2 Corinthians 12.7-10: How Afflictions Become Blessings

INTRODUCTION

Are you afflicted? Tormented with pains that just won’t go away?

I never thought old-age would be like this.

Jesus said he came that we might have life and have it abundantly. But didn’t say that life would be comfortable. He never said we wouldn’t experience afflictions.

St. Paul wrote that neither tribulation, nor distress, nor persecution, nor famine, … or peril, or sword…or anything else in all creation will separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

But he didn’t say we wouldn’t experience those things.

I have a little prayer that I use. It was written by St. Bernadette of Lourdes, who lived from 1844-1879.

This is the prayer:

Christ Jesus, we beg you by your loneliness,

not that you will spare us affliction,

but that you will not abandon us in it.

When we encounter affliction,

teach us to see you in it as our sole comforter.

Let affliction strengthen our faith,

fortify our hope, and purify our love.

Grant us grace to see how we can use our affliction to your glory,

and to desire no other comforter but you,

our Savior, Strengthener, and Friend.

Afflictions don’t mean that God has forsaken us.

The prayers in the Bible are full of cries to God from hurting people.

I want to talk about a part of scripture that has been especially important to me lately.

It’s in the 12th chapter of 2 Corinthians.

I. About seven years after met the risen Christ on the Road to Damascus, St. Paul had a wonderful experience.

A. This experience was a great honor and a great inspiration to him. But it appears that he didn’t tell anyone until years later.

People today who have such experiences write books, or go on TV with their stories. But God didn’t let Paul to fall into that trap. Instead God permitted Satan’s messenger to send a humiliating affliction that brought Paul down to earth.

Here’s how Paul recounts his visit to Paradise:

“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.

“On behalf of this man I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses. Though if I wish to boast, I shall not be a fool, for I shall be speaking the truth. But I refrain from it, so that no one may think more of me than he sees in me or hears from me.”

(I need to take time out to explain what the word “boast” means here. My dictionary defines “boast” as “to talk with excessive pride and self-satisfaction about one’s achievements, possessions, or abilities.”

But Paul isn’t boasting of his own achievements. He is boasting in his weaknesses. God shows his power by working through our human weaknesses.

What Paul calls “boasting” is an expression of confidence, joy and thanksgiving to God.)

The spiritual experience God gave Paul earlier in his life as a believer was the greatest experience he had ever had. His visit to Paradise was a great honor and inspiration to him. This revelation from God helped him to endure the difficulties and dangers he would face as he continued on his journey of discipleship.

B. This visit to Paradise was for Paul alone, not for him to brag about to other people. So Paul had kept quiet about his experience for 14 years. Now he writes about it. He mentions it to tell his friends the lesson he had learned from it.

When God is especially gracious and honors us with some unusual experience of his goodness, it is easy for us to get the idea that we are virtuous and take the credit that belongs to God.

God uses weakness and pain to keep us humble.

II. So God allowed Paul to experience an especially painful affliction immediately after his glorious experience.

A. He writes:

“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, to keep me from being too elated.

“Three times I besought 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.’

“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.”

B. Paul doesn’t say what the “thorn in the flesh” was, and through the ages, people have speculated what it might have been.

Some think it was a disease of his eyes because in one letter he comments on how large his handwriting was. Charlotte’s mother had trouble with her eyes, and she liked to think that that was what Paul was referring to.

A famous archeologist and Bible historian—Sir William Ramsay—speculated that Paul had attacks of malaria, which was common in some of the areas he visited.

Two chapters before, in this same letter, Paul quotes some of his detractors as saying, “His letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptable” (10:10). So some speculate that Paul had a speech impediment.

C. Paul’s affliction was a thorn, not a prickle, and it was embedded in his flesh. The Greeks used the same word for a stake.

It hurt. It tormented him. It was persistent and humiliating—something he would have to endure the rest of his life. And he hated it and prayed that that God would take it out.

D. Notice that Paul called his thorn “a messenger of Satan.”

Some people think that our troubles come from God. They say things like, “God never sends you anything you can’t handle,” as if God torments his children to test their faith and love.

But even though God doesn’t send our troubles upon us, he can still use them to make us better people than we would be if life were always tranquil for us.

Every affliction is a “messenger of Satan” because Satan uses afflictions to pry us away from God. We all know people who have been so weighed down by their troubles that they have given up on God.

But it is also true that sometimes when people are afflicted they draw near to God and cling to him all the more tightly.

E. An example:

Craig the leader of our Sunday school class is a young man in his 30s. He has been a believer for only three or four years. He found Jesus as his Lord and Savior only months before his kidneys failed and he had to go on dialysis. He said his faith saved him from despair and helped him through that experience.

I asked him why that difficult experience so soon after he had found faith didn’t make him doubt God. He said that thought hadn’t occurred to him.

But sometimes afflictions destroy weak faith and cause the sufferer to wonder whether there really is a God, after all.

Now Craig is living with a kidney-pancreas transplant and the kidney is gradually failing. But Craig is strong in his faith. And he lives his faith. He works at church with the high school youth, and the young people love him. He works with our church’s ministry for mentally-challenged adults. He coaches 6-year-old soccer. He serves in other ways as I can’t remember just now.

I have followed Jesus for 68 years, but I look up to Craig as an example of discipleship.

III. God said, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

A. “Grace” is God’s free, active love—the gift that makes us children of God and gives us strength to live for Jesus to the very end. By grace we experience the life of Christ in our own bodies. By grace we have assurance that this life is not all there is but that God has reserved for us a resurrection life that is joyful beyond all imagining.

B. So Paul gloried in his infirmities—his weaknesses—he rejoiced that his afflictions gave him a way to honor God—to become strong in faith.

He writes, “I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest on me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; or when I am weak, then I am strong.”

APPLICATION

This story has become important to me because I am feeling increasingly the pains of old age. I try to remember that afflictions become blessings if I can learn from them.

Here are some of the things I think about when I am hurting:

When I am hurting, I ask God to use my pain to draw me close to himself. I offer my pain to God and ask him to teach me the meaning of the afflictions that I am called upon to endure.

I ask God to use my afflictions to prove the reality of my faith. If I can suffer and remain faithful, that proves that God is real to me.

I think of others who suffer far worse than I do—the blind, the paralyzed, the deaf, the homeless, those afflicted in their minds—and especially those without Christ. I pray for them.

And I remind myself that this world is not my home. Afflictions help me get in the mood for putting off my tired, hurting body and putting on the new one I will receive from the Father in the Paradise of God.

Here are some of my favorite words from the same letter to the Corinthians:

So we do not lose heart,

Though our outer nature is wasting away,

our inner nature is being renewed every day.

For this slight momentary affliction

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

because we look not at what can be seen

but at what cannot be seen;

for what can be seen is temporary,

but what cannot be seen is eternal.

(2 Cor. 4:16-18)