But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.
2 Corinthians 12:9 ESV
Nobody likes to admit their weaknesses, yet we often don’t acknowledge them because we don’t see them. We know from scripture that we are so dead in our sin that we are truly blind to it. We simply cannot see what He sees in our hearts, or what others see in us. Our own pride and focus on self block our ability to see the truth. People try to point it out to us, but we grow defensive, justifying our reason for feeling the way we do or acting in a certain way.
One of the hardest lessons I’ve had to learn is how to listen to the truths people were trying to share with me about me. It’s so hard to take in truths about our weaknesses because we don’t want to recognize that they are who we truly are. We don’t want to hear the truth about ourselves because it hurts too much or because there is so much fear wrapped around the acknowledgment of those weaknesses that it can be overwhelming. But think about the flip side – it’s pretty easy to see another person’s faults that they struggle to see. We’re not blind to other people’s weaknesses; we are blind to our own. If we are to grow more like Christ, we must take to heart the things people see in us that we can’t see.
The hard reality is the most common place those truths come out about us are in arguments. When we are angry, our heart pours out of our mouths – it’s when we release those things we’ve been holding in about the other person. The problem is we often don’t say them kindly or gently, so the words hurt even more, but the words coming out of our mouths in an argument are truths—they’re often what we’ve been feeling for a long time about the other person and have been stuffing away. Those words are how we’re viewing the other person, what we see in them that they cannot see.
Consider conflicts or arguments that you’ve had over the years with your spouse. The things said in anger may be truths about you. The problem is we get defensive and try to justify to them why we’ve acted a certain way. We spin it so that it’s the other person’s fault, but we don’t take to heart what is said. Apologies are said, and words are let go, so we dismiss what was said in anger.
What if we stopped and listened to those truths? What if we heard those people who know us best? What if we allowed those difficult conversations in our lives to reveal to us the parts of our hearts that we cannot see ourselves? God loves us even when we’re so dead in our trespasses that we’re blind to it, but He loves us enough to rescue us from our sin, so He puts people in our lives to show us what we cannot see. Don’t look at your spouse as the problem that God needs to fix; look at your spouse as God’s solution to your problem that He’s trying to fix.
Press on ~ you are loved 💗
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