It’s often taught that God transforms us by using our weaknesses to teach us to rely on Him. And that our weaknesses, when left unchecked, prevents us from living a perfect life before Him. But is that true, does God really use our weaknesses to teach us?

Let me lay out the same conflict from God’s covenant mindset to show you how He approaches our weakness and how He teaches us to rely on Him.

God will always approach us on the conditions of the covenant He made with us to show us how He draws us into a growth cycle to transform us. Just as God wants us to put Jesus first in our lives, He does the same. God answers all our questions by putting His covenant terms first.

When believers are taught that God uses their weaknesses as His point of reference to teach them, a common misconception nurtured as a result, is that His grace is about them. When this happens, the gift of His grace that is given for salvation on the conditions of His covenant is then directed to self, and so God’s love takes on a different expression, which is one of unconditional love.

It is said that because God uses our weakness to make us strong, that He therefore accepts us in our fallen state because the fallen nature has a purpose in His plan. And because these things sound scripturally correct at face value, believers accept these teachings despite feelings of guilt and condemnation as a result of their constant struggle with everyday choices. Because teaching does not start with God’s covenant, but rather the weakness of man’s fallen nature, the idea of what we need from God changes.

For example, saying that we need to be kind in a given situation even though we think a person might not be deserving of it, or that we need strength to be forgiving and put down our pride in a given situation even though we would rather retaliate and nurture offenses.

Before covenant, our experience with our own fallen nature dictated what we thought we needed and dictated the choices we thought we needed to make. After beginning a covenant relationship with God, we see what we need from His perspective. Our experience changes from the struggle with weakness to building with His grace. We need His grace to build.

Have you noticed how the struggle with weakness has taken center stage in many believers’ walk of faith? It’s not for a lack on their part, of trying to master control of their impulses; it is simply because they don’t have a growth cycle through which God initiates divine change, and that’s because they have not received wholesome teaching from God’s covenant perspective.

2 Peter 1:3-4
³  According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue:

⁴  Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.

When believers don’t know how God initiates divine change in the soul, many gaps are left in their understanding about what salvation is really about; and every so often they find themselves at a loss when confronted by thoughts and feelings that contradict the hope of change that they are meant to have in Christ.

As seen in 2 Peter 1:3-4, God uses the things of Christ (His covenant) to teach us to rely on Him, where the conscience, being justified in Christ, is no longer weighed down by the yoke of condemnation – because the yoke of His knowledge and the burden of His tools frees faith to carry the yoke of the Spirit in the fullness of Jesus Christ.

That means that believers who have made the transition to the covenant of Jesus Christ know how to weigh their thoughts and feelings upon the scale of Christ because they know how God affects divine change in the soul through their cycles of growth. Because believers converted to the covenant know how God affects divine change in their growth cycle they also know what God expects from them – which is not to master control of their impulses, but to take their thoughts captive to the obedience of Christ, where the inclination of the natural man is overcome.

To further build out this teaching point, let’s take a look at a popular scripture that ministers tend to draw from to lend support to teachings that center on using one’s weaknesses to teach believers to rely on God. To be more on point, we are going to examine the error of being taught that God allows access to His grace from the position of one’s struggle with weakness.

2 Corinthians 12:8-10
⁸ For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me.

⁹ And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.

¹⁰ Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.

Remember earlier on I said that God answers all our questions by putting His covenant terms first?

Going back to our selected scripture, the Spirit lays out where ministers get this wrong. Not having God’s covenant knowledge as their reference point they cannot relate to God other than from their own experience, which is dangerous for faith. The reason why it is dangerous for believers to try and relate to God through the scriptures from the position of their own experience (struggle with their perceived weaknesses) is because they are approaching God from the point of their separation from God and not from the position of being joined to Him by His knowledge and tools.

God does not give grace to believers when they confess that they are weak and need strength. To have access to His grace we need His covenant terms, knowledge, stewardship, tools and priesthood. In the scripture we see how Apostle Paul draws from his own experience to teach that the flesh will always be weak, but our choice is to build with God’s grace.

When Apostle Paul said that when he is weak, then he is strong – he was speaking from the experience of his growth cycle – his testimony was relating to his experience with the grace of God not the hardships of life or a struggle with moral weakness.

The thorn in his side was not a testimony of one who is struggling with his own weakness; the thorn in his side was in reference to Satan’s counsel that came to resist his faith – the same example we see when Jesus was in the wilderness. (Matthew 4:1 – 11)

Apostle Paul included his own experience with the grace of God as an example for us to follow. We are all in this dimension of testing for reward, and though Satan seeks to capitalize on the weakness of the flesh, both Jesus and Apostle Paul overcame Satan’s counsel, and so can you.

The reason why a believer may feel weak at first in the presence of Satan’s counsel is because Satan will always suggest that there is something of ourselves that we need to change by ourselves in order for our faith be perfect; and because God does not give witness to anything less than Christ, if a believer follows this path of reasoning their faith will fall short of the fullness of Christ and the continual struggle with the weakness of the flesh is then excused as being part of God’s plan.

Although it is true that when a believer’s growth cycle moves into the testing phase (resistance), that one will be in view of the insufficiency of the flesh to reflect Christ, and because the flesh is still susceptible to the presence of death; the focus is not about mastering one’s weaknesses or accepting the messiness of it all.

God’s focus is not on the weakness to teach us, the weakness is there to provide contrast so that as believers apply their faith with the tools of the covenant, they can perceive the path of their deliverance in how, by resourcing the power of grace, they are now no longer being brought into subjection to the powers of darkness.

By the sufficiency of God’s grace, ‘Christ in us’ is a reality as one daily experiences divine change through the cycles of one’s growth. The Lord allows the contradiction for the strengthening of faith just like in our example of how the Apostle showed that God’s grace is what must be resourced for the new man in Christ to grow.

God, through Apostle Paul, was teaching the pattern that He placed in Jesus for us to observe; that the contradiction is necessary to exercise our choice of will. Like a bodybuilder needs the resistance of weights to exercise his muscles against for increase, so also does the faith muscle of the new man in Christ need the resistance of the contradiction (being the counsel Satan offers in regard to the weakness of the flesh) to exercise the choice of will against, in order to increase in the fruits of the Spirit.

Our engagement with God in the midst of contradiction is what God designed the Christian growth cycle for. The new man needs only the things of Christ that grant us access to the grace of God in order to overcome self, Satan and the world. Faith is not about removing the things that we think make us weak or imperfect; but about learning how to reason with the grace of God in truth, whereby our souls are transformed into the likeness of Christ and our perspective transitioned from death to life.