Your God Is Too Glorious: A 7-Day Devotional by Chad BirdSample

The Best News of All

One of the most important lessons God teaches us through the labyrinth of life is that what we deem as our greatest strengths are usually our greatest weaknesses. And what we think are our greatest weaknesses are the raw material God uses to demonstrate his strength. He uses our losses, struggles, and deficiencies—the very aspects of ourselves we associate with failure—as the vehicles for his kind of success in our life. 

So we wrestle with weaknesses. So our closets have enough skeletons to populate a graveyard. So we weren’t voted Most Likely to Succeed or marched home from Sunday school with ribbons for Bible memorization. This is not about us. Neither how good we think we are or how bad we know we are constitute our identity or empower us for the missions on which God sends us. Our trust is in Christ, whose cross and identity we share. Our crucified King chooses the last and the least over the first and the greatest. 

We write our story in a way that draws upon our strengths, our hopes, our plans and dreams. But he writes our story in a way that highlights our weaknesses, our fears, our deficiencies. Why? Because in so doing he showcases the areas of our lives where he does his best work. Yes, God can and does use our unique talents and abilities, but most often he uses whatever is going to spotlight our nothingness and his everything. 

His story in our lives is most obvious when the narrative has taken a turn toward the cross. 

The self-image we cultivate tends to work on the false assumption that God desires us to grow more independent. To become better and stronger so that we need him less. We imagine ourselves growing when we lean less on God and more on our own gifts and talents. As if the Lord is waiting for us to spread our wings and make our own way through this life. 

But Christian maturity is not marked by independence but dependence. A growing awareness of our incessant need for Christ. The less we are, the more Christ is. Far from being bad news, this is the best news of all. For the more Christ is, the more we are the very people God has created us to be. 

Describe a time when God used your weakness to show his strength.