Not By Our Own Strength
by Donavon L Riley
It’s in our faltering, our stumbling into sin or grief, that God begins His strange work in us. He lets failure press on us, illness cling to us, and long days of sorrow settle in our bones—not as some distant punishment, but as a way of showing us the shape of our weakness, a way of taking us deeper into a fierce kind of self-knowledge. It’s the kind of seeing we cannot reach on our own, and it brings us to Jesus, the Son, who bore our frailty. God’s wisdom, the very wisdom that carried Jesus to the cross, teaches us here, where the Spirit pulls us toward humility—not a wincing or half-hearted humility, but the humility of those who know they can’t breathe without grace.
When Paul was faced with death in Asia, he could have buckled under the weight. Instead, he saw through it: “We had the sentence of death in ourselves,” he said, “that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead.” God reveals, through the grit of suffering, a truth woven in the gospel—our own strength cannot carry us. Only the strength of the One who defeated death can lift us up. God’s love urges us toward Jesus, the one who overcame both weakness and death, as the only source of life that can pull us out of the pit.
God even lets us see, if we dare look, a single day in the full clarity of His light. It’s an invitation, really, to sit alongside Christ, the one who sees us as we are. When we observe our thoughts, our words, and our deeds—even over the course of one day—we begin to understand the wild, unruly mind, the selfish tongue, the shaky heart. It’s a humbling view, the sort that strips away our illusions of strength, and God allows it so we’ll be drawn, again, to the depths of Jesus’ mercy.
In Jesus, God’s grace doesn’t shame or condemn—it opens the way. Through Him, God transforms our every faltering step into a reminder that we’re not here to walk alone. Jesus, who came bearing every weight of weakness, brings a grace that lets us stand not by our own strength, but by His. This is the fierce mercy of the gospel: a God who meets us in our lack and fills it, calling us not to hold ourselves up, but to rest in the hands of the One who redeems our frailty, wrapping our failures in His boundless love.