10/24/2024
Copied from enduring word commentary. A long read, but a great read!!
God’s provision to Paul through his thorn in the flesh.
And He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in needs, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
a. And He said to me: God had a response for Paul. The answer was not what Paul initially hoped for or expected, but God still had a response for Paul. We often close our ears to God if He responds in a way we did not hope for or expect.
b. My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness: Instead of removing the thorn from Paul’s life, God gave and would keep giving His grace to Paul. The grace God gave Paul was sufficient to meet his every need.
i. Paul was desperate in his desire to find relief from this burden, but there are two ways of relief. It can come by removing the load or by strengthening the shoulder that bears the load. Instead of taking away the thorn, God strengthened Paul under it, and God would show His strength through Paul’s apparent weakness.
ii. To do this, Paul had to believe that God’s grace is sufficient. We really don’t believe God’s grace is sufficient until we believe we are insufficient. For many of us, especially in American culture, this is a huge obstacle. We are the people who idolize the “self-made man” and want to rely on ourselves. But we can’t receive God’s strength until we know our weakness. We can’t receive the sufficiency of God’s grace until we know our own insufficiency.
iii. “Great tribulation brings out the great strength of God. If you never feel inward conflicts and sinking of soul, you do not know much of the upholding power of God; but if you go down, down, into the depths of soul-anguish till the deep threatens to shut her mouth upon you, and then the Lord rides upon a cherub and does fly, yea, rides upon the wings of the wind and delivers your soul, and catches you away to the third heaven of delight, then you perceive the majesty of divine grace. Oh, there must be the weakness of man, felt, recognized, and mourned over, or else the strength of the Son of God will never be perfected in us.” (Spurgeon)
c. My grace is sufficient: How did God’s grace make the difference? How did it meet Paul’s need at this point?
i. Grace could meet Paul’s need because it expresses God’s acceptance and pleasure in us. When we receive His grace, we enjoy our status of favor and approval in God’s eyes. Grace means that God likes us, that He is favorably disposed towards us and that we have His approval and promise of care.
ii. Grace could meet Paul’s need because it was available all the time. When we sin or fail, it does not put us outside the reach of God’s grace. Since grace is given freely to us in Jesus, it can’t be taken away later because we stumble or fall. When we come to God by faith through the blood of Jesus, His grace is ever ready to meet us and to minister to our insufficiencies.
iii. Grace could meet Paul’s need because it was the very strength of God. So much of the power of this world is expressed in things that can only bring harm and destruction, but God loves to show His power through His goodness and grace. Sometimes we associate goodness with cowardice or timidity. When we do, we take a worldly perspective about power and strength, and we deny God’s truth about the strength of grace and love. Grace is not weak or wimpy. Instead, it is the power of God to fulfill what we lack.
d. My grace is sufficient for you: You may emphasize any aspect of this you please.
i. “My grace is sufficient for you.” Grace is the favor and love of God in action. It means He loves us and is pleased by us. Can you hear it from God? “My love is enough for you.” Isn’t it true?
ii. “My grace is sufficient for you.” Whose grace is it? It is the grace of Jesus. Isn’t His love, His favor, enough? What will Jesus fail at? Remember too that Jesus suffered thorns, so He cares and He knows.
iii. “My grace is sufficient for you.” It is right now. Not that it will be some day, but right now, at this moment, His grace is sufficient. You thought something had to change before His grace would be enough. You thought, “His grace was sufficient once, His grace may be sufficient again, but not now, not with what I am going through.” Despite that feeling, God’s word stands. “My grace is sufficient for you.” Spurgeon wrote, “It is easy to believe in grace for the past and the future, but to rest in it for the immediate necessity is true faith. Believer, it is now that grace is sufficient: even at this moment it is enough for thee.”
iv. “My grace is sufficient for you.” Redpath explains this aspect best: “Do you see the humor of the situation? God’s grace: me. His grace sufficient for little me! How absurd to think that it could ever be any different! As if a little fish could swim in the ocean and fear lest it might drink it dry! The grace of our crucified, risen, exalted, triumphant Saviour, the Lord of all glory, is surely sufficient for me! Do you not think it is rather modest of the Lord to say sufficient?”
v. “My grace is sufficient for you.” I’m so glad God didn’t say, “My grace is sufficient for Paul the Apostle.” I might have felt left out. But God made it broad enough. You can be the “you” in for you. God’s grace is sufficient for you! Are you beyond it? Are you so different? Is your thorn worse than Paul’s or worse than many others who have known the triumph of Jesus? Of course not. This sufficient grace is for you.
vi. “This sufficiency is declared without any limiting words, and therefore I understand the passage to mean that the grace of our Lord Jesus is sufficient to uphold thee, sufficient to strengthen thee, sufficient to comfort thee, sufficient to make thy trouble useful to thee, sufficient to enable thee to triumph over it, sufficient to bring thee out of it, sufficient to bring thee out of ten thousand like it, sufficient to bring thee home to heaven… O child of God, I wish it were possible to put into words this all-sufficiency, but it is not. Let me retract my speech: I am glad that it cannot be put into words, for if so it would be finite, but since we never can express it, glory be to God it is inexhaustible, and our demands upon it can never be too great. Here let me press upon you the pleasing duty of taking home the promise personally at this moment, for no believer here need be under any fear, since for him also, at this very instant, the grace of the Lord Jesus is sufficient.” (Spurgeon)
vii. “John Bunyan has the following passage, which exactly expresses what I myself have experienced. He says that he was full of sadness and terror, but suddenly these words broke in upon him with great power, and three times together the words sounded in his ears, “My grace is sufficient for thee; my grace is sufficient for thee; my grace is sufficient for thee.” And “Oh! Bethought,” says he, “that every word was a mighty word unto me; as ‘My,’ and ‘grace,’ and ‘sufficient,’ and ‘for thee’; they were then, and sometimes are still, far bigger than others be.” He who knows, like the bee, how to suck honey from flowers, may well linger over each one of these words and drink in unutterable content.” (Spurgeon)
e. Therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me: Through his infirmities, God made Paul completely dependent on His grace and on His strength, but it was all for good. Paul’s continued – even forced – dependence upon God made him stronger than he would have ever been if his revelations had made him proud and self-sufficient.
i. Many of us think that real Christian maturity is when we come to a place where we are somewhat “independent” of God. The idea is that we have our act so together that we don’t need to rely on God so much day to day, moment to moment. This isn’t Christian maturity at all. God deliberately engineered debilitating circumstances into Paul’s life so he would be in constant, total dependence on God’s grace and God’s strength.
ii. Many people see God as a parent that we outgrow. Once we’re mature and once we have overcome certain obstacles in life, we can shake off God just the same as we shook off the authority of our parents. In this pattern, some of us treat God the same way we treat our parents. We give Him a measure of respect, we give Him His due – but we no longer feel we really have to obey Him any more. In our hearts, we have moved out of the house. We think we can make our own rules in life as long as we have supper at God’s house once a week and give Him a little recognition.
iii. Many harbor a longing for the day when the Christian life will become “easy.” We hope for a time when the major struggles with sin are behind us, and now we go on to bigger and better things without much of a struggle. That day is an illusion. If the Apostle Paul himself constantly experienced weakness, who are we to think that we will surpass him?
iv. In fact, the illusion of strength and independence actually leaves someone in a weaker place. “There is nothing more hindering to the work of God than the uplifted and proud Christian.” (Morgan)
v. “Ministers of the Gospel especially should banish all thoughts of their own cleverness, intellectual ability, culture, sufficiency for their work, and learn that only when they are emptied can they be filled, and only when they know themselves to be nothing are they ready for God to work through them.” (Maclaren)
vi. “God works through the man who has been wiped clean and turned inside out, his life emptied before the Lord until he is hopelessly weak, that no flesh might glory in His presence.” (Redpath)
f. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities: In the end, Paul does not resign himself to his fate; he welcomes it. He rejoices that God has forced him to rely on the grace and strength of God all the more so he can say, “when I am weak, then I am strong.”
i. Paul was at such a level of spiritual strength and maturity that God had to deliberately introduce a thorn in the flesh. Most of us provide our own thorns, and an honest look shows us enough weakness to make us constantly and totally rely on the grace and strength of Jesus. Yet even if we were to grow to the spiritual strength and maturity of a Paul, God would say to us as well: “I need to keep you depending on Me in everything. Here is something to depend on Me for.” This is a place of victory, not of discouragement.
ii. “In the Christian perspective there is no place for the aimless non-resistance of dispirited resignation.” (Hughes)
g. I take pleasure in infirmities: Paul’s pleasure in infirmities is not the sick musing of an ascetic, thinking that we are justified before God by our sufferings. Paul didn’t seek his thorn in the flesh, it came to him.
i. “The concept, so pernicious in the Church at a later date, of courting martyrdom, of practising asceticism, and even of embracing dirt, disease, and destitution as means to the acquisition of favour before God, is diametrically opposed to the Apostle’s mind and to the whole tenor of the gospel in the New Testament, for it is a concept governing a way of life for one’s own sake, with a view to making oneself righteous and acceptable before God – a concept of works, not faith.” (Hughes)
h. For when I am weak, then I am strong: What triumph! What can the world do to such a man so firm in the grip of Jesus? God did not allow this thorn in the flesh to punish Paul or to keep him weak for the sake of weakness. God allowed it to show a divine strength in Paul.
i. Think about this man Paul. Was he a weak or strong man? The man who traveled the ancient world spreading the gospel of Jesus despite the fiercest persecutions, who endured shipwrecks and imprisonment, who preached to kings and slaves, who established strong churches and trained up their leaders was not a weak man. In light of his life and accomplishments, we would say that Paul was a very strong man. But he was only strong because he knew his weaknesses and looked outside himself for the strength of God’s grace. If we want lives of such strength, we also must understand and admit our weakness and look to God alone for the grace that will strengthen us for any task. It was the grace-filled Paul who said, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:13)
ii. “The valleys are watered with rain to make them fruitful while the summits of lofty mountains remain dry. A man must become a valley if he wants to receive the heavenly rain of God’s spiritual grace.” (Calvin)
iii. “From all this I gather, that the worst trial a man may have may be the best possession he has in this world; that the messenger of Satan may be as good to him as his guardian angel; that it may be as well for him to be buffeted of Satan as ever it was to be caressed of the Lord himself; that it may be essential to our soul’s salvation that we should do business not only on deep waters, but on waters that cast up mire and dirt. The worst form of trial may, nevertheless, be our best present portion.” (Spurgeon)
i. To summarize, instead of using his experience to glorify himself (as the “super apostles” among the Corinthian Christians did), Paul relates how his whole glorious experience humbled him more than ever.
i. All Paul’s enemies could see was the thorn; they could not see how and why it was there. But Paul knew, so he rejoiced even in his thorn in the flesh.
ii. Of course, the greatest example of the principle Paul communicates here was lived by Jesus Himself. “Could anyone on earth be more meek than the Son of God to be hung on the cross, hung in our place that He might redeem us from our sins? As that point of absolute weakness was met by the mighty power of God as He raised Him from the dead, I wonder if the pressure of the thorn in Paul’s life was a reminder of the power of the cross.” (Redpath)
iii. Yet, we should never think that in our lives, the mere presence of a thorn means the glory and strength of Jesus would shine in us and through us. You can resist God’s grace and refuse to set your mind on Jesus, and then find your thorn cursing you instead of blessing you. “Without the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit, thorns are productive of evil rather than good. In many people, their thorn in the flesh does not appear to have fulfilled any admirable design at all; it has created another vice, instead of removing a temptation.” (Spurgeon)
