Philippians 4:13

This verse has been printed on more sports equipment than any other line in the Bible, and the immediate context is the opposite of a victory slogan.

Read the two verses before it. Paul is describing a skill he had to learn — his word suggests initiation, being let in on a secret over time. What he learned was how to be brought low. How to be hungry. How to have plenty, which is arguably the harder of the two. “All things” means *these* things: the full range of conditions life had put him in, including the ones nobody would choose.

So the promise is not that you can achieve anything you set out to achieve. It is that there is no circumstance in which you will be left without sufficient strength to remain yourself. That is a stranger and better claim than the poster version. Plenty of things Paul set out to do did not happen; he wanted to go to Spain, and he wanted the churches to stop fighting. But there was no situation that took him down.

The last clause is the load-bearing one, and it is the one usually cropped out. Through Christ, who strengthens me. The strength is not a personal quality that was there all along waiting to be believed in. It is supplied, continuously, by someone else — which is exactly why it does not run out at the point where your own would have.