We're coming to the end of our series on 2 Corinthians 4 and during my prep I've been reading a new book entitled Disability & The Gospel: How God uses our brokenness to display his grace. The author, Michael Beates, helpfully interacts with both the Bible and his own experience of bringing up a profoundly disabled daughter. The insights I've gained are many and the tie-in with what we've been looking at in 2 Corinthians has been wonderful. Here's just one example:
Get hold of the whole book here....just as the culture works hard to bury the reality of our sin and mortality, so too often does the church. While we confess our belief in salvation by grace alone, we all get properly dressed and work quite hard to appear clean, healthy, and whole (too often for all the wrong reasons). True spirituality does not project an image of superiority or power or "togetherness." Rather, true spirituality is quite ordinary and transparent in its shortcomings and weaknesses. The Lord Jesus, in his humanity was quite ordinary and even weak. Like all of us, he was ordinarily weak as an infant in the manger and extraordinarily weak and vulnerable on the cross.
