Three Prayers, Three No's

Today's Reading

Read 2 Corinthians 12:7-10 carefully — slowly enough to feel it: "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."

Then read Psalm 6:1-7 — David at the end of his strength: "My soul also is greatly troubled. But you, O Lord — how long? Turn, O Lord, deliver my life... I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears."

Read James 5:13-16 on the elders praying for the sick. Notice that James assumes some prayers for healing are answered. Notice also that he does not say all of them are.

Finally read Mark 14:32-36 — Gethsemane. Jesus himself prays three times that the cup might pass. It does not. He drinks it.

Reflection

Paul did not have a small problem.

He calls it "a messenger of Satan to harass me." Whatever the thorn was — most likely a chronic physical affliction, possibly a recurring temptation, certainly something that hurt — it was painful enough that the most theologically robust man in church history pleaded with God three times to take it away. The Greek word he uses is the same one used in the Gospels for desperate prayer. He did not ask casually. He begged.

And the answer was no.

This is the verse that should change everything about how the modern church talks to suffering Christians. Paul did not get healed. The man who raised Eutychus from the dead, who saw the third heaven, whose handkerchiefs were so charged with the Spirit that they healed the sick by proximity (Acts 19:11-12), prayed for himself three times and was told no. If we cannot account for that — if our theology of healing has no room for it — then our theology is not the New Testament's theology.

Notice what God's reply does and does not say. He does not tell Paul his faith is too weak. He does not tell him to claim his healing more aggressively. He does not promise the thorn will be gone next year. He says: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Sufficient is not the same as comfortable. Made perfect in weakness is not the same as in spite of weakness — Paul means through weakness, located in weakness, weakness as the place where the power lives.

Charles Spurgeon, who battled depression severe enough to keep him out of the pulpit for weeks at a stretch, and gout severe enough that some Sundays he was carried to his chair, knew what kind of strange ministry comes out of unhealed pain. "I have learned to kiss the wave that throws me against the Rock of Ages." Read it again. He did not learn to escape the wave. He did not learn to pretend the wave was not real. He learned that the wave he kept resenting was the very thing pressing him into the only refuge there was. His "Lectures to My Students" — required reading for generations of pastors — devotes an entire chapter to "The Minister's Fainting Fits," in which he describes seasons of crushing depression with a candor almost unmatched in Christian history. "The mind can descend far lower than the body, for in it there are bottomless pits. The flesh can bear only a certain number of wounds and no more, but the soul can bleed in ten thousand ways, and die over and over again each hour." This is not a failed Christian writing. This is the Prince of Preachers describing his ordinary working life.

J.I. Packer, whose Knowing God shaped a generation, made the point with characteristic clarity: real Christian wisdom is found not in our natural strengths but in tracking God's will through the territory we did not choose. Strength is not the Christian's competence. Faithfulness is. And faithfulness is sometimes simply showing up tomorrow, sick, anxious, and unhealed, to do the small work in front of you because Christ is there too.

What does this mean practically?

It means that if your prayer for healing has not been answered yet, you are not necessarily out of fellowship with God. You may be more in fellowship with him, more inside the place his grace is doing its strange work, than the people whose prayers were answered the first time.

It means that you are allowed to keep praying. Paul prayed three times. James 5 still tells us to call the elders. Jesus prayed in Gethsemane that the cup might pass. None of them treated their prayer for relief as faithless.

It means that you are allowed to say, after the third no, "your grace is sufficient" — without pretending that it does not still hurt. Paul did not stop limping after God's answer. He boasted of his weakness, but he kept calling it weakness. The Bible never asks us to relabel our suffering as a blessing. It asks us to trust that God can do, in the middle of the suffering, something stranger and better than its removal.

This week we are going to walk slowly through this territory — the silence after prayer, the long obedience of chronic illness, the discipline of complaint, the surprising place weakness takes in Christian discipleship. Today's job is just to let Paul's three prayers and three no's be exactly what they are: a permission slip to bring God your unhealed body, your unhealed mind, your unhealed family, and your unhealed grief, and to be told you are not, after all, the failed Christian the rest of the church was making you feel like.

Going Deeper

Write down, on paper, the specific thorn you would most like God to remove. Be honest about it. Then write next to it the words from 12:9: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Sit with the gap between what you wrote and what God said to Paul. The whole work of this plan is to move slowly across that gap.