My Grace is Sufficient
MESSAGE SUMMARY:
All of us face difficulties in our lives, but how we respond to our difficulties determines the blessedness of the life that we enjoy.
Paul, in Corinthians 12:7b-10, tells us that he is stricken with a “thorn in the flesh. A messenger from Satan to harass me”. Paul pleaded with God to remove this “thorn” and life difficulty from his life. However, God’s response to Paul, and to us is: “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 {your} 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.". God’s Grace is enough; it is all we need for our lives’ difficulties. However, this teaching from 2 Corinthians 12 is “counter worldly”, and it flies in the face of everything that we have ever been taught outside of the Gospel.
This teaching from Paul is like exercising with weights – when we begin to face our muscle “burn” in our exercise, we can either stop our exercise and gain nothing; or we can push through the difficulty of the “burn” to benefit from our exercise. As the workout slogan summarizes Paul in 2 Corinthians 12: ”No pain; no gain!”. In other words, when we encounter our life’s difficulty, we push through the pain and rely on the God’s Grace to make us even stronger in our faith and to realize God’s power, which is manifest in us and through us. We can not live a spiritual life only in our own strength.
Paul, throughout his Epistles, illustrated the Kingdom of God through God’s focus on human weakness to use His power to create strength. For example in 1 Corinthians 1:27-29, Paul describes God’s manifestation of His power through earthly weakness: “But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.”.
From Paul’s teaching and from the way he lived his life, we learn that we should accept and own our limitations; however, we should and can push through these limitations and constraints because the Grace and power of God empower us to greater heights than what our capabilities, without God, permit us.
We need to repent and change our way of thinking and to become, like Paul, completely yielded to the Lord. Paul turned every one of his Life’s difficulties into a manifestation of God’s power and glory. Paul was a servant of God 100% of the time!
When you are weak, God is strong in you because, as God told Paul: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in {your} weakness.”.
TODAY’S PRAYER: Lord, Sabbath rest is truly an unbelievable gift! Thank you that there is nothing I can do to earn your love; it comes without any strings attached. As I close my eyes for these few minutes before you, all I can say is, thank you! In Jesus’ name, amen. Scazzero, Peter. Emotionally Healthy Spirituality Day by Day (p. 133). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.
TODAY’S AFFIRMATION: I affirm that because of what God has done for me in His Son, Jesus, I AM A CHILD OF GOD. Yet to all who received Him, to those who believed in His Name, He gave the right to become children of God-- children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God. (John 1:12f).
SCRIPTURE REFERENCE (ESV): 2 Corinthians 10:2-12; 2 Corinthians 11:4 -13; 2 Corinthians 11:23-33; 2 Corinthians 12:1-10; 1 Corinthians 1:17-25; 1 Corinthians 1:26-31; 1 Corinthians 2:1-5; 2 Corinthians 4:7-11; Philippians 4:13. (Click the blue below to read the full Bible text for these scripture references in BOLD.).
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