What a weak people!

The Dane, LIS HARTEL, won the Olympic silver medal in horse riding in Helsinki, 1952.

Her feat of coming second in the Grand Prix was enhanced by the fact that Lis was partially paralysed. Despite this, she was able to ride and control her horse.

Physically, she was weak, but she overcame her disability to become strong in her sport.

God's way of doing things is sometimes incomprehensible to us. God does not look at appearances, neither physical nor spiritual strength, in choosing his workers.

God uses everyone, it doesn't matter what their original skills. He chooses, above all, a special kind of people: the weak. It seems as if his job advertisements specify, 'the weaker, the better'.

We are all in serious danger of being proud. Whenever we do anything right, we like to show off about it. We push our medals into the faces of friend and foe, known and unknown people alike.

We like to be watched and admired by the crowd. God knows this, and that is why he uses the weakest, the humblest, the smallest, and the least powerful people.

The army of God is made up of weak people. But they are able to defeat even the strongest enemy. They have a characteristic in common:  they depend exclusively on their creator.

The strength of these weak people is that they glory only in the cross of Jesus Christ. Paul himself described this when he said: 'May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.'

And everyone should realise that without the cross of Jesus Christ, we would all be a bunch of losers. And we would also be the laughing stock of the whole world.

God has his own way of making things, and the weaker we are, the stronger he can make us. The more closely we draw to his cross, the more powerful we become in his strength.

And that is not because it is a lucky charm: the cross itself has no value but in that Jesus, God himself made human, died on that cross in our place. More than that, he was raised to life, defeating death for us. He's the incomparable winner in all the world.

He is our glory. When we look at him, no one can defeat us. When we recognise our weakness at the foot of that cross, we are the strongest people in the world.