The Blessing of Personal Inadequacy

Jim Petersen and Mike Shamy

From: The Insider: Bringing the Kingdom of God Into Your Everyday World (NavPress, 2003)

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Don’t we often look at what’s going on in our life and think, “How would God ever use me with other people when my own life falls so far short? How can I tell people about ‘peace with God’ when I worry about my job, our finances, and the company my kids are keeping? Who am I to say anything to anybody?”

Some feel disqualified because of a relationship that has gone bad. They may be working through some deep struggles in their marriages. Many have heartaches with children and conflicts with the extended family, or they have made enemies at work. They feel guilty about relational difficulties like these—feel like failures, like people who don’t have the right to say anything to anybody. 

Sometimes it's true. Sometimes we do fail. We do lose credibility! The most common objection to the gospel I hear from people in business has to do with bad business experiences they have had with people who identify themselves as Christians. It’s as the apostle Paul pointed out: “God’s name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you” (Rom. 2:24).

It is possible to discredit the gospel by the way we live. But this doesn’t happen as often as we may think or for the reasons we might imagine. Most often our feelings of inadequacy are rooted in lies Satan feeds us to keep us under his control. We hear him say, “Real Christians don’t have problems. They don’t mess up—and you do! Sort out your own life before you try to be of help to anyone else.” We listen to this and keep quiet.

But let us suppose it is true! Let us suppose I have, in fact, discredited my testimony, that the news is out that I’ve been dishonest in my business dealings. What am I going to do about that? Am I going to leave it that way and just sit it out for the rest of my life? Or am I going to step into the light and get beyond it? Healing comes as we are honest, first before God, and then before others. Whether we have, in fact, lost credibility or whether our feelings of inadequacy are of our own fabrication, the best possible environment for spiritual progress is one in which we are engaged with God in the lives of other people. When we are, we will find that even our weaknesses can be used by God for our benefit and for others.

Mike’s Story 

For many years my life was based on two false assumptions: First, I believed I had to achieve a certain level of competence and have my life together before God could use me—and I wasn’t quite there yet. I also had the idea that if I were transparent and let people see my weaknesses and struggles, it would invalidate what I had to say about Christ. As you can imagine, the combination produced feelings of guilt, anxiety, and deep inner dissatisfaction.

I didn’t get these ideas from Scripture. They came out of my childhood. Some of my earliest memories of my father are of him leaving on yet another trip. His work as a political strategist and organizer required him to be absent for long periods of time. This left my mother at home with two small boys. Mother struggled with bouts of severe depression, so we never knew what a day would hold for us. Would she be up or would she be down?

As a young boy I searched for security. I craved stability and certainty. I soon discovered that whenever I performed competently, I would gain my parents’ praise. Living in a world of an absentee father and a mother who struggled to cope, this praise was the closest I could get to the real love and acceptance I longed for. Performance became my way of controlling my uncertain life.

I carried this pattern into my adult life and into my faith in Christ. I was uncomfortable in situations I couldn’t control. That being the case, faith, by its very definition, posed a special problem for me. “Faith is being…certain of what we do not see (Heb. 11:1).” In other words, it isn’t really faith until we get beyond what we can control! That was a frightening idea for me. I feared that if I followed God into where he wanted to lead me, my incompetence would be exposed and I would be seen as a failure. I found it hard to open my hand on my need to control my world and respond to God’s call to follow him by faith.

Over the years, God has gradually delivered me from these deeply entrenched patterns that held me prisoner. One of the Scriptures the Holy Spirit used most to free me is the second letter Paul wrote to the believers in Corinth. Here’s what I saw.

A Man Under Attack 

Paul’s credibility was under attack when he wrote this second letter to the Christians in Corinth. Certain people were attempting to discredit his legitimacy as an apostle and minister of the gospel. They were trying to undermine his influence in order to draw the Corinthian believers into their own orbit of influence.

Paul’s previous letter had been quite confrontational. In it he dealt with several hard situations within the church, such as quarrels, sexual immorality, lawsuits, and some chaos. In this second letter to the Corinthians, we find Paul concerned for how his previous letter had been received. He was also concerned about how some people seemed to be misinterpreting his failure to visit them as he had planned. Apparently some people were using those things—the hard letter and the aborted trip—to create dissent and undermine Paul’s authority. They were saying, Paul doesn’t really love you.  Look at this letter he wrote! And then he didn’t even show up when he told you he would.  He can’t be a real apostle. True apostles don’t do things like that. You need to follow us.  We have better credentials for leadership than he does.

Paul knew knew there were people trying to take over and that they were using questions about his credentials as leverage. They were demanding proof of Paul’s legitimacy as an apostle. He hated that sort of thing, since making one’s credentials is (more often than not) little more than a sophisticated form of boasting. But he chose to play their little game. He knew it would provide the setting for teaching his spiritual children one of the greatest truths of the Christian life.

The Game

Before he started the game, this bit of madness, he had one thing to say to his spiritual children. He wrote, in effect, there is only one credential that can validate my ministry among you, and I have that credential. You’re it! “You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts … written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God” (2 Cor. 3:2-3). 

With that, Paul made his first moves in the game of one-upmanship. If they wanted to boast, he could match them boast for boast:

What anyone dares to boast about—I am speaking as a fool—I also dare to boast about. Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are the servants of Christ? (I am out of mind to talk like this.) I am more. I have worked much harder, been in prison more frequently, been flogged more severely … I was beaten … stoned … shipwrecked … I have known hunger … thirst … I have been cold and naked.  Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches (2 Cor. 11:21-28).

Now, while we’re in this pointless, boasting mode, Paul continues—let me tell you what I’m really proud of!  “If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weaknesses” (2 Cor. 11:30).

The Great Paradox

His weaknesses! Here is a man whose credibility is under attack. He has been asked to submit his credentials. And Paul starts talking about his personal weaknesses! That would be like your being on the short-list for an important job. It’s down to you and three others. You go in for the deciding interview and instead of talking about the great things you will bring to the company if they employ you, you describe your past failures.

The failure Paul chose to talk about was his very first attempt to preach about Christ.  It happened in Damascus right after his conversion. He reminded the Corinthians of how “the governor under King Aretas had the city … guarded in order to arrest me. But I was lowered in a basket from a window in the wall and slipped through his hands  (2 Cor. 11:32-33). What did that have to do with the subject of Paul’s weaknesses? We need to go to the account of the story in the book of Acts to get the answer.

The record of the event in Acts shows that immediately after Paul’s conversion “he began to preach in the synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God. All those who heard him were astonished and asked, ‘Isn’t he the man who raised havoc in Jerusalem among those who call on this name?’ … Yet Saul grew more and more powerful and baffled the Jews living in Damascus by proving that Jesus is the Christ” (Acts 9:20-22).

That’s a failure, we ask? He overpowered and baffled his opponents! He was able to prove to the Jews that Jesus is the Christ. That sounds like success! The next verse explains it: “After many days had gone by, the Jews conspired to kill him … But his followers took him by night and lowered him in a basket through an opening in the wall” (Acts 9:23,25). The goal is not to win the argument. It is to help people see Jesus.  Instead of people turning to Christ as a result of his powerful persuasion, he had to run for his life—in the basket normally used for garbage disposal.

From Damascus, Paul went to Jerusalem where he tried the same thing again, “speaking boldly in the name of the Lord. He talked and debated with the Grecian Jews,” and the same thing happened. The text continues, “but they tried to kill him.” This new convert was becoming more trouble than he was worth, so, “When the brothers [in Jerusalem] learned of this, they … sent him off to Tarsus (Acts 9:28-30). They had to get him out of there. Paul spent his next years in Tarsus and Arabia until Barnabas went and found him and brought him to Antioch.

These first attempts by the apostle Paul that ended in failure were watershed events for him. They were important because they taught him a major lesson.

Look at the difference between the brashly aggressive man who confronted the Jews in Damascus and the man who took the gospel to the people in Corinth. Paul writes, “I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power.”

This time Paul came in weakness! Not that he wasn’t capable of being more assertive.  He had started out that way, with all the forcefulness in the world—and discovered it to be fruitless. Paul consciously discarded that approach for another, more powerful way.  He chose to live under submission to the Holy Spirit. Why? “So that your faith might not rest on man’s wisdom, but on God’s power” (1 Cor. 2:3-5). He was looking for enduring, eternal results.

Clay Jars Don’t Distract From Their Contents 

“We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us” (2 Cor.4:7).                      

Jars of clay do a better job of revealing the treasure they contain than do jars made of finer material. They don’t distract attention from the contents. There is no confusion about the source of power. We reveal the reality of the transforming power of the gospel best when we are authentic, honest, and open about our weaknesses.

A friend from Becky’s college days came to visit. She was dismissive of the gospel Becky and her husband, Don, had shared in the course of her visit. Then, on the evening before she left, Don and Becky were in tension with each other over something. They were discouraged after they said good-bye to her because they felt they had blown it. Their words seemed to have had no effect and then they had topped off the visit with a petty disagreement.

Much to their surprise, the friend phoned a week later to tell them she had become a Christian. She explained that it was the way they had handled the disagreement that had captured her attention. She had seen how both of them had felt pain rather than going to war over their difference. What kind of relationship is this? she asked herself. What makes it work?  “Then,” she said, “I realized the connection between the things you were telling me and the way you live your lives.” 

They had revealed Christ to her through their weakness. She could identify with that!  She knew she was made of clay. It gave her hope to discover Don and Becky were made of the same stuff.

As we go through our daily routine, we will either depend upon ourselves, or upon God. In a sense, it is easier, less stressful, to live life in our own way, trusting in ourselves. It gives us the illusion that we are in control. We know our stuff. We are prepared, and so we take on the world.

Trusting the Holy Spirit, on the other hand, can be unsettling! With him in the lead we are never sure how whatever we are doing is going to turn out. We will still prepare ourselves to do our work, but we know his intentions might at times be different than ours. On occasion, he might even decide to let us look like failures. We don’t like to live like that, and we probably won’t until after we, too, have had a couple rides in the garbage basket.

That’s why we need our inadequacies. Without them we will never understand our need for true strength. It is difficult for us to embrace the paradox: that in Christ, we are weak when we think we are strong, and strong when we know we are weak. Spiritual fruitfulness does not come out of our feeling strong and self-assured. Spiritual fruit can only come from the Holy Spirit.

Excerpted from The Insider: Bringing the Kingdom of God Into Your Everyday World by Jim Petersen and Mike Shamy, copyright 2003. Used by permission of NavPress www.navpress.com. All rights reserved.

Jim Peterson is the associate to the general director of the Navigators.  He helped pioneer the Navigator ministry in Brazil, developed missionary teams in Latin America, and coached ministry teams around the world.  Mike Shamy has led the Navigators’ mission to U.S. metro areas since 1999.  In addition, he has ministered throughout New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom.