Thank you. The Bible nowhere teaches that believers should seek out trials or difficulties.

But today on Truth for Life, we'll learn how we might miss out on blessings when we attempt to avoid or power through the challenges of pain or conflict or failure.

Alistair Begg teaches us how we can face life's hardships with confidence.

Paul has been very clear concerning the nature of weakness, and classically so, in 2 Corinthians and in Chapter 12.

And again, if you like to turn to that, you will see that as he takes on the false apostles of his time,

who are arguing about how strong and wonderful they really are, he decides that he's going to tell them how unbelievably weak he is.

And as he reaches the apex of his argument, he says in verse 7 of 2 Corinthians 12,

to keep me from becoming conceited or from getting a big head

because he said, I've had revelations of God that are so unbelievable that I couldn't even begin to talk about them.

And that could give me a sense of dominance and priority and so on. And God, recognizing that, to keep me from getting a big fat head, he gave me a thorn in my flesh. We don't know what it is. If we needed to know, we would have been told. We know that it was a torment to him and something that he would like to be rid of. He'd ask the Lord three times if he

would take it away from him, and three times the answer came back, no, because God told him,

my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. My power is made

perfect in weakness. Okay, he says, therefore, deduction, if that's the

case, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses so that Christ's power may rest upon me.

For, he says, when I am weak, then I am strong.

It's paradoxical, isn't it? It's ironic.

Especially when you said it within the context of 21st century America.

Because the one thing that you're not supposed to admit to is weakness. Everyone is a winner

in America. Peggy Noonan writing in the Wall Street, 2009, July 2009, she writes,

For 30 years, the self-esteem movement told the young they're perfect

in every way. It's yielding something new in history, an entire generation, with no proper sense

of inadequacy. We're not talking about a wrong sense of inadequacy. We're talking about a proper

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