Christ and the Christian’s Calling
Christ is speaking in me. He is not weak. . . . He was crucified in weakness, but lives by the power of God. For we also are weak in him, but in dealing with you we will live with him by the power of God.
2 CORINTHIANS 13:3–4
Is Paul Crazy?
As we are beginning to see, 2 Corinthians is unlike any other letter that Paul wrote. The others are written to churches that will accept without question all that he says as coming with apostolic authority—Christ’s authority, in fact. So in those letters Paul is very much the teacher telling it like it is. But here he is writing to Christians many of whom, he knows, do not respect him as an apostle. He is under suspicion with them of being something of a kook, perhaps a fraud, and so his first task must be to recapture, if he can, their confidence in him and readiness to learn from him.
Paul is not, I think, used to such situations. Certainly, his usual confident, logical flow in unfolding his thoughts is diminished, and there is some to-ing and fro-ing, repeating and going back on himself, as he seeks to achieve persuasiveness. He is a preacher dictating a letter, so naturally he speaks in a didactic fashion; yet all the time he seems to be asking himself what he can say to get under the Corinthians’ skin and convince them that he is a person they should love and learn from after all, despite the way the “super-apostles” have put him down.
This needs to be born in mind as we approach the passage that we are to study now, 2 Corinthians 5:6–6:2.
So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.
Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others. But what we are is known to God, and I hope it is known also to your conscience. We are not commending ourselves to you again but giving you cause to boast about us, so that you may be able to answer those who boast about outward appearance and not about what is in the heart. For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you. For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.
From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Working together with him, then, we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain. For he says,
“In a favorable time I listened to you,
and in a day of salvation I have helped you.”
Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.
It can safely be said that all who appreciate Paul’s apostleship find this section of 2 Corinthians supremely thrilling, indeed overwhelmingly so. The passage is the climax of the first part of the letter, where Paul is baring his soul in order to reestablish trust, love, and responsive rapport between the Corinthians and himself, and to that end he is highlighting his motivation as a servant of God.
Understanding how people tick, as we say, is always fundamental to good relationships with them. Think of husband and wife, and parents and children, for a moment, and you will have no doubt about that. Paul presents himself here as a driven man and indicates what motivations are driving him. The Corinthians, he knows, suspect that the enormity of his energy and enthusiasm for the church-planting work he is doing argues mental unbalance—to put it bluntly, insanity, some form of religious mania.
Paul sweeps the idea aside. “For if we are beside ourselves [the Greek word means, literally, out of our mind], it is for God”—that is, it is between us and him, and no business of yours—but “if we are in our right mind, it is for you” (5:13)—and you must take us seriously. (The plural here, by the way, is not the authorial “we” that is commonplace in English-language literature; it designates Paul and Timothy together, the twosome announced as sending the letter in 1:1. From the start of chapter 3 Paul has been associating Timothy with himself in everything he has said.)
Paul in effect is begging the Corinthians to ask themselves: Is it possible that Paul and his companion are sane after all? Could it be that it is wrong to mock and belittle them? Do we really understand them? Should we not, after all, see them as guides for our faith and life in the way they want us to do? I hope every reader of this book will join the Corinthians in facing up to these same questions.
Paul’s Motivations
In any event, Paul is passionate in desiring that the readers of his letter should properly understand him, and he lays himself on the line accordingly. He now explains what drives him in the risky, hazardous, and often pain-laden service of Jesus Christ that has become his life’s work. His motivation, he tells us, is threefold. The three operative thoughts are distinct, but they overlap, and blend and bond with each other to form a single rope of response, if I may put it so, to the overwhelming fact of Christ. As a result, we see Christ as God incarnate into weakness, the baby son of a poor Jewish girl; Christ for three years a peripatetic, disruptive social and religious outsider; Christ crucified in weakness as a revolutionary who had become a nuisance; Christ, Paul’s loving Sin-Bearer, absorbing divine wrath against him on the cross; Christ now his risen, reigning, returning Lord, his life and his hope.
The three motives are these:
1. Paul wants to give constant pleasure to Christ.
“Whether we are at home [in heaven] or away [still on earth], we make it our aim to please him,” Paul says (5:9). Pleasing those who in some sense have your heart— a spouse, a sibling, a child, a friend, a mentor, a benefactor, or whoever—is a demanding occupation. It calls for imagination, empathy, and effort; you have to be aware of their hopes and expectations that involve you, their likes and dislikes, and their sense of the bond between you and them.
Is this a major motive in our own lives, I wonder: always and under all circumstances to please our Lord and Savior? It was so with Paul, and this agenda, then for him as now for us, is demanding. It requires sustained love to Jesus, expressed in adoration of him for all that he is in himself and thanksgiving to him for all that he has done, for the world of lost humanity in general and for us sinners in particular. It requires sustained obedience to all his commands, up to the limits of our understanding of them. It requires constant watchfulness against temptations to self-indulgence, and constant battling against sloth, laziness, and indifference to spiritual issues. It requires respectful and caring treatment of all others as persons created to bear the image of God, and self-denial at all points where self-absorption would conflict with and damp down active neighbor-love. It requires daily holiness, from morning to night, a daily quest for opportunities to bear witness to Christ, and daily prayer for the furthering of Christ’s kingdom and the blessing of needy people.
There is joy in laboring wholeheartedly to please Christ, as Paul knew, but there is no denying that, as Isaac Watts put it, “love so amazing, so divine [as Christ’s love, supremely displayed at the cross], demands my soul, my life, my all.”
2. Paul wants to be found fully faithful to Christ on judgment day.
Paul continues, “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” (5:10). Here we must watch our step, for centuries of misunderstanding have obscured Paul’s meaning in this verse and others like it. Paul is not talking about personal salvation as such. He is not hoping for a final justification that would at last be achieved through the merit of his own devoted service, as Roman Catholic teachers, following Augustine, long supposed.
Let it be said, loud and clear: justification, God’s definitive declaration on where we shall spend eternity, is a verdict passed the moment we come to a living faith in Christ. When exactly that is must be left to God, who alone can read human hearts to discern when in each case; but, theologically as well as pastorally, it is always right to assure those who credibly profess penitent faith in Christ that through him their prospect of heaven is now divinely guaranteed. The basis for that verdict is nothing that we do by or for ourselves, but the sin-bearing suffering of Jesus for us on the cross, as we shall shortly see.
From the moment of the verdict, it is the Christian’s privilege to live in the assurance of future glory with Christ when life in this world ends. Believers can face the close of life without fear, without panic, without alarm, because they know that whatever else changes, they will be with Christ, in Christ, through Christ, being glorified together with Christ, for ever and ever.
But when Paul says, as in Greek he does, that at the final judgment believers’ track records (things “done in the body”) since they became Christians will in some sense come back to them as their destiny, he is talking about something else: namely, what we label rewards, the divine acknowledgment of faithful service rendered. On this, C. S. Lewis is the most helpful thinker I have read. Lewis asks, what is it that a man in love wants when he courts the girl, woos her, and gets engaged to her with a view to marrying her? Answer: he wants more of the relationship with her that he has already begun. He wants the deepest, richest, most satisfying mode of togetherness with her that it is possible for him to have. He wants, in other words, more of what he has already.
Such is Lewis’s analogy for understanding what Jesus and the New Testament writers tell us about the rewards that are to come to Christ’s faithful servants at the last judgment. The rewards are pictured in terms of privilege, honor, satisfaction, and joy—that is certainly what the images of feasting, crowning, and ruling are all about. And the prospect of being eternally with Christ and seeing his face and his glory is explicitly spelled out (see John 17:24; Rev. 22:4), as is the expectation of reigning with him (2 Tim. 2:12) and being glorified with him (Rom. 8:17).
On the same topic, Paul taught in his first Corinthian letter that on “the Day” (judgment day) fire will disclose whether each individual Christian has built (in the ongoing life of the church, basing everything on Christ the foundation) with “gold, silver, precious stones,” which will survive the flames, or with “wood, hay, straw,” which will not (1 Cor. 3:12–13). The apostle has in view halfhearted, opinionated, frivolous, arrogant, disruptive people, destructive rather than constructive in their influence, such as become problems in ordinary congregations today. “If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives,” Paul now states, “he will receive a reward”; but “if anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire” (3:14–15) (i.e., as from a burning building, in which the person escaping has to leave everything behind, to perish in the flames). What “loss” the person escaping will suffer in this case is not specified, but Paul is assuring us that though it will not be the loss of salvation, the loss will be real and grievous. The rewards, by contrast, are for faithfully contributing to the worshipping life and loving, outreaching service of the church of Christ.
“Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others,” Paul continues (2 Cor. 5:11). Knowing that he and his colleagues, like every other Christian, must one day give account to God for the way they have served the Savior since their conversion, and being thoroughly solemnized in his heart by awe in face of this responsibility, he with them invests himself wholeheartedly in their God-appointed evangelistic ministry. The word “fear” in this text is the standard Greek term for fear in the ordinary sense of apprehensive anticipation, causing alarm and perhaps panic; but here it is carrying Old Testament overtones of humble loyalty within the covenantal frame of reverent and adoring awe (as when the fear of the Lord is said to be the beginning of wisdom). Alarm and panic are not in view at all.
God, so Paul now goes on to say, takes knowledge of evangelists as they do what they do, and so Paul adds that he hopes the Corinthians take knowledge of Timothy and him in the same way, for he and Timothy and others like them are deadly serious in their ministry. It is, after all, a life-and-death business (see 2 Cor. 2:15–17), and all the practitioners of this ministry look to be respected accordingly by all who are Christ’s (5:11). If you accept this and accept us on this basis, Paul goes on, you should be able “to answer those who boast about outward appearance and not about what is in the heart”—in particular, the “super-apostles” who make malicious fun of Paul’s sober teaching style, as well as of things he teaches (v. 12).
Which brings us to the final, climactic motive of Paul and of his teaching.
3. Paul is controlled, claimed, driven, directed, set going, and kept going by the love of Christ.
“For the love of Christ controls us,” Paul says (5:14). The verb translated “controls” (and “constraineth” in the KJV) means all that is spelled out above. And “love” is agapē, virtually a technical term in the New Testament, meaning a purpose of making a loved one great in whatever way that loved one needs to be made great, and doing so by whatever means are necessary to that end. In the verses that follow, Paul will focus on the two great acts whereby Jesus Christ, the lover of our souls, became our Savior, savingly involving those who by faith lay hold of him in a new life that is in truth his risen life in them. “One has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for him who for their sake died and was raised” (vv. 14–15).
It is sometimes asked whether Christ’s death or his resurrection is what directly brings about the sinner’s salvation. The answer is both, and to minimize either’s importance in relation to the other is to begin to falsify that answer. In other words, Christ died for our sake as our representative and substitutionary Sin-Bearer, and it is one facet of our faith in him to see and think of ourselves as having died with him, in the sense of having voluntarily ended the life we were living in our unbelief. But that is not all. Christ was raised from death for our sake as our forerunner and life-giver, and it is a further facet of our faith in him to see and think of ourselves as having been raised with him in union with him, so that now we participate in his resurrection life in terms of desire, direction, and divine driving energy. When Paul declared that in his ministry he toils, “struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me” (Col. 1:29), it is this supernatualizing of motivated service that he refers to.
So now we are different people from what we were; in some respects, certainly, the same, but in other respects decisively and irrevocably changed. Now we are not running our lives independently, as we did before, but responsively, as we allow Christ, who loves us, and the redeeming love he has already shown in saving us, and his loving purpose for our new lives, to impact us in their full strength. And this will continue, in all appropriate ways, to all eternity. Praise God!
Galatians 2:19–20 tells us a similar story about the Christian’s transformed identity, as modeled in the person of Paul once more. “I have been crucified with Christ,” he writes. “It is no longer I [apart from Christ] who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (v. 20). “Crucified with Christ” here corresponds to “all have died” in 2 Corinthians 5:14, and “I live by faith in the Son of God” matches “that those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for him” in 2 Corinthians 5:15. What Paul is talking about is a personal life that is new in the sense that it has a new motivation and is under new management, one that brings vision, direction, communion, purpose, and potential that were simply not there before.
The next block of verses (vv. 16–21) further opens up the differences that the active love of Christ has made in the lives of sinful human beings. Verse 16 says: “From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh [Paul did!], we regard him thus no longer.” This is the first difference: a new way of thinking about people. The imparting of new life to believers has permanently changed the inward mind-set that determines their perception, first of the Lord Jesus himself, and then of others. No longer do believers assess others (Christ included!) in purely human, this-worldly terms, asking only how people might best fit in to society around them and what use we might make of them (this is what “according to the flesh” evidently implies). Instead believers see their neighbors as lost souls, without God and without hope, and they never forget that the primary way to help these lost souls is to share the gospel with them.
Verse 17 adds, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” This is the second difference: a new way of existing among people. Union with Jesus Christ, which correlates with one’s first significant embrace of and commitment to Jesus as Lord and Savior, involves a fresh exposure to the same creative power that made the world and today sustains it and generates within it the process that produces and shapes each person in the womb during pregnancy. All who have come to faith in Christ know that they are now different persons from what they were before, and from what their peers—fellow Christians excepted—still are, though they often find it hard to say just what the difference is. Here, however, Paul gives them the theology of the transformation that has occurred, namely, that the re-created and unending personal life of resurrection, derived from and shared with the risen Christ, is theirs already.
The Stupendous Exchange
At this point something arresting happens. It is not unique; it happens elsewhere in Paul’s writings, sometimes on a grander scale than here—in Romans 5 and 8, for instance, and Ephesians 1–2. Falling into the preacher’s regular proclamatory mode of thought as he dictates, Paul breaks into a rhapsodic doxological declaration, or at least indication, of the wide and wonderful range of God’s work of grace in and through Christ, which Paul is privileged to make known in its fullness as near universally as he can. The episodes he describes are, if I may put it musically, the sforzandos and fortissimos of his letters, the moments of emphasis that shape the specifics of what he is laying out at each stage.
Here in 2 Corinthians 5, the fortissimo begins at verse 18: “All this [every aspect of salvation mentioned thus far] is from God”—yes, God!—“who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.” Then comes the conjunctional phrase “that is,” which introduces an amplified analysis of what this declaration means. I shall discuss Paul’s analysis under three heads, focusing on reconciliation, as Paul does, and highlighting in order its meaning, its method, and its messengers.
THE MEANING OF RECONCILIATION
Reconciliation is a big word expressing a big idea, namely, all that is involved in turning a state of alienation, hostility, and apartness into a state of intimate, affectionate, harmonious togetherness on a permanent basis. The initial state of enmity and separation was universal and included liability to and expectation of retributive judgment from God the holy Judge for the sins—trespasses, that is, willy-nilly slips and slides into moral pitfalls—that beset and defile each one of us every day of our lives. The new state of friendship with God, now available to all the world, Jew and Gentile together, rests on Christ’s acceptance of incarnation in the womb and propitiation on the cross, followed by his resurrection from the dead, plus vocation by the Holy Spirit in the individual sinner’s head and heart, and justification of him or her as the decisive word issuing from the holy Judge. My next point will show this.
THE METHOD OF RECONCILIATION
Paul says in 5:21, “[God the Father] made him [Jesus Christ, his incarnate Son] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” The key to understanding this amazing statement is to know that in the days before italics and underlining were invented, a writer of Greek might use an abstract noun in place of an adjective to achieve emphasis. Paul does this in Romans 8:7, where the Greek literally reads, “The thinking of the flesh is enmity toward God” (ESV renders the word “hostile,” which is the adjective one would expect). Paul also does it here, saying that God made Christ “to be sin” (meaning, God counted him and treated him as a sinner, sinless though he was), so that we in him (meaning, we who believe and are united to Christ by the Holy Spirit) become “the righteousness of God” (meaning, right relationally with God, recipients of the divine verdict: not penally liable, now or ever, though guilty as charged; and thus accepted and forgiven).
Paul uses the phrase “the righteousness of God” elsewhere, possibly in a different sense, which scholars debate, but this is certainly what it means here in 2 Corinthians 5! The method of God’s reconciliation is here revealed, then, as a two-way transfer, or exchange. On the one hand, the Lord Jesus as our substitute took our place and tasted on our behalf the penalty—that is, the death and banishment into hell—that we deserved. On the other hand, we are made sharers of the Father’s eternal approval of and pleasure in his always loyal, loving, and obedient Son, who now has borne, and borne away, the sin of the world. Retributive justice has been done, once for all, and just justification—justification, that is, on the basis of justice thus executed—is now ours for the taking.
Well may we speak of this double action on God’s part as the great exchange, the wonderful exchange, and, as I like to do for maximum emphasis, “the stupendous exchange.” It is overwhelmingly awesome, almost beyond belief. It is holy love in action—the holy love of the Father, who sent his Son into this world to die for our sins; the holy love of the Son, love for everyone whose sins he bore; and the holy love of the Holy Spirit, who works in our hearts to create and sustain the faith that brings the blessing of reconciliation and acceptance home to us as the supreme gift of divine grace.
It is commonly said that the righteousness of Christ is imputed to us (that is, reckoned to our account; the word’s background is in bookkeeping). This means not that God pretends that we ourselves did and suffered what Christ did and suffered for us, but that our bonding with Christ by faith and his bonding with us by the Holy Spirit entail that we share forever the status and position that are his by virtue of who he is and what he has done for us. In English society, a commoner who marries a Lord thereby becomes a Lady, and one who marries a Duke or a Prince becomes a Duchess or a Princess, simply by virtue of who her husband is; his dignity now embraces her, so that hers now matches his. In verse 21 the Father’s present and ongoing embrace of his incarnate Son as perfectly righteous, to be honored accordingly, embraces us with him, for his sake, by virtue of what he has done for us. This, then, is the divinely devised method of our reconciliation, as Paul sets it forth.
THE MESSENGERS OF RECONCILIATION
Paul speaks repeatedly of the messengers of this reconciliation. Observe the following statements:
God . . . gave us the ministry of reconciliation . . . entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. (2 Cor. 5:18–19)
We are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. (v. 20)
We appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain. (6:1)
That Paul speaks here of the gospel-preaching, church-planting task that God has given him and Timothy in relation to the Corinthians is too obvious to need discussion. But clearly their role and service of ambassadorship for Christ is not, in Paul’s thinking or God’s planning, confined to the citizens of Corinth. Paul, we know, sees himself as called to be a church-planting pioneer taking the gospel to towns in Asia Minor, in Greece, and as far west as Spain. And clearly, too, Paul does not imagine that he and Timothy are the only gospel messengers in existence. How wide and inclusive, then, is the category of gospel messengers, “ambassadors for Christ” as Paul calls them?
Christ’s Great Commission, to go and disciple all nations, was given to the apostles as representing the whole church that was to be, and what Paul writes here should surely be seen as fitting into this larger frame. So, just as all Christians should share Paul’s threefold life motivation, as reviewed above, so all Christians should see themselves as sharing the church’s calling to make Christ known with a discipling purpose as far and as wide as we can. We are all called to trust, love, honor, worship, and serve Christ, and to practice neighbor-love in all its forms, of which evangelism is one. The church everywhere is called to be a missional community as well as a doxological one, and all Christians are called to pull their weight in both aspects of its ongoing life.
Weakness and Vocation
Now, what has all this to do with the way of weakness, which is what this book claims to be about? How does it bear on the problem of weakness, which we focused on right at the start? Let us see.
I described weakness as a state of inadequacy, or insufficiency, in relation to some standard or ideal to which we desire to conform. As has been indicated already, it takes many forms. There is physical weakness, which keeps us from excelling in sports; there is weak health, which makes us vulnerable to all sorts of diseases; weak capacity limits us as employees, business people, and entrepreneurs; weakness of memory keeps us from becoming top-notch teachers or managers; weakness of character unfits us to be leaders, parents, trainers, team captains, and perhaps team members too; and so on.
Subjectively, the sense of being weak, which the weak yet intelligent person can hardly avoid, generates feelings of inferiority—the Charlie Brown syndrome—and of uselessness and worthlessness, along with consequent gloom and depression—not at all happy feelings to live with. The sense of weakness casts a cloud over one’s existence. In this fallen world, where original sin in the form of pride, ambitious independence, and deep-level egocentricity has infected everyone, we all crave to be admired for strength in something, and the expectation that it is not going to happen makes one feel like a punctured balloon and plants bitterness in one’s heart. The gospel message, however, which we have been reviewing in this chapter, first calls on us all to be realistic in facing and admitting our sinfulness, our weaknesses, our actual transgressions, and our consequent guilt before God; and then it addresses us, in God’s name, substantially as follows:
Look to Christ as your loving Sin-Bearer and living Lord. Embrace him as your Savior and Master. And then in his presence resolve to leave behind the old life of conscious self-service, marred as it was by bitterness, self-pity, envy of others, and feelings of failure, in order that you may become his faithful—that is, faith-full—disciple, living henceforth by his rules under his care.
Love Christ, in unending gratitude for his unending love to you. Labor to please him in everything you do. Let his love constrain, compel, command, comfort, and control you constantly, and, like Paul, stop regarding human approval as in any way important. (Earlier he wrote to the Corinthians, “With me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you . . . . It is the Lord who judges me,” 1 Cor. 4:3–4). Live and love the way Paul did before you, and aspiring eagerness will replace gloom and apathy in your heart.
Lean on Christ and rely on him to supply through the Holy Spirit all the strength you need for his service, no matter how weak unhappy circumstances and unfriendly people may be making you feel at present. We have already noticed how, as part of his response to being berated as “weak” by the Corinthians and their “super-apostles,” Paul reveals that Christ has set him to live with an unhealed “thorn” (pain, disability) in his body and has told him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:7–9). It is time now to take to heart his triumphant concluding comment on this aspect of his life situation: “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” (vv. 9–10). So lean on Christ, the lover of your soul, as Paul did, and in all your ongoing weakness, real as it is, you too will be empowered to cope and will be established in comfort and joy.
We may, I think, take it as certain that Paul was not by nature or upbringing weakness-conscious in the way that he came to be after putting himself in Christ’s hands on the Damascus road and setting out at Christ’s command on his apostolic travels. And we should recognize that the fierce and somewhat disabling pain with which Christ in due course required him to live, and which he clearly accepted as a weakness that would be with him to his dying day, had in view less the enriching of his ministry than the furthering of his sanctification. The clues are there: Paul refers to increase of humility in face of privileged revelations (12:7), deepened dependence on Christ in face of Satanic discouragements and distractions (vv. 7–9), and a robust readiness to welcome whatever other forms of suffering might come his way in the future (v. 10). He demonstrates a sustained recognition that feeling weak in oneself is par for the course in the Christian life and therefore something one may properly boast about and be content with (vv. 6, 9–10). (“Boast” here means, not parade or be proud of in a self-centered way, but highlight when appropriate as a significant, God-given part of one’s life.)
In this, Paul models the discipleship, spiritual maturity, and growth in grace that all believers are called to pursue. When the world tells us, as it does, that everyone has a right to a life that is easy, comfortable, and relatively pain-free, a life that enables us to discover, display, and deploy all the strengths that are latent within us, the world twists the truth right out of shape. That was not the quality of life to which Christ’s calling led him, nor was it Paul’s calling, nor is it what we are called to in the twenty-first century. For all Christians, the likelihood is rather that as our discipleship continues, God will make us increasingly weakness-conscious and pain-aware, so that we may learn with Paul that when we are conscious of being weak, then—and only then—may we become truly strong in the Lord. And should we want it any other way? What do you think?