Also by this author: Ours: Biblical Comfort for Men Grieving Miscarriage, In His Hands: Prayers for Your Child or Baby in a Medical Crisis
Published by Harvest House Publishers on June 4, 2024
Genres: Non-Fiction, Christian Life, Theology
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This overview of the theme of weakness in the Bible offers readers practical encouragement and hope as they learn to view their frailties as part of God’s plan and purpose for their lives.
Our culture deifies strength—and sadly, the church does too. Who has the most successful ministry, the largest congregation, or the godliest family? Our misplaced faith in human strength is a false hope with no basis in Scripture.
Conversely, we associate weakness with powerlessness and personal failure. But a closer look throughout Scripture reveals the central role human frailty plays in the redemption story. From Genesis to Revelation, when God’s people are at their weakest, his power is made perfect. Far from an undesirable defect, God designed our weakness to draw us closer to Jesus.
As you learn to accept the good gift of weakness, you will experience true strength, the kind that only comes from a loving and infinitely powerful God.
Weakness is hardly a popular topic in society, or in the church. We prefer to hide our weaknesses, or to tell inspiring stories about how we have overcome them. Even when people study or teach Scripture passages about weakness, they usually do this through the cultural lens of self-sufficiency and triumphalism, missing some of the deeper messages. Eric M. Schumacher has put a lot of thought into the topic, and has written this book as a corrective. This book explores the role of weakness in redemptive history, providing a biblical survey from Genesis to Revelation.
Although the words “biblical survey” may make this book sound too scholarly for the average reader, this is not a dense academic treatise. Rather, this book reads like a theologically rich sermon series. Schumacher begins each chapter with an illustration from his own life experience, and then explores that chapter’s topic and relevant Scriptures through an outline that is clear and easy to follow. This book is accessible to average churchgoers, while also having value to scholars. Schumacher shows how weakness appears as a major theme in Scripture, and he also distinguishes between different types of weakness, such as the natural weakness that is part of God’s good design for us as finite creatures, and the types of physical and moral weaknesses that are consequences of the Fall.
The Good Gift of Weakness: God’s Strength Made Perfect in the Story of Redemption is a unique, thoughtful book. It shares a helpful perspective on a neglected topic, and I especially appreciated the insights about weakness in the story of Jesus. As for things that could have been better, Schumacher acknowledges some of them in the epilogue, and I agree with him that this book would have benefited from more personal application ideas. Perhaps that can be another book in the future. Overall, I appreciated this book a lot, and would highly recommend it.