Radio Broadcast Monday 07/21/2025

Classic Christianity – Power in Weakness – Part 1 – 7-21-25

Power in Weakness – Part 1

Boast in the Lord, NOT yourself. For we can do nothing apart from Christ Jesus who lives in us. This is key for our understanding today. We think we are so smart, based on the things we have learned, and everything we have learned in the world, and of the world is a lie. When you have wisdom from God, this becomes abundantly clear.

~ “I must go on boasting. Although there is nothing to gain, I will go on to visions and revelations from the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of it I do not know, but God knows. And I know that this man—whether in the body or out of it I do not know, but God knows— 4was caught up to Paradise. The things he heard were inexpressible, things that man is not permitted to tell.

I will boast about such a man, but I will not boast about myself, except in my weaknesses. Even if I wanted to boast, I would not be a fool, because I would be speaking the truth. But I refrain, so no one will credit me with more than he sees in me or hears from me, or because of these surpassingly great revelations.

So to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9But He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is perfected in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly in my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest on me. That is why, for the sake of Christ, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” 2 Corinthians 12:1-10

…..

And a certain ruler asked Him, saying, “Good Teacher, having done what, will I inherit eternal life?”
And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good, except God alone.

~ “Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.” 1 John 5:12

~ Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life; the one believing in Me, even if he should die, he will live. And everyone living and believing in Me shall never die, to the age. Do you believe this?” John 11:25,26
—

Pray to God:

Do you really want to know the WHOLE Truth of what is going on today?

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you.” Matthew 7:7

Lord Jesus, teach me the truth of the world today and give me the wisdom to know the truth and identify the lies of the devil. Thank you God.”

~ “When it comes to spiritual power. It’s interesting that what God says about how do you get this power, because in both cases, you’re saying, How do I get powerful physically? How do I get powerful mentally? How do I get powerful spiritually? And they’re totally opposite. The way you get powerful mentally and physically is to go study, exercise, that type of thing. How do you get powerful, Spiritually? God says, by being weak, by being weak, you’ll want to get strong in the Lord. Get weak in your flesh. Now, so that you don’t think I’m a total idiot, let’s read the Word of God together.

” ~ Bob George

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Announcer 0:13
Welcome to Classic Christianity Radio with Bob George Bob’s clear, timeless teachings on the complete forgiveness and unconditional love of Jesus Christ will transform your life as you learn about God’s amazing grace. Let’s join Bob as he teaches us from God’s Word.

Bob George 0:29
We were told in the scripture that to the early apostles that you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you to be my witness. And we sometimes look at that, well, I witness to somebody, so therefore I must have experienced the power of God. But to really understand what this word power means is difficult for us, because it really is a spiritual terminology that has to be comprehended spiritually. Remember what it says, “Natural man cannot understand spiritual things. It’s foolishness to them, but we, who are in Christ, can understand all things, because the Spirit of God is there to reveal the meaning of it to us.” But we don’t really have a point of reference many times in regard to this word, name power, or this, this name of power, we think of bodily power, physical power.

We can kind of comprehend that if somebody said to you in your early days, when you get to my age, it’s way too late for that, but you can build yourself a good body and and you say, well, and you can be powerful, and you can be strong, don’t you know that? And you can play on the football team, and you can, you can be a great athlete. And you say, Well, how do I do that? How do I go about doing that? And so they put you on a regiment. They say, you lift weights. You start with medium size weights with a certain amount of repetitions, and then you build up, and you build up and you build up till pretty soon you got muscles bulging all over the place, and you’ll be strong, and you’ll be powerful, and you will be respected. And you can look at that and say, I’m going to what do that, or you can say, I’m not going to do it. Some of you have said, I’m going to, some of us have said, I’m not going to. But the issue is that you can do that, and you can put your effort into that activity and build a strong, powerful body. Are we together on that you can do that? And so I can relate to that. How do I get powerful, and how do I get strong physically? That’s one of the ways you can do so, eat proper food, get proper exercise, and lift weights and go on a regiment, and you’ll be big and strong some day. We can relate to that.

What about with my mind? You say, Well, how do I get strong and powerful as a mental person? How do I get to a point where people are going to respect my mentality and be powerful even maybe run for president? And so there’s formulas for that. Probably, if you really want to run for president, you need to go to one of those East Coast schools, Harvard, or one of those high pollutant schools. You don’t want to go to Texas Tech, or someplace like that. You want to go to Harvard. And so you go to Harvard. Now you say, What’s the difference between Harvard and Texas Tech? I don’t know, neither does anyone else, but you got a reputation that that’s where you go if you want to get intellectual. And so you say, Okay, I want to be powerfully mentally. I want to be one of those people that people respect mentally, and we even maybe one day run for office, politically and all that type of thing. And so here’s how you do that. You go to school, you study and you study and you study and you learn what’s in that book. Now, again, guys, no one ever stops to think, hold on a minute. Did the person who wrote that book have a brain in their head? You can go to college and study evolution. But who came up with evolution, and why would we think that was so important and ignore what God says about how we got here? So the issue is, you say, I go to school. That’s nice, but what do they teach? It’s like saying, I go to church, big, hairy deal. What do they teach in that church? That’s the issue, not that you go to church, but what do they teach? I went to church all my life. What’d they teach? Nothing, nothing. Politics and yeah, nice ideas, positive thinking you can get all that you want, is that the kind of church you want to belong to? Not for me anymore. It settled the issue back then, because I didn’t have to think that was kind of nice. I could go and put my mind in neutral for an hour. Think about my business. But I can get powerful through education. I can educate myself. I might even say, if you really want to get an education that people are going to be impressed with, you probably need to go study overseas. That’ll be a help to you. Go over to Europe and study over there for a year or two, and that’ll help a lot in people being impressed with you. And boy, if you can become phi, beta, kappa, or whatever that’s called, you are going to really be somebody, somebody.

You know, it’s funny to me. I remember my junior year. I think it was at high school, the girl that was a valedictorian of our senior class that year, flunked out her first year of college. You know, education’s a strange thing, but again, those are things you say, go do it. Go do it. Go give it a try. Go study hard, and you’ll be respected intellectually. We can kind of grab a hold of that, can’t we? It’s something I can do in all of these cases, bodily, as well as mentally. Here’s what you do, and you work at it, and you train yourself at it, and you will become powerful, and you’ll become strong.

When it comes to spiritual power. It’s interesting that what God says about how do you get this power, because in both cases, you’re saying, How do I get powerful physically? How do I get powerful mentally? How do I get powerful spiritually? And they’re totally opposite. The way you get powerful mentally and physically is to go study, exercise, that type of thing. How do you get powerful, Spiritually? God says, by being weak, by being weak, you’ll want to get strong in the Lord. Get weak in your flesh. Now, so that you don’t think I’m a total idiot, let’s read the Word of God together.

In Second Corinthians 12, he says, to keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassing, great revelations. In other words, God had met with the apostle Paul in a very, very unique way. In fact, Paul said he was sent into heaven, and there received these revelations that he ultimately passed on to us. And so that has a tendency when God has revealed something to you as special as what was revealed to Paul to become conceited, just like we can become intellectually conceited. You know, people who have gone to school and gotten good grades and everything, they kind of get a little intellectual. I’m a little better than you are, and for sure, I’m smarter than you are. And we get that. What always gets me about that is there isn’t anybody that’s smart in all things. Some people think, Oh, I’m smart. That’s nice. What are you smart in? You might be smart in medicine, but you’re dumb as a mule in law. Or you may be smart in law, but dumb as a mule in medicine. So the issue is there isn’t anybody that I know that’s smart in all things. So the best you can do is in the subject that I studied, I got smart in that subject, but don’t think you’re smart in all things. That’s where people make mistakes. I can’t tell you the number of doctor friends that I’ve had, obviously, any man that can have the tenacity to go to sit in school, as long as you have to to study to become a doctor, is not a mental light weight. You’ve got to have some ability to retain information. I don’t even know how they remember the drugs they give me, the names of them, and they remember the ones that they didn’t give to you. You got to have intellect, no question about that. But many times you’ll have a person, and I’ve seen this so many times that they got very educated and smart in medicine, and then someone came up with a business deal for them. And they thought, Well, man, as smart as I am in medicine, I’ll be a great businessman. And they get in business and lose everything they ever had. I cannot tell you the number of people that don’t like that. You take people, multi millionaires in one field, and then they go over and get in another. If you don’t lose all their money. And so the issue is, what I’m saying here, guys, is there is no one that’s smart in all things. You may be smart in the field of endeavor that you pursued, but you cannot be smart in all things.

And so the issue that we’re dealing here is that wisdom, it says before the fall, many times, pride comes before the fall. And you can get prideful with your intellect by thinking that you’re smart, smarter than the average guy. And so Paul was saying, because of this revelation that was given to me by God and to keep me from becoming conceited over the fact that I now have this revelation there was given to me, said, a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me. Now, guys, we do not know, nor did Paul think it was important for us to know what that thorn in the flesh is? I think the reason that those kind of details are eliminated out of the Bible is because if we knew what it was, we would say, I don’t have that one. So Paul may have had a thorn in his flesh, but I don’t have that one, so I’m okay. He just said, a thorn in my flesh, something irritating, he said, three times, I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. Do you think God liked Paul? Do you think God loved Paul? I don’t think he loved him more than he does anyone else. But do you think he loved him? Well then why didn’t he answer that prayer? You know that we say, Oh Lord, I prayed for healing well, but God didn’t do anything well. He didn’t do anything with Paul either. Paul said he prayed three times. That’s a lot for some of us. Three times he didn’t take it away from me, but this is what God said to me, Paul says. God said to Paul, Paul, My grace is sufficient for you, in the midst of your trial and tribulation that you’re going through and is thorn in the flesh, My grace is sufficient for my power is made perfect in your weakness. How do I get powerful physically? Go work out. How do I get powerfully mentally? Go study. How do I get powerful spiritual, spiritually? Die to yourself. Become weak now, guys, does that make any sense to you? If you didn’t know the Lord, somebody say, Hey, Bob, you know how you get strong spiritually, Hey, how’s that get weak? See, you got to be kidding me. I never understood this passage, guys, I never could comprehend that, because I was brought up with these mentalities. The way you get strong is you work at it, and you can get strong mentally, and you can have a strong personality, and you can have a tenacious personality, and you can be known as a strong person. I’m which another way of saying that I’m conceited. And that I’ve got a real strong will, but it’s a strong will.

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Bob George 14:11
So when you say here that the way you get strong spiritually is to get weak, that’s a tough one to grab a hold of, but the Bible says that I will boast all the more gladly. He said, I’m not only weak, I’m going to boast in my weakness, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. There again, the power, the power of God, may rest on me. So you ask yourself the question, how do I plug in to what the Bible says is power, and he says, God wants me to have this power. Then how in the world do I get it? And can you see guys with our background, it’s it’s go try harder. Go study your Bible harder, pray harder, witness to more people. Go to church. Tithe if you want to get really powerful, tithe twice. And we come up with all of these activities, spiritual activities, and tell people, if you do this, just like if you lift weights, you’re going to get strong. If you do this, you’re going to get strong spiritually, don’t we? Am I right or wrong? And so we want to be strong spiritually. We don’t want to be weaklings. And so what do we? Do we go out and try to make ourselves strong spiritually. And Paul says, No, guys, the only way that you’re ever going to experience the power of God in your life is when you recognize your weakness, when you recognize the fact that I can’t, but He can. When you recognize the fact that apart from Christ, I can do nothing, well, you see, we say those words, but do we put them into practice? Apart from Christ, I can do nothing. What’s he talking about? I didn’t need Christ to drive the car here to church. Sometimes you don’t even need Christ to preach here in church. But the issue is, what is he talking about? He’s talking about the things that I’m interested in, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, long suffering. Those are the things I’m looking for. Those are the qualities I’m building into you. Your educational system can build in intellectual qualities, your physical system can build in physical qualities, but if you’re looking for spiritual qualities only, I can build those into you. And there’s only one way I’m going to do it when you recognize that you can’t, and I did, because I’m not going to compete with you. I’m not going to be in this ball game with you. I’m not going to be getting in the car with the two drivers with the two steering wheels and say, Let’s both of us drive. One of us is going to be the driver and the other is going to be the spectator. But we’re not going to have two drivers. And until you come to the point of saying, I let go of the wheel, that I can’t, but you can, you’re never going to experience the power of this trip. And so, contrary to everything else that we know in human experience, how do you get powerful? And how do you get strong in the Lord, by recognizing your weakness.

Does that make isn’t that crazy, guys? I mean, the logic of that doesn’t even there’s no logic to it. But you see, God doesn’t deal in human logic. He deals in truth. He knows us. And he knows that if I have something to do with my trying to make myself strong spiritually, guess who I’m going to be talking about me, and if all I have to do to build a church is to just get a hold of some concepts, worldly concepts of how you draw crowds, and you draw the crowd, guess who I’m going to be talking about, us, and how many people we have and how much money we have. That’s why it says guys, that a man who compares himself by himself is a fool. Why? There is nothing good that can come from it. If I’m comparing myself by you, there’s only two things I can come up with. I am better than you, that’s pride or woe is me, I’m worse than you. That’s self condemnation, and both of those are out of the pit of hell. And so the issue is, when you’re out trying to build something on your own, when you get it, you’re really proud of yourself. If you go out and lift weights and get some big muscles, I’ll guarantee you you’re going to wear a t shirt, a tight one, let your muscles bulge. I’ve never experienced that, but I’ve seen it. Am I right or wrong? If you’ve gone out and gotten educated, I guarantee you’re going to let everybody you know how smart you are. We’re so proud of ourselves. Paul says. You’re going to be strong in the Lord, there isn’t going to be any room for pride. Why do you think people resist this message of grace? Because you can’t get prideful over it. There isn’t anything to get prideful over. You didn’t have anything to do with it. But, Lord, You don’t understand, I’ve kept short accounts with God. I’ve been diligent in keeping my sins confessed. I know, and that’s why you’re talking about it. That’s why you’re talking about it, is because you’re prideful of what you’re doing. If you understand, what Christ did at the Cross took away your sin. There anything to brag about that is there? Now look what I’ve done. There isn’t anything you’ve done. If there was anything that I had to do with salvation, I’d be bragging about it, and that’s what we do. I got baptized. I got double dipped. I spoke in tongues, and I think big, hairy deal. Why are you bragging over something you have done instead of bragging over what God has done? But that’s the way we are, am I right or wrong, isn’t that the way when I’ve accomplished something, brother, you’re going to know about it. He said, My grace is sufficient. Paul, forget about what you’re doing. My grace is sufficient. What I did for you is sufficient. You don’t need to try to add to that equation. I did it. You didn’t quit adding to it.

And so he told us that, therefore I’m going to boast all the more gladly about my weakness. Why? So that Christ’s power, he said, may rest on me. Verse 12. This is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in my weakness. I delight in it. Now, look at this, guys. Think about this for a minute. Think about how much sense does this make to you on a worldly basis, on just a worldly basis, I’m going to get up this morning and I am going to delight in the insults that you’ve given me, and I’m going to delight in My hardships. I’m just thrilled to death that I lost all this money on the stock market recently. I’m just thrilled with that. Going to delight in that hardship. I’m going to delight in the fact I lost my job, Praise Jesus. Persecutions. I’m just going to delight the fact that people turn their back on me and say the guy’s an idiot. Going to delight in that? Going to lighten difficulties. God, we don’t delight in difficulties. We delight when things go smooth. Thanksgiving. What are more more Thanksgiving about? All the good things that have happened to us. Thank you, Lord Jesus for my family. Thank you, Lord Jesus for all this food. Thank you, Lord Jesus for Pepto Bismol. We got a million things to thank God, but do we thank him for the hard times. Do you know guys, it’s through the hard times when God builds character in you. I’ve told him sometimes, Lord, I’m as big a character as I need to be. I don’t need any more trials and tribulation. He said, we’ll just see about that. It says, trials and tribulation build character.

We’re not going to seek character that way. We’re going to go out and try to build character. Say, how do you get character? Same way you get everything else. Go out and work at it. Said, No, you don’t have to work at it, believe me, I’ll put you through. I’ll let you go through enough trial and tribulation. You’ll get some character if you just approach the trial and tribulation with the right attitude. But he’s saying to us, guys, it’s look, for the sake of Christ, Jesus, I’m going to delight in my weakness. You’ll delight in it. Now, guys, want to ask you a question. Answer it honestly in your own head. Do you actually delight in your weakness? How many of you have come to understand that you are weak? When do you really understand that you’re weak? You or when you’ve just gotten out of surgery, that’s one way, when you’re sick, when you’re down, and many times even when you’re deeply depressed. Now, guys, instead of turning to the world for solutions, God could be allowing that to take place so that you would ultimately have brains enough to turn to Him for His sufficiency. It’s in your weakness. Remember what they call foxhole religion. You’ve heard that terminology. What is that? People in the service, people in the army in a foxhole getting bombed and turned to Jesus. No wonder they call it foxhole religion. What Lord, if you don’t get me out of this, I’m not going to get out of this situation. I am weak. I’m powerless. He says, Good, now my strength will be there.

And so guys, I think there’s to a degree, there is an educational process that we have to go through, and that is getting our minds renewed on what is actually truth. Because our pride does not like this. I mean, there isn’t anything in our pride that says I like this message, I want to walk out of here just rejoicing in how weak I am, because our pride says, No, I don’t want to be weak. I want to be strong. But God says you will be strong if you recognize you’re weak, because my strength will be there, not yours. We think we’re so powerful, we build these big atom bombs, and we build hydrogen bombs. And you look at what happened during World War Two in Japan, when we bombed Japan, and you take a look at that city, what it took, and it took billions of dollars to develop these bombs to wipe out a city. And then you see a hurricane come through and just collapse the whole place. You think God’s power is a little bit more stronger than our ability to build bombs. Think that tsunami had a little bit more power to it than a bomb.

Announcer 27:11
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