Audio Transcript

There are three reasons why I want to focus on 2 Corinthians 12:7–10 in particular. First, it’s God’s word. Those of us who have grown up in the church need to just say those words very slowly. The God who created the universe, holds it in being, guides every part of it, knows everything, and is infinitely good and infinitely wise has spoken. That’s breathtaking. That’s reason number one. I think those four verses are the mind of God. If tonight, when we’re done (in thirty minutes or so), we have understood them, we know what God thinks.

Second, these four verses, as much almost as any verses, are not only Christ-exalting, but they are Christ’s intention to be Christ-exalting, which is very offensive to thousands of people — that Christ intends to exalt Christ. It drove away C.S. Lewis for years. It drove away Brad Pitt to this day. That’s no joke. It’s his testimony. This truth drove him from Christianity. He grew up a Southern Baptist kid. It drove away Oprah Winfrey when she was 27 years old. What I’m about to show you drove these people away from church and Christianity. It drove away Erik Reece, a university professor. It drove away Michael Prowse, who wrote for the London Financial Times.

What we’re going to see in these four verses is Christ’s “egomania” — that’s what Erik Reece calls it. And one of my purposes is to help you not be driven away, but you can’t get ready not to be driven away until you see it and how offensive it is to the human mind. That’s number two. These four verses go to the heart of that issue.

My third reason is that there’s hardly a sweeter set of four verses to make Christian Hedonism plain and compelling in our suffering. Those are my three reasons for choosing this text to talk with you about. I love this text. I worked my way through 2 Corinthians doing Look at the Book — about 170 episodes or something like that.

As I worked my way through it, I thought, I love this book, and I love this man. I have an exercise room in my attic where I jog three times a week. I have a big picture of my dad, a big picture of Jonathan Edwards, a little picture of Dan Fuller over here, and then a big picture of the apostle Paul (Rembrandt’s rendition).

Before I run, I turn off my audiobook, and I just go from one to the other, saying, “Thank you, God. Thank you for my father. Thank you for Jonathan Edwards. Thank you for Dan Fuller.” And I love the apostle Paul. I love you. Do you hear me? Do you hear me in heaven? I love you. I really do. I mean, my love affair with the apostle Paul is one of the main reasons I’m a Christian.

I don’t know how you became a Christian or stay a Christian through all the ups and downs of your life. But if you fall in love with a person who has suffered as much as Paul, and who met the Lord Jesus on the Damascus road, you have to conclude that he’s either a liar or an inspired apostle. I cannot not believe him. That’s why we’re doing what we’re doing now for the next few minutes here.

Paul’s Pain, Christ’s Power

I’m going to read the text, and then we’ll spend the next thirty minutes looking at the book.

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. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” 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 12:7–10)

That’s a weird therefore. He’s saying, “Because you’re going to use my pain to make you look good, therefore I’m going to be happy in it.” That’s crazy. Don’t you want to be crazy? I just so want to be crazy like this. “Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly” is the word hēdista, the word from which we get “hedonism.” He says, “I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”

And what he means by “weaknesses” is insults, hardships, persecutions, calamities, and all the sorts of things that today people are getting their back up about and going on the Internet and saying, “I won’t be treated like that.” The world doesn’t have a clue what this man is like. This man is so from another planet, and so is Christianity.

Kept from Conceit

It is remarkable that Paul would repeat the phrase “to keep me from becoming conceited” twice, exactly the same way. It’s at the beginning of the verse and the end of the verse. This action of the risen Christ is to keep Paul from being conceited. Got it? Got the main point? Jesus means to kill pride, conceit, and self-exaltation in the apostle Paul. What caused it? What’s the danger? What has happened that makes that necessary?

He says that it’s “because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations.” What’s that? It’s in the preceding verses. This is Paul. He’s not talking about a third person. He’s using the third person. I wish we had time to talk about this, to show how much he’s going to push this into the background, while the super-apostles, who are opposing him, put it in the foreground. They’re so big into revelations. They’re so big into boasting in their big-shot abilities to be better than Paul. And Paul says, “I know a man who had way better experiences in Jesus than you’ve ever had, but I’m just going to boast in weakness.” That’s the idea here.

I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven — whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into paradise — whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows — and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter. (2 Corinthians 12:2–4)

Now, this is what you’ve all prayed for. “If you just show yourself, if you just send an angel or just do something amazing. My life is just so ordinary. I want something like that.” This is a great text for you because what’s the upshot of this? Spiritual danger. I mean, you would think if there were anything sanctifying in the world, it would be to go to heaven for half an hour. People write books about that. Wouldn’t that change your life? No, it absolutely wouldn’t change your life. It would make you proud. It would make you arrogant and conceited. That’s what it would do. So, why would Jesus give him that experience?

Why would he let me do what I’m doing right now in these forty minutes? This is going to make me proud. I’m going to go home tonight and think, “I think they liked it.” Do you see how dangerous that is? That’s just unbelievably dangerous. I mean, Desiring God is a successful ministry. We have a big budget. Millions of people all over the world tune in to our stuff. That’s horribly dangerous. Paul says, “In giving me that, Jesus knows my flesh. He knows where that’s going.” Is it going anywhere good?

Gift of a Thorn

So, what are you going to do? He’s going to solve this problem of sinful conceit by giving him a thorn. What’s that? Nobody knows what the thorn is except I think we can say with a fairly high degree of confidence that it’s physical, not relational. I mean, some people have said his enemies are his thorn. I don’t think that works. I think the phrase “in the flesh” here is really significant. And here are more reasons why I love him. Here’s Galatians 4:13–14:

You know it was because of a bodily ailment that I preached the gospel to you at first, and though my condition was a trial to you, you did not scorn or despise me, but received me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus.

Paul lived with a bodily ailment, and it was offensive to the people who saw him. Maybe it was runny eyes, or some horrible patch of skin, or maybe he was stooped over or had something that made him hard to look at.

Here’s 2 Corinthians 10:10:

They [the super-apostles] say, “His letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech of no account.”

In other words, “This man is so unimpressive he shouldn’t be considered an authoritative apostle. He’s just not impressive enough.” And then you talk about suffering. Here’s just a glimpse into 2 Corinthians 11:

Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one — I am talking like a madman — with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death. Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. (2 Corinthians 11:23–24)

Five times 39 is 195. You don’t have a back left after that. You don’t. That may have been the thorn. Your back would be shredded after 195 lashes in five different settings just after they got healed. Shred it, heal. Shred it, heal. Shred it, heal. Shred it, heal. Shred it, heal. You can’t move in the morning when you get up. I love the apostle Paul. Next to Jesus, I love him. He endured all that for us.

Three times he was beaten with rods, once stoned. The thorn could have been any of those. So, who gave him the thorn? It’s “a messenger of Satan to harass” him (2 Corinthians 12:7). Well, Satan is not eager for Paul not to be conceited. Satan is not into helping you be godly; God is. Jesus is. And so, this thorn is from God — from Jesus through Satan. That’s worth spending another half hour on.

Compassionate Purpose in Pain

This is not new in the Bible. This is Job all over again. “Satan went out from the presence of the Lord and struck Job with [boils]” (Job 2:7). Satan struck him with boils. And here’s what Job said: “Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” And then the text says, “In all this Job did not sin with his lips” (Job 2:10).

Satan went out from the presence of the Lord and struck Job. Satan struck Job. Satan is real. He hates you, and he will make you as miserable as he can inside and outside. And when Job responded to his wife who said, “Curse God and die,” he said, “Shall we not receive evil as well as good from the Lord?” And the writer said, “That’s not a sin to talk like that.” And you know it’s not because the inspired writer in chapter 42:11 says Job’s family “showed him sympathy and comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him.”

“Jesus’s ultimate aim in saving us the way he does is to see that his grace and power are glorified.”

I’m a Calvinist. God governs everything — no exceptions. Satan is included. He’s on a leash. He cannot do anything to you but what God ordains for him to do — including making you humble. I get a great deal of pleasure out of thinking of Satan being made the instrument of my sanctification. Because that’s exactly what this says, is it not? The design is no conceit. Jesus is saying, “I want a humble apostle with no conceit. My solution? Use Satan to take away your braggadocio.”

So, what might that mean for me tonight? I mean, my life has been a healthy life. My life has been a happy life. My life has been a blessed life. And it’s been an embattled life in many ways, and God has been merciful to figure out my need for pain and pleasure (like the old Swedish hymn said), and I’m not done.

Being 79 is like the beginning of the hard times, not the end. I’m not expecting it to be easy. Dying is not easy. I just pray that what this text says will happen. That’s why I linger over it.

When the Answer Is ‘No’

So, we have God, through Satan, humbling Paul with his thorn because God blessed him so much with his ministry and with his going into heaven and seeing these revelations. Now, he prays for this thorn to go away three times, and the Lord doesn’t take it away.

Here’s what Jesus said: “My grace is sufficient for you” (2 Corinthians 12:9). In other words, “I’m going to bring pain into your life, and I’m not going to answer your prayer to take it away — not the way you think — and I’m going to be enough for you.”

Joni Eareckson Tada has a book called The Practice of the Presence of Jesus. My wife and I read this together every night, one page a night. They’re short devotions. If there was ever a beautiful exposition of these verses in a human life, it’s Joni Eareckson Tada. She’d be so embarrassed if she heard me say this, but I cannot not love her. I mean, I love a lot of people. I love Joni Eareckson. I wrote her when I read this preface because she calls herself a five-point Calvinist.

She’s never been this explicit about her Calvinism. I was so blown away by her going public with five-point Calvinism in the introduction. So, I wrote to her and said, “What’s up?” And she wrote back and said, “How can you not celebrate the things that have sustained you for 55 years of paralysis?” If I have time at the end, I’ll read this, but I know I won’t have time. So, get the book. I’m requiring this as a seminary text in my class in May on 2 Corinthians. She would say, “Jesus is enough. Jesus is enough.” That’s what she would say, and that’s what this is. Jesus says, “My grace is sufficient. I’m enough. I’m enough for you. Aren’t I, Paul?”

Dwelling in the Tent of Gladness

Then he explains it. What does that mean, “My grace is sufficient for you”? He says, “For my power is made perfect [complete] in weakness.” He’s saying, “All that I want to be experienced of my power is going to happen this way. My power is made perfect in weakness.” And that weakness is the experience of this thorn, which is spelled out here with insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. So “my power is made perfect in weakness” means the sufficiency that I am for you is the working of my power in and through weakness.

Now, that doesn’t work yet as an argument. There’s something missing, because a lot of people are weak, and a lot of people have insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. And Jesus gets no glory in their life. His power is not perfected in their weakness. So, weakness plus Jesus doesn’t mean glory for Jesus. What’s missing? Therefore. Here’s the way Paul reasons: “Okay, you said you’re sufficient for me. You said that the reason you’ll be sufficient is because when I’m weak, you’re going to manifest your strength.” Brad Pitt, Oprah Winfrey, the early C.S. Lewis, Michael Prowse, and Erik Reece drew the conclusion, “Oh, so you cause pain in your loved ones in order to make yourself look great? I’m not going to worship a God like that.”

And they left. You have Jesus making his power great through pain in Paul, and Americans by the millions walk away. “I don’t want a Christ-exalting Christ. I want a me-exalting Christ.” Now, Paul, being unusually Christ-exalting, did this. He said, “Therefore, I will all the more gladly boast . . .” That’s the word that riveted me a couple of years ago when I was working through 2 Corinthians. “I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses.”

Why? What kind of logic is that? You’re being used to make him look great, and it’s costing you sleepless nights, and you’re going to be happy? You’re going to infer gladness? What in the world? He says, “I will gladly boast of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” That word rest means to tabernacle or to tent. It’s like a tent and Christ is manifest on or in the tent, and I think the tent is gladness.

How will Christ be seen tenting on you in your pain? Gladness. Pain doesn’t make him look good. Duty with groaning doesn’t make him look great. But gladness in suffering for his sake because he’s enough — that makes Jesus look amazing. That’s what Paul lived for — to make Jesus look amazing. He said, “Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me, because when I’m glad in my weakness, he looks great.”

Redefining ‘Power’

Paul continues: “For the sake of Christ, then, I am content . . .” (2 Corinthians 12:10). Now, I think that word and the word “gladly” are essentially referring to the same reality. “For the sake of Christ then, I am content with weaknesses.” Why? He says, “For when I am weak,” and then you would have expected him to say, “Then he looks great. Then he is strong.” And instead, he says, “Then I am strong.”

I think that’s Paul’s way of redefining human power. This whole text is a redefinition of Christian power. I was thinking about this so much recently because I want to know what power is. What is power? And almost all of us, when we think of power or strength, we think of physical strength, right? I can lift a thousand pounds. I can lift a car. It’s on my kid; I’m going to lift a car up. That’s power. Or we think of power that takes a rocket up and rescues astronauts who have been up there way too long. That’s power. What is that? A thousand tons? That’s power.

None of that applies here. This is not physical. So, what is power that’s not physical? It’s the power to take a heart that would be bitter and angry and resentful and self-pitying because of my thorn and make it glad. Paul says that’s the kind of power that raises people from the dead. I mean, I have to readjust my entire concept of power. Because you would think, That’s not power; that’s like a psychological adjustment. Well, if that’s the way you think, you’re just not thinking like the Bible. Your conversion from being a self-centered, Christ-ignoring human being to being a passionate person for Christ who is willing to die — that is a miracle.

That takes power you have no control over and is more powerful than holding the universe in being. So, it’s a different order. I have to readjust my whole thinking. I have people in my life that I want to be saved. With man, it is impossible. With God, nothing is impossible. That statement means there is a kind of power that God wields that has nothing to do with lifting barbells or launching rockets. It is the kind of power that you need tonight.

When you go home and you think back over this talk and you say, “I’m sure not like Paul. I’m just not going to rejoice in my thorn.” And you get on your knees, and you say, “But he said there’s a power. There is a supernatural power that will be made manifest, perfected, if I could experience that miracle.” We love the phrase “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” at Desiring God (2 Corinthians 6:10). One of my tests for Christian maturity when I watch a pastor preach or I watch somebody on the Internet is, Can I detect tears? They don’t have to be on the face right then. I just want to know if this person has tasted enough pain and gone deep enough with Jesus that they get what it means to be “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.”

Hallowed Be Your Name

Let me wrap this up by giving you summary statements. There’s so much more we could look at, but I have seven or eight summary lessons. I’ll just read them.

First, great gifts from God are often fraught with the danger of pride in us. So, be careful what miracles you ask God to perform in your life — by catching you up to heaven or giving you some amazing experience of supernatural wonder. Be careful. He might give it to you, which would be good. I mean, I don’t think Paul sinned by going to heaven. I don’t think he would have said, “Oh, if I’d known it was going to cost me a thorn, I wouldn’t have gone.” I think he would have.

Second, great gifts of God’s grace are often accompanied by painful life circumstances. I doubt that there’s a mature Christian in this room who couldn’t agree with that. Let’s say you’re over forty (which is really young). Who cannot document those two tracks in their life? God has blessed you so much, and he has brought so much trouble into your life. It’s pretty rare for a person not to be able to see both of those.

Third, Satan is on a leash and cannot hurt God’s people more than God wills for their good. That’s wonderful, because he’s on the loose today.

Fourth, God sometimes rescues his people from sin through ordaining that they suffer with the view to greater dependence on God’s grace and power.

Fifth, Jesus’s ultimate aim in saving us the way he does is to see that his grace and power are glorified. Your comfort in this world is not his ultimate aim. His aim is that he gets glory. And if it costs you your life, or 195 lashes on your back, he will do it.

Sixth, this is not selfish egomania. When Jesus brings suffering into your life to make his power and grace look good, this is not egomania. Now, this is crucial. I’ve skipped over that, and we’re ending right now with this to try to help you not walk away like those five people did. Because you say, “Oh, Jesus is an egomaniac. He abuses his disciples. He gets pleasure out of the abuse that he gives, like a bad dad. So, I’m not going to follow Jesus.” This is my effort to keep that from happening.

This is not selfish egomania because this glorification of Christ reaches its climax in the gladness of his people in the glory of Christ’s grace and power through suffering and into eternal happiness. I can say it more simply. It is selfishness and egomania to exploit other people and be indifferent to their well-being in order for you to advance your well-being. That’s selfish. That’s egomania. God doesn’t do that. Jesus doesn’t do that with his people.

Rather, he magnifies his glorious grace by making us glad in his glorious grace, by bringing satisfaction in his glorious grace. He brings us into his own pursuit of pleasure rather than stepping on us to get to his pleasure. God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. That’s why Paul would say, “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses. . . . For when I am weak, then am I strong” (2 Corinthians 12:9–10). He knew Jesus was not exploiting him or abusing him. He wasn’t.

He was doing the kinds of things in this world that require the deepest fellowship with Jesus. I’ve talked to thousands of people over the years, and I’ve never heard anybody say, “I went the deepest with Jesus on the sunniest days.” Nobody has ever said that to me. They say, “I went the deepest with Jesus on the stormy days, the hard days, the days when I didn’t think I could survive another minute. Jesus met me.” That’s certainly the way Joni talks on pages 107 and 194 of her book.

Seventh, all prayer should ultimately be for the hallowing of God’s name and Christ’s glory so that its answer will always be on the deepest level. That’s something I didn’t even talk about. What about answered prayer and non-answered prayer? Paul said, “Please take it away.” “No.” Again: “Please take it away.” “No.” A third time: “Please take it away.” “No.” We all know that experience.

When he didn’t get the answer to that prayer, what he got was gladness in the grace of Jesus, gladness in the power of Jesus, and contentment in weakness for the glory of Jesus. So, if you asked Paul, “Did your prayers get answered?” I think he would answer at two levels. He would say, “No, not the ones I asked for. But in all my prayers, I am praying, ‘Hallowed be your name, God.’” I think you should pray that way.

So tonight, you might ask God to take away your thorn another time, which you should. I have thorns in my life. I ask every day for them to be taken away. Most of them are relational. Physical is just not important enough for me. But I’ll tell you, people are. I pray that the thorn would be taken away. But when you ask that, say underneath it, “Above all, hallowed be your name. Above all, Christ be glorified.” And then every prayer is yes.