Why Are There So Many Disappointments?

2 Corinthians 12:7-10

INTRODUCTION

We remember one day when our first child, Johnny, was seven-years-old, almost eight, he was upset by something that wasn’t going as he wished. He said to us, with sorrow, “I wish I’d never been born. There’s so many disappointments.”

It doesn’t take long for even a child to learn that life is no picnic. There’s sickness, and failure, and disappointments, and losses.

Friends disappoint us. We disappoint ourselves. Enemies torment us. We have money problems and health problems. People we love die. And finally we face the reality of our own death.

People ask “Why? Why? Why?” And sometimes they say, “Why, God?”

We think we could bear our troubles if we just could know “why”?

Especially we want to know why we suffer—or when someone dear to us suffers.

I’ve known people who turned away from God because they blamed God for their troubles.

The godly men and women who came before us had the same troubles that we have—and, I think, even more troubles. They were less healthy; they lost more babies; they lived shorter lives; they had fewer comforts.

And—just like us—they wondered “Why”?

The holy people who wrote our Bible had these same questions.

They brought their troubles to God—just as we should.

Here are some of the prayers of desperation we find in our Bible:

Psalm 22:1-2

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

Why art thou so far from helping me,

from the words of my groaning.

O my God, I cry by day, but thou dost not answer;

and by night but find no rest.

Psalm 130:1

Out of the depths I cry out to thee, O Lord!

Lord, hear my voice!

Let thy ears be attentive

to the voice of my supplications!

Psalm 6:2

Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am languishing;

O Lord, heal me, for my bones are troubled.

My soul also is sorely troubled.

But thou, O Lord—how long?

The great apostle St. Paul wrote in his letter to the Christian believers in the Greek city of Corinth about an affliction he had recently suffered. He wrote, “We were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself. Why, we felt that we had received the sentence of death” (2 Corinthians 1:8-9).

We need to remind ourselves that others suffer as we do, and some have greater sorrows than we can even imagine.

One believing woman in a nursing home told me: “I don’t ask, ‘Why me?’ I say, ‘Why not me?’” That’s one way to look at the problem.

Others suffer; why should I be exempt?

That’s a helpful way to look at the problem.

We wish God had made a happier world. After all, if he’s all-powerful, and if he’s all-loving, he should have made a happier world for us to live in.

You can read the Bible from cover to cover, and you won’t find a complete answer to the “why” question.

But you’ll find a lot in the Bible that will help you to deal with your troubles.

You’ll find a lot to assure you that God is with you in your troubles.

You’ll find ways that you can honor God, especially because you have suffered.

You’ll be encouraged to offer your pain up to God and let him use it to bless other people.

You’ll find that, while this world seems to be a “vale of tears,” there’s another world in which our Lord will wipe away all our tears.

I. In Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians Paul tells of an amazing experience he had had 14 years before.

A. He had been caught up into heaven and seen wonderful things—things that were too astonishing to tell about.

If Paul had been writing nowadays, he might have been tempted to write a book about his experience, and it maybe would become a best-seller and make him rich.

But he knew that what he had seen and experienced wasn’t something to boast about.

And then he had a setback. He tells about it in 2 Corinthians 12:7-10.

“And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me.”

We don’t know what Paul’s affliction was. Some think that he had malaria. Some think it may have been partial blindness, or chronic fever, or maybe an affliction of the mind.

But we know that it was something very painful, because he calls it a “thorn in the flesh.”

He didn’t call it a “sticker,” he called it a “thorn,” and thorns are very painful.

Maybe you have a thorn in the flesh—some kind of pain or affliction that torments. Most of us do, if we’ve lived as long as we have.

B. Notice, Paul didn’t blame God. He says, “A thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me…”

Some people think that it is God who afflicts them. Maybe sometimes it is.

Maybe sometimes God gives us pain to get out attention, or to correct some sin in our life.

But Paul doesn’t blame God. He puts the blame on Satan.

But Paul figured out a purpose for his “thorn in the flesh.” It was to keep him from being too elated. It was, in other words, a lesson in humility.

One of the best things we can do when trouble comes is to ask ourselves: “What can I learn from this affliction?”

Maybe we can say like Paul: “It will help me to be humble.”

Several years ago my young granddaughter was talking about her grades. I said, “It’s good for you to get a bad grade now and then. It will help you to be humble.”

She said, “Grandpa, I’m humble enough.”

We may think we’re humble enough, but the truth is that we need constantly to learn that lesson.

Humility is not to think about ourselves more highly than we ought to think.

Humility is to constantly depend on God.

II. So Paul prayed about it. Paul was powerful in prayer, but this time he got an answer that surprised him.

A. Paul writes, “Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; but God said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power if made perfect in weakness.’”

I don’t know whether God spoke to Paul in a voice Paul could hear with his ears, or whether God gave Paul an impression in his heart.

God has never spoken to me with a voice I could hear with my ears, but he has spoken to me in the Bible.

He has spoken to me by things wise people have told me.

He has spoken to me in books I have read.

And sometimes he speaks to me in my thoughts while I’m lying awake at night.

And through this story, God also speaks to us. He says, “My grace is sufficient or you…”

“Grace” is one of the great words in the Bible.

“Grace” is the powerful word that includes the entire story of God’s love, active in Christ and the Spirit to do for us humans what we could never do for ourselves.

B. Our afflictions weaken us. And God works in our weakness.

That is why God says, “My strength is made perfect in weakness.”

When we are feeling strong and capable, we depend on ourselves. We don’t have to depend on God.

When we are weak we have to depend on God.

And so Paul says, “I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, 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.”

APPLICATION

There’s nothing I can say—or anything you can read in the Bible—will take the sorrow out of your life.

But there are ways of looking at your troubles, and pains, and losses that will help you to bear them.

When we hold tightly on to God and don’t give up on him, we prove that our faith is real.

We become stronger believers.

We become an example for the weaker ones among us.

When we suffer, we understand better the sorrows of other people. We are able to comfort them because we understand something of what they are experiencing.

When life is good and everything is rosy with us, we hardly need God.

But when our bodies are full of pain and our lives are full of disappointments, we know we need God. These things can make us cling tightly to God.

There’s a saying, “The only whole heart is the broken one.” When our hearts are broken, that is when God can come in and heal our hearts.

I don’t mean that the pain will go away, but God will comfort us and heal our souls and help us to find peace in God.

When our bodies are full of pain and our hearts are full of sorrow, we long for that Better Land where Jesus is, where he has prepared a home for us to be with him for ever.

This world is not our home. We’re not supposed to be totally comfortable here. God is preparing us for glory.

This world isn’t a resort for our pleasure.

It’s more like a hospital for our healing.

It’s more like a school for our learning.

Paul wrote in this same letter to the Corinthians (4:16-18):

“So we do not lose heart.

Even though our outer nature is wasting away,

our inner nature is being renewed day by day.

For this slight momentary affliction

is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure.

because we look not tat what can be seen but at what cannot be seen;

for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”