The Thorn

Paul had been caught up into the third heaven and shown things not lawful for a man to utter, and lest the sheer weight of such revelations should puff him up, there was given to him, in his own words, a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet him. He does not tell us what it was. Perhaps he was not permitted to, so that every afflicted soul in every age might read its own thorn into the silence. We know only that it was sharp, that it was constant, that it buffeted him, and that he wanted it gone. For this thing, he says, I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. Three times the great apostle went to his knees and asked for healing.

And God said no. This is the first hard truth of the passage, and we must not soften it. The Lord who healed multitudes, who was and is entirely able to remove any thorn, looked upon his suffering servant, heard his threefold plea, and did not take the thorn away. But he did not answer with silence either. He answered with a word that has held up more sinking souls than any healing ever did. My grace is sufficient for thee, he said, for my strength is made perfect in weakness. He would not remove the thorn. He would give something better than its removal. He would give grace enough to bear it, and in the bearing he would do a work that the healing would have prevented.

THE MERCY OF THE UNREMOVED

We assume, almost without thinking, that the loving answer to suffering is always its removal, that if God is good he will take the thorn out, and that a thorn left in is a prayer unanswered. But here is a thorn left in by a God who is love, and left in on purpose, and called mercy. For the thorn did something in Paul that ease could never have done. It kept him from being exalted above measure. It kept him low, and leaning, and tender, and near to God. The strong man forgets God. The man with the thorn cannot. Every throb of it drove him back to the grace that was sufficient, and so the very thing he begged to lose was holding him where he most needed to be.

This is a thought we resist, and we should be honest that we resist it, because it overturns the bargain we would like to strike with God, the bargain in which faithfulness is repaid with comfort and the removal of every pain. God does not sign that bargain. He is after something deeper in us than comfort. He is after a soul made humble and dependent and God-shaped, and he knows, as we do not, that such a soul is more often forged in the furnace than in the ease, and that a thorn well borne can give what a healing would have taken away.

STRENGTH MADE PERFECT IN WEAKNESS

Hear the paradox at the center of the Lord’s answer, for the whole Christian life turns on it. My strength is made perfect in weakness. Not in spite of weakness, but in it, through it, by means of it. The word rendered made perfect means completed, brought to its full end. God’s strength reaches its fullness precisely in the place of our weakness, because only there is there room for it. As long as I am strong, I fill the space with my own strength, and his has no room to be shown. When I am emptied, when the thorn has drained me of my own resources, then the power of Christ can rest upon me and be seen for what it is. We carry this treasure, Paul says elsewhere, in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. The cracks in the vessel are how the light gets out.

And so Paul makes a turn that only grace can explain. Most gladly therefore, he says, will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. He does not merely resign himself to the thorn. He glories in it. He comes to prize the very weakness he had begged to be rid of, because he has learned what it is for. When I am weak, he concludes, then am I strong. This is not the grim endurance of a man gritting his teeth, and it is not a pretense that the thorn is pleasant, for he still calls it a messenger of Satan. It is something stranger and higher, the discovery that the place of his weakness has become the place of God’s power, and that he would not trade it.

GLORYING, NOT MERELY BEARING

There is a great distance between resignation and glorying, and the grace of God means to carry us across it. Resignation says, I cannot change this, so I will endure it. Glorying says, God is doing something in this that he could do no other way, and I welcome it. Resignation is a clenched fist slowly forced open. Glorying is a hand held out. Paul did not arrive at glorying by pretending the thorn did not hurt, but by seeing past the hurt to its purpose, to the power of Christ resting upon him, and finding that purpose worth the pain. This is the work grace does in the afflicted soul, not usually the removal of the thorn, but the slow transformation of the one who bears it, until he can say with the psalmist, my flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.

THREE TIMES, AND NO MORE

Notice that Paul besought the Lord thrice, and then stopped. He did not batter heaven without end, nor did he conclude from the unanswered asking that God was deaf or unkind. He asked, earnestly and more than once, and then he listened, and when the answer came, though it was not the answer he sought, he received it and rested in it. There is a wisdom here between two errors. The one error is to ask once and give up, as though God owed us an instant yes. The other is to demand without ceasing that God reverse himself, refusing every answer but the one we came for. Paul asked, and asked, and asked, and then he heard, and having heard, he submitted.

For the no of God is not the silence of God. Often the very thing we call an unanswered prayer is a prayer answered otherwise than we asked, and answered better. Paul prayed for removal and received sufficiency, and had he been given the removal he would have lost the greater gift, the power of Christ resting upon him, the humility that kept him near. We are poor judges of our own petitions. We beg for the lifting of the very weight that is holding us upright. A God who granted us every removal we asked would ruin us with kindnesses, and it is his mercy that he loves us too well to always say yes.

THE FELLOWSHIP OF HIS WEAKNESS

There is a deeper mystery still in this glorying in weakness, for it draws us into fellowship with Christ himself, who was crucified through weakness. He did not save the world from a throne of strength but from a cross, in the very extremity of weakness, mocked and helpless and dying, and it was there, precisely there, that the power of God was most fully at work to save. The pattern of the Master becomes the pattern of the servant. We are made strong the way he was made strong, through the weakness and not around it, and the thorn that conforms us to a crucified Lord is no curse but a strange conformity to his own image.

This is why the saints could speak of their afflictions almost as friends, not because they were free of pain but because they had seen what the pain was doing, joining them to Christ, emptying them of the self that crowds him out, opening in them a space for a strength not their own. Think it not strange, Peter says, concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened, but rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings. The thorn is a fellowship. It sits us down at the table of his own weakness, where his own power is served.

And the grace promised is not a single lump given once to last a lifetime, but a daily provision, renewed like the morning. As thy days, so shall thy strength be, God promised his people, and it holds for every thorn. You are not asked to find, today, the grace to bear a whole lifetime of the affliction, which would crush you even to contemplate. You are given grace for this day’s portion of it, and tomorrow grace again, his mercies new every morning, his strength meted out to match the burden of each day as it comes. The thorn is borne not by one great heroic act but by a thousand daily receivings of a grace that is always, exactly, sufficient.

So if you carry a thorn that will not come out, an affliction of the body or the mind, a besetting weakness, a sorrow prayed over many times and still unhealed, hear the word given to Paul as given also to you. It may be that God will not remove it, and it may be that his refusal is his mercy, and that the thing you would give anything to lose is the very thing keeping you near to him. Stop demanding removal as the only love. Ask instead for grace sufficient, and receive it, for it is promised and it is enough, new every morning and matched to the day. Let the thorn drive you to lean, and lean, and you will find underneath you the everlasting arms. My grace is sufficient for thee, he says still, and he has never once said it to a soul and then failed to make it true.