My Grace Is Sufficient for Thee

The letter has an address, an occasion and a fight in it, and all three change how this passage reads.

The address is Corinth, and the passage is 2 Corinthians 12:7-10. A large, wealthy, argumentative port city, and a church Paul had planted and then spent years in painful correspondence with.

The occasion is that other teachers had arrived. Paul calls them, with heavy irony, the very chiefest apostles. They were impressive, they were fluent, and they were saying that Paul was not.

And here is the fight, quoted in the letter itself, in what they were saying about him.

For his letters, say they, are weighty and powerful; but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible.2 Corinthians 10:10, King James Version

That is the problem in the room. A church is being persuaded that its founder is unimpressive in person.

So Paul does something he clearly hates. He starts boasting, under protest, calling it foolishness twice, listing beatings and shipwrecks and a night and a day in the deep. And then, at the top of the list, where the strongest item should go, he puts this.

The passage will not tell you what it was

Here is the text.

And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me.2 Corinthians 12:7-8, King James Version

People have guessed at the thorn for nineteen centuries. Eye trouble, malaria, a speech impediment, an opponent, a recurring temptation. Every one of those is a guess, and the passage does not say, and I am not going to tell you which it was, because I do not know and neither does anybody else.

What the passage does say is three things about it.

It was given. Passive. He does not describe himself as having caught it or caused it.

It was a messenger of Satan to buffet me, which is violent language, the word for being struck repeatedly with a fist.

And it had a stated purpose: lest I should be exalted above measure, said twice in one verse, which is a thing Paul does when he wants a clause to be unmissable.

Now watch what he did about it.

I besought the Lord thrice.

Three times. Not once in passing. He asked, seriously, and then again, and then again. The same number of times Jesus prayed in Gethsemane, which anybody in the early church would have heard immediately.

You are not being ignored, you are being answered. 2 Corinthians 12:8-9 has three requests and a reply, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps answered and granted from collapsing into one word for a person who has been counting their own askings.

And here is the answer.

And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.2 Corinthians 12:9, King James Version

Is sufficient. Present tense, and it is worth noticing that the tense in the original is a settled, standing one: it is sufficient and it continues to be, as an established fact rather than a promise about later.

And the thorn does not go. That is the plain reading and I will not soften it. Nothing in the chapter suggests it was ever removed. Paul goes on writing letters with it, and the last we hear of the man he still has it.

You have had a settled answer land on an unresolved situation. 2 Corinthians 12:9 gives the sufficiency in the present tense over a thorn that never left, and the same Spirit who kept both facts in one verse is the reason nobody has to choose between them.

I want to sit with what three times means, because it is the number that hurts.

Three is not a lot of praying by anybody's standard. It is not a man who gave up quickly, and it is also not a man who spent forty years on it. What three does is establish that this was a considered, repeated, serious request from somebody with every reason to expect it to be granted, and that he stopped asking after the answer came.

He stopped because he had an answer. Not because he ran out of faith and not because he gave up.

You are not out of faith because the asking stopped, and Paul stops at three inside the same chapter where he calls himself an apostle. 2 Corinthians 12:8 records the number without an apology anywhere near it, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that from reading as a surrender.

You are allowed to stop asking when something has been said, and Paul stops at three without one word of apology. The written account moves straight from the third request to the reply and then to his conclusion, and it is His Spirit who makes that a permission rather than a defeat.

And then the sentence he builds out of it, which is the most defiant thing in the letter.

Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.

He takes the item his opponents were using against him and puts it at the top of his own list.