Be Strong

“Strength is nothing more than how well you hide the pain.” (Unknown)

“Anyone can give up; it’s the easiest thing in the world to do, but to hold it together when everyone would expect you to fall apart, that is true strength.” (Unknown)

Strength comes from the individual and is what you make it. Strong exists as the current beauty ideal. After all, “Strong is the new skinny,” and I need to let everyone to know that I am “Pretty Strong. Pretty Fast.” (I’m not, by the way, strong or fast but especially not fast.) Strong is how you want to be viewed; it’s your reputation’s goal.

Every corner of culture — television, magazines, fitness and even education — touts the necessity to “Be Strong.” In fact, being strong exists as the best path to success for self and to elimination of the competition.

Strength through Weakness

“The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts him, and he helps me. My heart leaps for joy, and with my song I praise him.” (Psalm 28:7)

“The joy of the Lord is your strength.” (Nehemiah 8:10)

“That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Corinthians 12:10)

God’s view of being strong means bringing Him joy, depending on Him for strength, and realizing that He is strength. Strength comes through weaknesses as we allow His power to flow, not by focusing on destroying weaknesses through our own creation of inner strength.

In Created to be God’s Friend, Henry Blackaby says:

“The provision for our obedience is always provided for us by God. Ours is to obey; it is for God to provide! What we in our weakness and limitations cannot provide, God in His infinite grace does provide.”

Even though we try to convince ourselves otherwise, we do have limitations. We are weak. No matter how much strength we manage to muster, our weaknesses eventually show themselves and leave us naked and spent for all to see. That’s the place where we realize that weak really is the new strong.

In “The Fire of Delayed Answers,” Bob Sorge says:

“We don’t really know what it’s like for God to be the strength of our heart until our heart and flesh have failed.”

The Point of Failure

Have you reached that point? Do you know what having your heart and flesh fail feels like? If you do, then you know the life-changing impact of God’s power flowing fully through you. You know that as your own strength flows out through your weaknesses, God’s strength flows in through that same portal.

The only way to truly reach the point of God’s strength flowing through our weaknesses is through brokenness and trusting God in that brokenness to give us strength for the day. It is at that point that weakness actually becomes the new strong.