For When I am Weak, Christ is Strong! ~ “And the Next Day”
How could the Apostle Paul keep going when he was left for dead in Lystra? How was it possible that the text says, “And the next day he departed…” (Acts 14:20)? Paul kept going. He persevered. I want to suggest to you, Paul was able to do this because he understood, “For when I am weak, Christ is strong!” (2 Corinthians 12:10).
Listen below as I take three minutes recently in a sermon preached at Sonrise to encourage you toward perseverance. For when we are weak, Christ is strong in us – which enables us to continue on the next day.
For When I am Weak, Christ is strong!
God allowed Paul to see past the doors. For a moment, we’re going to take these two doors as the doors of eternity. Now there’s just a little bit of glass in each one of them, but there’s not a lot we can see out those doors. And the Bible gives us just a little bit to see outside the door, but we don’t get the full sense of it. But God put Paul on the other side, and Paul did.
I’m suggesting to you that when he’s standing in Lystra, and he is proclaiming the gospel, and they start to take stones and hurl those stones at him. When they began to hit his body and knock him on the ground, and as they kept beating him one after another, so that they thought he was dead, you say, “What is motivating Paul in that moment?”
It’s because God let him see on the other side of that door. He understood the kingdom, and he realized that eternity is too long and important to stay today and not be engaged in the gospel work. So that the verse says, “And the next day” he went and started working.
Oh friends, we’ve got to do it today, and we have to do it the next day. When you get discouraged and when you’re the one that life’s problems have come down on you and you feel like you’re ready to give up – it’s in that moment you have to realize, no, because beyond the doors is eternity. In order to get to eternity, tribulations will come. They’re part of God’s plans, and as part of God’s plan, I can persevere by grace because God’s grace is sufficient in my weakness. He is my strength so I can do it because Christ enables me to do it, and I’m not doing it in my own strength, but in the strength of the Spirit. And so, the next day we go on.
Someday possibly when we get to heaven, we’re going to see that co-worker, we’re going to see that person who is in school with us, we’ll see the neighbor, we’ll see the person who rode with us in a cab, we’ll see some person and realize in God’s grace, He allowed us, He allowed our testimony, He allowed our words, He allowed us to be the instrument that he used to help somebody else get to heaven. And we will rejoice in eternity because we realize that eternity is better and bigger and it’s greater than the tribulations we go through right now.
So that like Paul, we don’t rejoice in the fact that we are suffering; we don’t rejoice in the fact that there are problems. But, we can say, like Paul, that in reproaches, in infirmities, in needs, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s sake, I can take pleasure – for when I am weak, Christ is strong.
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Kevin Carson pastors Sonrise Baptist in Ozark, MO (www.sonrisebaptist.com) and is the Department Chair of Biblical Counseling at Baptist Bible College and Theological Seminary in Springfield, MO (www.gobbc.edu). You can follow him on Twitter at @kevincarson.
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When I struggle at times I think of Paul. So determined he let nothing stand in the way of sharing the good news. B Blessed