AMONG US: in our Weakness
Pastor Steven Osborne
Transcribed by PulpitAI (with edits)
I made the mistake yesterday to go to the mall. Some last minute gifts. Boy, did I regret that. It’s like all of Duluth was there, and most of Canada. That was insane. I don’t know why I shared that with you, but just had to get that off my chest.
This morning we’re talking about God among us in our weakness. Anybody out here that seems or feels weak? Anybody that’s got any weaknesses this morning? Okay, four of us. The rest of you guys, good luck, you know? But I think when we’re honest with one another and when we’re vulnerable with one another, we can honestly say that we all deal with certain weaknesses and challenges and struggles in our life. And a lot of times it is easy to want to just hide those things from other people and even maybe sometimes hide those weaknesses and challenges from God as if He doesn’t know about those things already. He does, right? Amen?
And so there is a freedom when we can be honest with ourselves, there’s a freedom when we’re honest with other people, and there’s a freedom when we can be honest with God and say, “God, you know everything about me in any case, so here’s my weaknesses. I’m just gonna be honest; I don’t have it all together,” amen?
And so I want to just encourage you, again, as we think about this Advent season and Christmas, and as we try and discover about what does that mean for God to be Emmanuel and God to be with us and among us? Because he is. Sometimes we don’t feel that, but he is. When we look at his Word and we look at his promises, then we know that God is with you this morning. His Spirit is inside of us even with your weaknesses and struggles.
Smell the Roses
Now there’s two words in a sense this morning that I’m gonna try and bring together as we think about the Christmas story and maybe a story in 1 Corinthians about Paul, and the two words this morning is “weakness,”—so we’re gonna dig a little deeper as we look at this word—and the second word is charis, right, and it means “favor” or “grace,” and that’s the Greek word. And so we’ll try and bring those two words together.
But before I do that, I’m busy reading a book. Hopefully this week—it’s been one of those ten books that’s next to my bed and just laughing at me because I don’t get time to read it, and I’m trusting that I can finish this book this this week. And it’s about a pastor—maybe you’re familiar with him—Paul David Tripp. I really enjoy his material. And he’s got this book called Dangerous Calling. And for those of you that might be on the search committee, whenever that happens, I want to encourage you to read this book before you guys hire your next pastor. I think this will be helpful and meaningful for you.
But I want to just read a little bit from page 41 about just kind of what he’s sharing in his early student days as he was in seminary, and he is now preparing for some material out of the book of Romans. It says:
I try to connect every minute detail to the overarching intention of the offer. I consulted all of the experts, weighing inside over inside and opinion against opinion. Countless hours of disciplined private study were represented by page upon page of legal-size page notes. It was all very rewarding.
One evening, hours into exegeting the next section of Romans, it hit me. I had spent hours each day for months studying perhaps the most extensive and gorgeous exposition of the gospel that has ever been written, and I had been fundamentally untouched by its message.
This message had little impact on me it had been all grammar and syntax, theological ideas and logical arguments. It had been a massive intellectual exercise but almost completely devoid of spiritual power. I can remember staring at my ink-filled pages. They seemed distant and blurry, somehow not attached to real life, somehow not having anything to do with me. No, I wasn’t delusional. I had written all of it, but all of it seemed detached from me, my real life, my marriage, my struggles with my sin, my past, my future, my deepest hopes, dreams, and fears. I stared at the page, and it seemed impossible that I could have done all of this work when it had been little more than an assignment for a class for a grade in pursuit of a degree.
And that just really hit me. And he’s talking about—he teaches and he trains other pastors. He’s a professor. And he talks about how many times he will try and help the next generation of pastors to think through some of the challenges that they will face in a congregation. And a lot of times they will get upset with him because they feel like he’s lecturing them, and it’s like, “Well, we don’t maybe want to hear about all of those issues. Give us the Greek and give us the Hebrew. And give us the intellectual meat about that passage.” And he said a lot of times they can be quite arrogant, and he says he’s fearful for that next generation of pastors and thinking he’s glad that they’re not gonna be their pastor when it’s all based on just intellectual facts.
And then he continues to tell the story—I think it’s a friend of his that loves roses. Right? He’s got the best-looking rose garden in town. And he knows everything that you need to know about the type of soil and water and anything that is gonna make these roses beautiful. And one day it hit him that he has never sat to just enjoy the roses. It’s all been work, and he’s never taken the time to just actually sit in his garden and say, “Man, look at how beautiful that is,” to actually sit and to smell it, right?
Venessa’s done that. We’ve got some rose bushes, and these things keep me quite busy in the summer and trying to water them, and there’s been several times where Venessa said, “Man, did you see that rose? Did you smell it?”
It’s like, “No, I’m too busy,” right?
When it comes to the Christmas story and when it comes to our relationship with God, there is quite the temptation to make it all about the information, to make it all about the theology. Sometimes we can get so into the facts and these ideas and the lessons, but that can actually leave these doors unchanged and not being transformed by the power of God. Now that is a big waste, and that is not the desire for
God. Absolutely there is beautiful things that we get to learn about God, but we don’t want to just so work on the roses that we don’t enjoy the beauty of it, that we don’t enjoy the smell of it. I don’t want you to just—even as we think about Easter or Advent, right, I mean, we all know the stories, and it’s like, “Pastor, give me the next big revelation about this Christmas story.” You know it all! Right? For most of you, I’m not gonna give you a whole lot of new information about the birth of Jesus Christ. You know it all. But my question this morning is, is that really transforming your life? Does it still make you excited as you think about this incredible gift that we have and what that actually means in our lives as a church? When we worship this morning, when we sing these songs, does it still stir you to say, “Man, it is more than just these words. It is more than just the cute Christmas story.” And when we start to think about the power and God’s presence in our lives, now we can get excited, right? Now we can get excited, because our lives can be transformed by the grace of God in our lives. If the grace of God isn’t real in your life, guess what? You are missing out. And then you’re actually really missing out on this incredible story to think about this baby, Christ, the God of gods that came to this world to be a baby, to die on the cross for you and me because of his great love for us. That’s what we get to celebrate this morning. And it is not about just the theology, right? Is God’s presence really real in your life this morning? Do you really believe and know that he is among us, that God is here this morning, that his Spirit is inside of you, and do you still get excited about that?
Some of you seem like you’re still excited about that.
Grace
If you have your Bible with you, we’re gonna look at that first word, kind of as we look at the word “grace.” Luke Chapter 1, verse 30. Luke Chapter 1, verse 30. And this is kind of a short one; we’ll get to a longer one here in a second. But it says:
But the angel said to her…
So this is the angel talking to Mary.
“Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God.”
Now that word “favor” there is the Greek word charis. It refers to unmerited favor or kindness from God. It emphasizes that God’s grace is not earned but freely given. It is not about our effort but about his love.
So when we think about this famous story of Mary and the angel, right? There’s a movie out on Netflix right now. I don’t know that I want to recommend it because the theology isn’t good around it, but it is about what did Mary’s life look like, you know, as a teenager, and her upbringing and her parents, right? And so we don’t have a lot of information in scripture, and so I don’t know that I can recommend it, but it was interesting to kind of think through that and this idea of what led up to that moment where God decided to pick her and this angel to show up and say, “Mary, you have found favor.” What can anybody do in this world to experience that much favor that you can give birth to the Savior of all mankind? What is your—you know, it’s like, at least in our minds, like she was probably perfect, right? It was like no sin in her life. But everyone would fall short. I mean, I don’t know that there’s anybody that is qualified enough to carry baby Jesus, right?
And that’s why we have this word. It is because of grace. It’s because of God’s favor that it probably has nothing to do with her. It has nothing to do with her. And so even when we think about the story about Jesus Christ and this tremendous gift and the story of grace in our lives and Jesus dying on that cross, guess what? None of us deserve that. What is there that you and I have done to say, “Okay, God, you love me so much that because of what I have done, you will die on that cross?” It is absolutely the favor and the love of God that allowed his Son to go through all of that for us, for Jesus Christ to actually enter into this world.
Jesus as a Servant
Now there’s a course that I’m doing through a college. It’s a free course. And they’re just looking at the the history of Christianity. And again, this is kind of that rose story for us. A lot of times we’re so used to the smaller stories and the typical Christmas stories, but there was something in this lesson that kind of hit me differently as I was preparing for this message. And this professor is talking about kind of the larger story when we think about the different cultures that was at play during the birth of Jesus Christ, because you’re working with the Jewish culture and how that impacts them, right, but then you’re also working with the Greek culture, and you’re also working with Roman culture. And all of them were religious. The Greeks were religious; the Romans were religious—obviously just not in a godly way. But at least as we think about the Greeks, they had many gods that they were worshiping.
In South Africa, if you go to South Africa and you maybe go to the Kruger National Park, you will hear about the Big Five, right? And so the Big Five is the lion and the rhino and the elephant, right? And everyone wants to always see the Big Five.
When you think about Greek culture, they have the Big Twelve, right? There’s some twelve main gods that they worship. There’s probably many more, but at least there’s twelve. And so at number eight, at least with one of the articles I was reading, you had Apollo, right? The god of poetry and the sun. At number two, you have Poseidon, right? The god of the sea, horses, and earthquakes. That sounds a little bit more intimidating and powerful, right? It’s like, how would you like to be the god of the sea and horses and earthquakes? That sounds cool. And then Zeus. Zeus is kind of the chief deity. He is the god of the weather, the most powerful of them all. And so when you think about Greek culture, here’s some of the gods that they’re worshiping, and they’re trying to, in a sense, portray this power of all the different gods.
And then the same thing in the Roman culture, you have Jupiter and Juno, and then you had semi-divine gods like Julius Caesar. And again, it is trying to portray this power and the authority of these different gods that they’re worshiping.
But then, when we think about Jesus, this is so counter-cultural of what is happening in all of the other cultures, because here you have Jesus, who is actually the King of kings, enters the world as a helpless baby, dependent on Mary and Joseph for survival, born in a manger. Right? It’s like, everyone is bragging about their powerful gods. You have Zeus, and it was like, “Look at me, look at me!”
And then you have Jesus, and he comes as a baby, getting no attention. Right? At least from a worldly and a fleshly perspective, that looks like a zero. “What do you mean this is Jesus, that this is the Savior of the world, the King of kings, but there’s nothing special about him?” Nothing, at least from human perspective.
Philippians chapter 2:7 says:
… he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
This is our God, that he is the Creator, part of the Trinity, and he came in a baby form to serve us. He made himself to be nothing.
I have this little statue in my office. I’ve got several things—there’s some of my bookshelf stuff that means absolutely nothing. There were some people that I gave money. I said, “Just make that look pretty,” and they went to HomeGoods, and they did a great job. But then there’s a handful of stuff that is really meaningful to me, and this is one of them, and it’s this illustration, kind of this picture of Jesus washing feet. Right? It’s like, wow, this is so different than Zeus and Greek mythology, right? Not this God that is distant, but this is Jesus, our Savior, that came as a baby to be amongst his people, to wash their feet. It’s like, wow, that just doesn’t make sense, right? How powerful is that? But it looks weak, and it’s like, there’s no way that Jesus is actually gonna have an impact.
Gods like Zeus and Poseidon and Mars were portrayed as powerful, invulnerable, and distant from human frailty. They demanded reverence and often instilled fear rather than embodying sacrificial love. And here you have Jesus doing exactly the opposite. And he is actually the real deal. He is the Savior.
Weakness
Now this morning, kind of looking at part two, the second word—and then we’ll try and bring it all together—is in 2 Corinthians. If you have your Bible with you, 2 Corinthians chapter 12. This is words from Paul. So 2 Corinthians chapter 12, starting in verse 1.
I must go on boasting. Although there is nothing to be gained, I will go on to visions and revelations from the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows—was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell. I will boast about a man like that, but I will not boast about myself, except about my weaknesses. Even if I should choose to boast, I would not be a fool, because I would be speaking the truth. But I refrain, so no one will think more of me than is warranted by what I do or say, or because of these surpassingly great revelations. Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient…
So that “grace” is that Greek word that we’ve talked about, charis.
… is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
Now again, when we just think about this story, Paul’s got this incredible moment. He somehow gets to experience heaven or spiritual realm—we don’t know exactly what that all looks like, right? And he sees and hears things, and apparently he’s not able to share some of those things with us. And he’s like, “Man, I can, you know, some amazing things. But I want to share with you, the Lord has given me this revelation that I should boast about my weaknesses.” And the revelation for him is like, “Man, when I am weak, then I am strong, because of God’s grace in my life.”
And it talks about that somehow he’s got something in his life. There’s something in his life that is hindering him. It’s hindering his ministry, some sort of thorn that is a pain in his life. And he’s been asking God, he says, “God, just take this thing away.” Right?
Many years ago, I was caddying for my dad while playing golf. And in South Africa, you have these thornbushes—it’s called a pen doring—and my dad did not have a good golf day, and he ended up in the rough, and I had to go and look for his ball, and one of those things broke off and ended up in my leg. And one of those things kind of just, they suck right into your leg. And I can’t remember if we were able to take it out on the golf course. All I remember is I had to go to the hospital because I got a shot. Right? And so while I’m having this thing in my leg, that’s all—I could care less about my dad’s golf game or about where his ball is in that moment. All I can think is, “Get this thing out of my leg!” Right?
And maybe you have experienced that in your own life. Maybe you’ve had a little splinter in your finger. I don’t know if you’ve experienced that, but it’s like, that’s all you can think of, right? That thing is so awkward, and it’s painful, and it’s like, “If I can just get this thing out, then I can focus again on life,” right, “and then I can do some of my other jobs again.”
And in the same way, this is what Paul is saying. He’s like, “There’s something that is bugging me, that is hindering me to,” in a sense, at least according to his perspective, to achieve his full potential. Right? It’s like—and I don’t know if he maybe even prayed or said, “Lord, if you just remove this thing, then I can actually be more effective. I can actually do more ministry. But I got this something that is painful, a weakness in my life.”
And you would think that God would say, “You know what? I agree with you, Paul. You know, you’re only reaching thousands of people right now, but if I remove this thing from you—let me just remove this splinter from you, because now you’re gonna reach millions.”
At least if I was God, that’s the way I would have done that. I would have said, “Come, I’m gonna take this weakness, this pain out of your life. You don’t deserve this, Paul. You’ve been so good. You know what? You’ve had the worst luck with boats and ships, and, you know, let me let me just remove this thing for you.”
But that’s not what God is doing in his life. He actually gives him these words. I don’t know that I would have appreciated these words in Paul’s life. He says, “My grace is sufficient for you.” What? “For my power is made perfect in weakness.”
Like, “Lord, I don’t want to hear all of that.” It’s like, “Just take this thing out!”
God says, “No, no, no. That thing serves a purpose in your life. It is reminding you that you still need me. And it is reminding you that you need to lean into me in moments when you want to give up.”
When life feels difficult, when life feels hard, what are you gonna do? What will our lives look like if God bails us out every time immediately? There’s no way that we’re gonna have a deep faith, there’s no way that we’re gonna have a deep relationship with Jesus Christ, if we just, every time we’re going through hard stuff and we pray and say, “Okay, Lord, just fix this.” But a lot of times he allows us to go through those difficult things because it builds character, and it gives the opportunity for God to work in our lives.
The word that Paul uses here for the word power, the Greek is dynamis. It refers to God’s strength, ability, or miraculous powers. It is the root word for “dynamite,” indicating explosive, transformative strength.
So the word that we’re seeing here, what God is trying to communicate to Paul is to say, “Paul, in your weakness, my power will bring transformation. My power is explosive, and it can change things.”
Now that’s a little bit of a different way to think about some of the challenges that we have in our lives. When we face challenges, or at least when I face challenges, a lot of times we lose sight of all of these things, and we want to sit in the corner of our room and cry. It’s like, “God, don’t you love me anymore? Do you even see the stuff that I’m dealing with? Instead, to be on a place to say, “God, you are with me. Your Spirit is inside of me. And even in this moment, yes, life sucks, life is hard, but guess what? I don’t have to lose hope, because your Spirit, that dynamis power, is working in my life, and you will bring change and transformation in this situation.”
And he goes on and says that this grace is made perfect. The Greek here meaning is “to bring something to completion, fulfillment, or maturity.” God will somehow, with all of your weaknesses and things that you’re dealing with, if you allow him, the Spirit of God, and for God to do his work in your lives—if you bring those weaknesses, guess what? He will bring completion and maturity to whatever you’re dealing with. But it will take some trust. It will take some timing in all of those things and to wait on the Lord. But it’s gonna be worth it.
Now, just think about other examples where we see kind of the same thing about weaknesses and how God uses those people with their weaknesses. Moses with his insecurities. David and his moral failure. Peter, after his failure, denying Jesus. Right? And then God not giving up on them. Again, his Spirit working inside of them.
Reasons for Weakness
A couple things as we just think about this truth and reality about leaning into God with our weaknesses:
Weaknesses is the doorway to God’s power. Let me say that again. Weaknesses is the doorway to God’s power. Mike shared—there’s a group of us that pray every Sunday morning, early. And Mike reminded me of the story of Gideon with the 300 men. Right? It’s like, so Gideon goes like, “Okay, we’re gonna put this big army together. We’re gonna have our Zeus moment.” Right?
And then God says, “No, you don’t need that many people. Nope, that’s still too many. You only need 300. Because Gideon, it’s not about you. It is about my power.”
So even today and this Advent season, for us to realize again that your weakness (or weaknesses) is a doorway for God’s power to do a mighty work. God’s strength brings glory to him and not us. And so it is an important reminder for us, as we think about our weaknesses and think about all of the ways that God has worked in your life over the years, and the answers he’s given you in those moments of trouble, those moments of storms, where you think, “Oh man, I’m gonna drown. This is too much to handle.” And then somehow God comes in, and he solves that for you, and he’s with you. And then years later you go like, “God, you are so good. It was amazing how you did that.”
Unfortunately, a lot of times it is easy for us in those moments to actually take the credit again and say, “Look at me. Look at what I did in those moments.”
And it is fascinating, in my own life I have seen that a lot of times when we’re not maybe in a moment of weakness and maybe everything is going well in our lives and we’re healthy and there’s no challenges, it is so easy to become prideful in those moments. Right? Until we go through some challenges. Then God puts us, and we get on our knees again. It’s like, “Oh, Lord, I forgot. It’s about you. It’s about you.”
Weakness builds compassion for others. 2 Corinthians chapter 1 says:
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.
Weaknesses reminds us that we’re all in need of grace, and it opens our hearts to minister to others. If you have not dealt with challenges and weaknesses in your life, I’m assuming that there’s very little compassion in your life. But praise the Lord, all of us probably have gone through many, many things. Right? And we can hate those moments and those challenges and those struggles in our lives, or we can say, “God, you’re gonna use this to create compassion in my life, so that I actually can show compassion to other people.”
And that’s a great reminder, right? It’s like, to hold on to that compassion, to never get to a place to look down on other people and say, “I have arrived. Look at me. I’m better than anybody else. There’s no challenges, no issues, no weaknesses in my life. Look at me!” No, we hold on to those things, and we become aware, and we think about those moments where God came through for us so that that compassion can come through in our own lives, so that we can minister well. Because we have a whole world out there that is broken that needs compassion. They don’t need another church that is just religious and that has no love and no compassion.
So this morning, stop hiding your struggles or viewing them as failures. Instead, see them as opportunities for God to show his power in your life. Celebrate the truth that you don’t have to be strong, because God’s grace is sufficient. Amen?
Go With God’s Power
I don’t have time—one last point. I want you to write down Acts 4, verse 33. You see the word again there, charis. And it says that—well, let’s look at that. Acts. This is actually really cool. And then we’ll close. It says:
With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.
“With great power,” right? And so when we look at—with what gave them the power? Again, it is that, the favor of the Lord. In that verse you see again the charis. It is through the charis, it is through God’s grace, through his favor, that actually gave them the power to go out and do the work.
And so for us, as we leave this place this morning within our weaknesses, it is not about how strong and how well put together you are, but it is actually the favor of the Lord—that same favor that Mary experienced; it’s the same favor that Paul experienced; it’s the favor that you and I get to experience this morning, the charis—in this Advent season that actually empowers us to leave these doors and to share about Jesus Christ. Amen? And to experience the work of God in our lives.
I pray this Christmas week that you’ll think about your own relationship with God, and if the Holy Spirit is actually still transforming your life, or that you actually fall into the same trap, where it’s been so about the roses and knowing everything about the roses, but you haven’t had the time to actually just sit still and enjoy it.
This Christmas season, this week, be quiet. After you’ve done all of your crazy shopping, don’t go to the mall. Just sit and reflect on this truth that God is with you. He’s with you. Everything that you’re experiencing this week, this year—he’s with you.
