It’s easy to feel like your weakness gets in the way of God using you or saving you.

If Christianity were about how you save yourself — or worse, about how, “God helps those who help themselves” (Ben Franklin) — then maybe your weakness would be in the way.

But that’s not what Christianity is about.

Christianity is not about you saving yourself — not about you finally working hard enough, getting rid of enough sin, keeping all the rules or making enough progress.

Nor is it, as Ben Franklin famously suggested, about God helping those who dig deep, try harder and find a way to help themselves. That’s the complete opposite of God’s saving work in Scripture, where he helps the helpless time and again (cf. Deut. 7:6-8 and God’s explanation of why he saves Israel — spoiler alert: it’s not because they were the best at helping themselves).

No, Christianity is about God revealing his redeeming strength IN our weakness (2 Cor. 12:9-10) — not apart from our weakness.

That means our weaknesses, our failures and mistakes, are not getting in the way of God using us for his mission or saving us from our sins. They are the way. They are the very place where he’s going to show up and make use of you and deliver you. Because your weakness reveals that His salvation is entirely by grace.

Your weakness is not where God’s grace is most absent, but where it actually has the chance to be the most evident. Because our hope is not in God saving those who are good enough (Mark 2:17), but in Christ Jesus, who came to be the Savior of even enormous failures, sinners and fools like me and you (1 Tim. 1:15).

Consequently, the place where we find ourselves most in need, maybe most embarrassed or ashamed, is the place where we should most expect to find our Savior at work.

Because he came for mistakes.

He came for sinners. He came for failures and fools. He came for weaknesses like yours and mine.

The answer, then, is not to get rid of our weakness so God can finally use us or save us, but to let the Lord be our strength in weakness (2 Cor. 12:9).

The answer is to let him work through our weaknesses to show his grace and his mercy all the more. Because his grace and mercy are for sinners — even for sinners who continue to struggle against sin (a struggle which, in itself, is a mark of God’s grace in your life).

Instead of hiding our weaknesses, we can let them be the testimony of a redeemed life. Because God came to heal exactly what we’re so desperate to hide — the weakness of our sin.

We don’t need to hide our sin. We don’t need to hide what Christ is not ashamed to heal.

Not that we glory in our sin, but we glory in our Savior, who came to save sinners. So, we do not need to hide that we have been and are being healed. Our healing only reveals our Healer. Our saving only reveals our Savior. Our sins and failures are not the final sentence in the Christian life. They are merely the stage for salvation.

Your weakness can be known, because your Savior is known through it.