Sufficient Grace

Paul has been forced into a strange kind of bragging. False teachers in Corinth had been parading their visions, their lineage, their oratory. So Paul plays their game just enough to subvert it. He boasts of his weaknesses. He boasts of being shipwrecked, beaten, starved, imprisoned. Then he tells them about a vision of his own, fourteen years before, where he was caught up to the third heaven and heard things he was not allowed to repeat.

And then he writes the most personally costly verse in the letter.

So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited.

-- 2 Corinthians 12:7

Paul never tells us what the thorn was. Some have guessed an eye condition; some malaria; some a struggle in his memory. The vagueness is, in its way, a mercy. Whatever your thorn is, his statement covers it.

He does what we all do. He prays.

Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me.

-- 2 Corinthians 12:8

Three is the number of completion. Three nights in the boat. Three days in the tomb. Three pleadings, Paul gave it everything. He prayed expecting the thorn to be removed. It was not.

What he received instead has become one of the most quoted verses in Scripture, but it should be read again as if for the first time.

But he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.'

-- 2 Corinthians 12:9

The verb tense matters. He said, the Greek is perfect tense, eireken: he has said and the saying continues. This is not a one-time answer. It is a standing word. The thorn stays. The grace shows up. The two co-exist. Paul does not get the deliverance he asked for. He gets a different deliverance.

Then he says something only Paul could say.

Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

-- 2 Corinthians 12:9-10

Notice he does not say I will pretend my weaknesses don't matter. He does not say now I am happy about the thorn. He says I am content, eudoko, I take pleasure in, I find rest in. He has discovered something only the long-prayed and not-delivered can discover. Christ is not waiting for the thorn to leave to be present. The thorn is the very place his power has chosen to rest.

Some of us have been doing the work of this plan. Naming feelings. Sitting with grief. Putting on, putting off. Walking by the Spirit. And the thing has not lifted. The craving has not stopped. The fight is still daily.

This story is for you.

This is one of faith's harder rooms. Every story of dramatic deliverance you have heard is a true story; not every deliverance is dramatic. Some healing is slow. Some healing looks like sufficiency in the wound rather than absence of it. Some days you do not feel free. You only feel held.

Held is enough.

Let those words land. Held is not failure. Held is one of the names of grace. Paul, who could quote scripture from memory and had been to the third heaven, lived the rest of his life with the thorn. He did not become a lesser apostle. He learned the strangest math in the kingdom. When I am weak, then I am strong.

If today you are not stronger than your habit, you are still loved. If today the wind is still against you, the hand of Jesus is still out. If today the thorn is still there, the grace still says sufficient.

This is not a consolation prize. It is the thing.