Three Prayers, Three No's

Today's Scripture

2 Corinthians 12:8-9 — "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."

Mark 14:35-36 — "And going a little farther, he fell on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. And he said, 'Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.'"

The Big Idea

The most successful missionary in church history prayed three times for healing, and God said no. That no was not a verdict on Paul's faith. It was an answer — a real one — and inside it was a promise: God's grace would be enough, and God's power would show up in the very place Paul was weakest. If your healing has not come, this passage is for you.

Reflection

The healer who was not healed

Paul did not have a small problem. He calls it "a thorn... in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me" (2 Corinthians 12:7). We do not know exactly what it was — most likely a chronic physical illness, possibly something else that hurt just as much. We know it would not go away. And we know it hurt badly enough that Paul begged. The word he uses for "pleaded" is the word the Gospels use for desperate people throwing themselves at Jesus' feet.

Here is what makes this stranger. Paul was not a man whose prayers went unanswered. Acts 19:11-12 — "God was doing extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, so that even handkerchiefs or aprons that had touched his skin were carried away to the sick, and their diseases left them." Cloth that brushed this man's skin healed people. And when he prayed three times for his own body, the answer was no.

Paul even tells the Galatians that sickness was part of his story with them: "You know it was because of a bodily ailment that I preached the gospel to you at first" (Galatians 4:13). His illness was not a detour from his ministry. It was the road his ministry traveled on.

If you have been sick or sad for a long time, you have probably met the modern version of the wrong response. Someone in a church hallway lowers their voice and asks whether you have really prayed about it. Someone forwards you a testimony about a miracle, with the unspoken question attached: why not you? Slowly you start to feel like a problem the church does not know where to file. Paul's thorn is God's answer to that hallway. The apostle himself would not have passed our healing tests.

If we cannot account for that — if our theology of healing has no room for an unhealed apostle — then our theology is not the New Testament's theology. John Newton, the former slave-trader who wrote "Amazing Grace," spent decades writing letters to hurting Christians. He compressed this whole truth into one line:

"Everything is needful that he sends; nothing can be needful that he withholds." — John Newton, Letters of John Newton

Needful is an old word for necessary. If God has withheld your healing this long, Newton is saying, then somehow — in ways you may not see for years — the healing is not what you most need right now. That is a hard sentence. Paul's thorn says it can also be a true one.

What the no actually said

Look closely at God's reply, because it is easy to hear it wrong. He does not say, "Your faith is too weak." He does not say, "Claim it more boldly." He does not promise the thorn will be gone by next year. He says: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Grace means God's love and help given to people who did not earn it. Sufficient means enough. Not comfortable — enough. And "made perfect in weakness" does not mean "in spite of weakness." Paul means the power lives in the weak place, the way light lives in a lamp. That is why he can write the strangest sentence in his letters: "For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses... For when I am weak, then I am strong" (2 Corinthians 12:10).

Notice that Paul says he will "boast" of his weaknesses — gladly. He does not hide the thorn from his churches the way we hide diagnoses from our small groups. He puts it in a letter he knows will be read aloud, because the thorn has become the proof of where his power was never coming from in the first place.

Charles Spurgeon, the great London preacher, suffered gout so painful he sometimes had to be carried, plus crushing depression. He knew this passage from the inside:

"I venture to say that the greatest earthly blessing that God can give to any of us is health, with the exception of sickness. Sickness has frequently been of more use to the saints of God than health has." — Charles Spurgeon, Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit

That sounds backwards until you have lived it. Health lets us forget God for weeks at a time. Sickness will not let us forget anything. J.I. Packer, who wrote about weakness near the end of his own life, described how this works:

"God uses chronic pain and weakness, along with other afflictions, as his chisel for sculpting our lives. Felt weakness deepens dependence on Christ for strength each day. The weaker we feel, the harder we lean. And the harder we lean, the stronger we grow spiritually, even while our bodies waste away." — J.I. Packer, Weakness Is the Way

Notice what neither of these men is saying. They are not saying pain is good. They are saying God does his deepest carving in the place we would never have chosen — and that the leaning itself is the strength.

You are allowed to keep asking

Some Christians draw the wrong lesson from Paul's thorn: that asking for healing is somehow unspiritual. The Bible says the opposite. Psalm 6:2 — "Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am languishing; heal me, O Lord, for my bones are troubled." David asks God to heal his actual body. By verse 6 he admits, "I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears." God kept that prayer in the Bible so that sick, exhausted people would have words.

The New Testament gives the church a standing instruction: "Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him" (James 5:14). Asking is not a failure of trust. Asking is trust. You do not beg help from someone you believe is ignoring you.

Jesus even told a story "to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart" (Luke 18:1) — a widow who kept knocking on an unjust judge's door until he answered. If persistence moves even a bad judge, Jesus argues, how much more does it matter to a good Father? Repeated prayer is not nagging God. It is exactly the kind of praying he asked for.

So what do we do with prayers that have been asked for years? Tim Keller, who prayed through his own cancer, put the promise this way:

"God will either give us what we ask or give us what we would have asked for if we knew everything he knows." — Tim Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

Think about a six-year-old asking to drive the car. The father's no is not a weaker form of love than a yes. It is love operating with more information. That does not make the waiting painless. Augustine, the great North African pastor, taught that the waiting itself is doing something in us:

"The entire life of a good Christian is an exercise of holy desire." — Augustine, Homilies on the First Epistle of John

By delaying what we ask for, Augustine says, God stretches the soul the way exercise stretches a muscle — making it large enough to hold what he actually intends to give. You may keep asking. Paul asked three times. You are in good company at any number.

The Son who prayed for the cup to pass

Now go to a garden outside Jerusalem, the night before the cross. Mark 14:35-36 — Jesus "fell on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. And he said, 'Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.'"

Read that slowly. The Son of God asked for the suffering to be taken away. He asked three times, Matthew tells us — the same number as Paul. And the Father said no. Hebrews 5:7 says Jesus prayed "with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard." Heard — and still led to the cross. Being heard and being spared are not the same thing. Jesus knows that from the inside.

This is where Christianity says something no other faith says. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from a Nazi prison cell, put it in six words:

"Only the suffering God can help." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

The God you are praying to about your unhealed body is not a distant manager reviewing requests. He is a God with scars. He prayed the prayer you are praying. He received the no — so that every no you receive would never, ever mean condemnation. Romans 8:32 — "He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?" The cross is God's proof that withholding your healing is not withholding his love.

Amy Carmichael, a missionary to India who spent her last twenty years in chronic pain, confined to her room, wrote a poem about Gethsemane and landed on four words:

"In acceptance lieth peace." — Amy Carmichael, Toward Jerusalem

"Lieth" just means "lies" — peace is found there. Not in pretending the thorn doesn't hurt. Not in giving up asking. In handing the outcome to the Father the way Jesus did: "Yet not what I will, but what you will." That is not weak faith. It is the strongest prayer ever prayed.

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 of 2 Corinthians 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. You do not have to close that gap today. The whole work of this plan is to move slowly across it — and Christ is on both sides of it.