My grace is sufficient; my power is made perfect in your weakness

My grace is sufficient; my power is made perfect in your weakness is the scriptural expression that interrupts Bryan Stevenson’s drive home after Jimmy Dill’s execution. Heard in a sermon on a station that has not reported the execution, it gives shape to Stevenson’s recognition that grief and brokenness can exist alongside healing and mercy.

The expression in the sermon

On the drive home, Stevenson turns on the radio looking for news about Jimmy Dill’s execution. A local religious station is carrying a news broadcast, but the report makes no mention of the execution. Stevenson leaves the station on; soon, a preacher begins a sermon with scripture.

The sermon gives voice to a passage about repeatedly asking the Lord to remove a burden and receiving the answer, “My grace is sufficient. My power is made perfect in your weakness.” It continues with the speaker’s willingness to boast of weakness so that Christ’s power may work through him, and concludes, “For when I am weak, then I am strong.” The expression’s paired claims—sufficiency in weakness and strength through weakness—make vulnerability the place where another kind of power becomes possible.

From grief to recognition

The words reach Stevenson while he is driving home brokenhearted about Dill. Rather than making the execution disappear, the sermon gives him a way to hold that loss beside a broader understanding of human hurt. He recognizes that people are caught not only in a web of hurt and brokenness, but also in a web of healing and mercy.

He recalls a little boy who hugged him outside a church, an act that created reconciliation and love. Stevenson acknowledges that he did not deserve that reconciliation in the moment; its force, as he understands it, lies precisely in being given to someone undeserving. The recollection makes the sermon’s language practical rather than abstract: weakness and failure do not foreclose the possibility of receiving or extending mercy.

Meaning and consequence

Stevenson connects mercy to breaking cycles of victimization and victimhood, retribution and suffering. He also describes its potential to heal psychic harm and injuries that can lead to aggression, violence, abuses of power, and mass incarceration. The expression therefore points beyond personal consolation toward a response to harm that does not simply reproduce punishment and suffering.

The passage does not resolve Stevenson’s grief over Dill. He drives home still brokenhearted, but understands that there is more work to do and knows he will return the next day. In the narrative, weakness is neither romanticized nor treated as defeat: it is acknowledged as real, while the sermon’s promise helps Stevenson continue working toward mercy.