, as you go on through life, by all means do act out of your strengths, your natural abilities, your acquired skills, your spiritual gifts. But in addition, don't be afraid of your weaknesses. Instead face them, and with reliance upon God, go forth like Moses and Paul did. Embrace the impossible.

And just one more thing. I told you earlier that Moses tells us the secret of all this. Here it is: when he went back to Egypt he didn't just have that donkey, his two sons, and his wife. He also had his staff -- his rod of the power of God. And so do you. So do I.
As we go forth, we do so not in our strength, not in our own power. While we may not have a staff like Moses did, the One who went with Moses goes with us. And he will empower us to accomplish all that he sends us forth to do, despite weaknesses, and despite whatever Pharaohs that come our way