Weakness is not something we tend to spend much time thinking about. We usually spend time avoiding it or trying to get out of experiencing weakness. Thankfully there are men like J.I. Packer who don’t (or can’t) run from it. Recent health problems have provided him with the opportunity to consider his own weakness. More importantly it gave him the opportunity to consider 2 Corinthians and how Paul, when faced with his own weakness, found strength in Christ.
The fact that weakness is not option is found in the title of the book that resulted: Weakness Is the Way: Life with Christ Our Strength. This is a short book with only 4 chapters. Size should not be confused with significance. This is no Knowing God, but it is a balm for the soul plagued by weakness, which will eventually find all of us.
“The memory of having fallen short in the past can hang like a black cloud over one’s present purposes and in effect program one to fail.”
Many of us live with such black clouds. It could be moral failure. It could be vocational failure. I was the pastor of a church that closed. That black cloud hung about me for years. It still shows up at times seeking to distract & deceive me. For Packer, his childhood accident and its consequences have hovered over him his entire life: weakness, alienation, left out…
This is just one of the aspects of weakness that Packer explores in the first chapter. He brings us to Paul, and the weakness he experienced at the church he planted in Corinth continued to struggle. In their struggle, they often attacked Paul, repeating the false accusations of the “super-apostles”. Packer uses Paul’s weakness to instruct us about weakness and the all-sufficient Christ.
Packer starts his meditations on 2 Corinthians with the Christian’s calling. While Christ died in weakness, He is not weak. He identifies with us in our weakness, but now He lives by the power of God. As people united to Christ, though we are weak, we also live by the power of God.
Paul expressed these truths as the Corinthians accused him of being weak in words and deeds. He was feeling powerless to change their hearts and minds. But Christ was not only weak in His death, but during His life. Born, many thought illegitimately, of a Jewish teenager under Roman rule, He grew up on the fringes of Jewish life in lowly Galilee. He would become an peripatetic Rabbi that stood on the outside of the power structures of Judaism.
Our calling is similar to His. As representatives of Jesus and His kingdom we will not quite fit in to whatever culture we find ourselves in. This does not mean we have fallen out of His favor, but rather so we may enjoy it instead of the fleeting pleasures of sin and this world.
“Now we are not running our lives independently, as we did before, but responsively, as we allow Christ, who loves us, and the redeeming love he has already shown in saving us, and his loving purpose for our new lives, to impact us in their full strength.”
Packer brings us, largely but not exclusively, to 2 Corinthians 5. There he explores reconciliation and the reality of the new creation. The gospel enables us to face our weakness as well as our sinfulness. They are addressed in Christ who bore our sin and weakness. He encourages us to look to Christ, love Christ and lean on Christ in our weakness.
“Our proud hearts shrink from weakness, real or fancied, in all its forms, … , and they embrace whatever looks like strength, including the goal and the reality of affluence.”
In the 3rd chapter Packer moves into talking about money: financial weakness. Seems, as first look, like a strange topic to address. Much of our weakness is centered on the lack of money. Money offers us power, ability and security. The lack of money brings us into the experience of weakness.
“Give till it hurts.” C.S. Lewis
This brings us to Paul’s collection among the Gentiles for the saints in Jerusalem. Generosity is not easy for people who want to be affluent. It is not easy for sinful hearts to let go of money. It is the gospel that softens our hearts and gives us the grace of generosity. Paul wanted them to excel in giving. He reminds them of the Macedonian Christians who gave out of their extreme poverty. Their weakness was not an excuse to cling to wealth. Packer helpful explains how giving is both a spiritual gift and a discipline. He then moves into how we should approach giving in light of the gospel: grateful stewards, to our neighbors as disciples of the Savior, and to glorify God. He also says it should be voluntary, cheerful, deliberate and wise.
“But our weaknesses will not go away any more than his did, and if we think that money will banish them, we actually add to them by cultivating self-deception.”
The final chapter is about the Christian’s hope. The loss of hope brings us to a place of powerlessness: weakness. As we age, many of our earthly hopes fail us and fade leaving us in the grips of despair. Packer points us to a surer hope: what is coming as a result of God’s promises. Paul, despite his weakness, continued to boast in Christ.
He talks about the meaning of “comfort” which is the “renewal of strength through encouragement” rather than reducing pain and distress. He then brings us to Paul’s thorn in the flesh and the sufficiency of grace in Christ. While our bodies waste away, we are able to live boldly in the hope of glory.
“Living in our bodily tents, we groan, says Paul (twice! 5:2, 4), and we have reason to. All sorts of diseases, discomforts, and under-the-weathernesses come our way; … The groaning expresses, on the one hand, intense longing for the bodily house that is to come and, on the other, intense frustration with the reach-exceeds-grasp and if-only and oh-no-not-that aspects of life as it comes to us in the present.”
The picture that Packer paints is a realistic picture. He is engaging the unfortunate and painful realities of life. Our Christianity must address these or it is pointless. In other words, he is bringing the gospel into where we live whether we want to be there or not. This is very similar to Luther’s theology of the cross. Surprisingly he doesn’t mention Luther in this context. This book, in some ways, is marked by Packer’s weakness (as he anticipated). It is not his best-written book. But it may be one of his most significant books (and that is saying something). It is a book I’m glad I bought, and read.
Cavman Considers 
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