All too often I fail in my role as leader, lover, protector, provider and pastor of my home. It is when I fail and fall far short of what I’m to do that the Enemy swoops in and affirms my failure and encourages me to quit.
“If you can’t do it well, you might as well not do it at all.”
But is exactly in my failures that I must see the better opportunity to succeed and victoriously complete my God-given role in my home as a strong weak man. The Apostle Paul relates God ordaining a Satan-sent demonic tormenter to work out God’s purpose of keeping Paul from being puffed up because of his trip to heaven. Paul even pleaded for God to remove this “thorn” in his flesh. But in some of the greatest counter-cultural words in the Bible, God says in a very un-American way:
“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12:9a)
Paul’s response is absolutely incredible:
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. (2 Corinthians 12:9b-10)
Paul had discovered what we as men so desperately need to rediscover, that our weaknesses are not for covering up from embarrassment, but in fact they are intentionally allowed by God to drive us to himself! Our weaknesses give us the opportunity to make room for the power of the Resurrected One. Paul learned contentment in the most horrible circumstances. If that was true for Paul, how should we respond to our failures in marriage and parenting? Next time you fail your wife and children, next time you lose your temper, next time you allow your eyes to wander, next time you forgo devotions for the ninth inning on TV, remember that our weakness and failure gives us plenty of room to display the forgiving and liberating power of Christ in our lives and the lives of our family.
Thoughts on this please.
Are thorns always failures?
John 9: 3 Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.4 We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work.5 As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”6 Having said these things, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva. Then he anointed the man’s eyes with the mud7 and said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing.
Jesus brought this man out of his weakness or thorn so that “the works of God maight be displayed”. God showed He has power to heal but there is also fulfillment to vs 4, 5 in showing God’s work through healing the man because a man testifies for the Lord and is called a “disciple” in vs 28.
I know that God works in both ways but I think the key is that God did the healing and He gave the strength back to the mans eyes. So I want to see what Paul saw, that in everything God’s grace is sufficient, totally enough. If He takes the thorn out great if not He is still great. But I shouldn’t be the man that tries to move the thorn that God has left right? Because if I try to move it wouldn’t that be slapping God in the face? So I want to be like Paul in keeping God in His place and in showing God in spite of the thorn. Plus Jesus calls us to be meek (Meek diffined: enduring injury with patience and without resentment) isn’t Paul being meek and isn’t being meek shooing God in away?