Weakness is Strength in World Missions
“For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12.10 NIV)
“…our sufficiency is from God” (2Corinthians 3.5 NKJV)
By Grant McClung
Faced with a world that is coming apart at the seams and knowing that our human strength and financial resources are meager to meet overwhelming international challenges, we are prone to grow “weary in well doing” in the mission of God.
The Apostle Paul, among the greatest of Christian missionaries, knew this and helped the early Christians in Corinth to understand that God’s power is made perfect in weakness. “Therefore,” he said, “I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.” He openly admitted, “For when I am weak, “then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12.9 – 10).
The Corinthian believers had lost God’s mission — reoccupied with their own accomplishments and comparing one “great” minister to another. Paul reminded them, rather bluntly, that all sufficiency comes from the Lord. “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves,” he said, “but our sufficiency is from God, who also made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant” (2 Corinthians 3.5 – 6 NKJV). Paul confessed that, “We have this treasure in earthen vessels that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us” (2 Corinthians 4. 7 NKJV). In his homespun wisdom, Vance Havner (1901 – 1986), the notable and often colorful Baptist evangelist, curtly quipped, “Our efficiency without His sufficiency is only deficiency.”
Craig Groeschel planted one of America’s largest churches (LifeChurch.tv in Edmond, Oklahoma) and leads an extensive church network of two dozen churches across five states. As the image of success, his teaching and advice is sought after by churchmen and pastors. Groeschel has learned, however, the “friendship of weakness” and the faithfulness of God’s strength. He says:
You can fight using your own limited power. Or you can tap into the all-powerful, limitless God who wants to help you win every battle for His causes. Some people say God is a crutch for the weak. Absolutely! I’m weak. I want God. I need His strength. And so do you
(“Weak is The New Strong,” in Groeschel’s book, Fight. Zondervan Publishing 2013).
Sizing up the task of world evangelization, our weakness brings a fresh baptism of humility and utter dependency upon the indispensable power of God to fulfill Christ’s great commission. This was the realization of J. Philip Hogan, a notable Pentecostal missionary statesman who led the global outreach of the Assemblies of God during one of their greatest periods of worldwide expansion (1960 – 1990). At the close of his visionary and strategic tenure, Hogan said:
“For more than twenty years I have been privileged to be intimately related to church planting and evangelism in more than eighty countries of the world and to be somewhat related and acquainted with the work of God in the whole world. A great deal of my time has been taken up with the human side of the missions enterprise. I have dealt with people, their successes, their personalities, and their problems. I am overwhelmed and humbled before the moving of the Spirit’s own sovereign presence in the world. Make no mistake, the missionary venture of the church, no matter how well planned, how finely administered and finely supported, would fail like every other vast human enterprise, were it not that where human instrumentality leaves off, a blessed ally takes over. It is the Holy Spirit that calls, it is the Holy Spirit that inspires, it is the Holy Spirit that reveals, and it is the Holy Spirit that administers.” (Cited in my book Azusa Street and Beyond: Missional Commentary on the Global Pentecostal/Charismatic Movement. Bridge – Logos Publishing, 2012 Revised Edition, p. 98; see www.AzusaStreetandBeyond.com).
Now, in a new generation of world outreach, Dr. Mark L. Williams, General Overseer of the Church of God, calls upon us to seek a new dependency on the Holy Spirit to reach this generation of youth and students. “God is not giving up on this generation,” he says, “and neither am I. I am praying for a revival that will sweep hundreds and thousands of students into the kingdom of God…I want to see the passion of youth intersect with the mission of God.” God is calling the church, says Williams, “…to unleash them to live out Christ’s life in the world” (“In Covenant,” Church of God Evangel January 2015). It will take weakness to win the world.
Dr. Grant McClung, President of Missions Resource Group (www.MissionsResourceGroup.org), is a veteran world missions author and leader. He is an International Missionary Educator with Church of God World Missions (Project # 065 0853)
