It’s a very established memory in my mind. I was pastoring in California at the time, and it was a Sunday night set aside for prayer. In our small church, if eight to ten people showed up, that was a good night. But this night took an unexpected turn when Linda—a periodic Sunday morning attender, but not the kind of person who would normally be present for this kind of event—walked in. I could immediately tell something was wrong—her appearance was very disheveled … her eyes were bloodshot. I knew she had a difficult life and wasn’t in a particularly good marriage. But when I walked up to her, I could immediately tell what the problem was—she’d been drinking! You could smell it on her breath. She’d been in recovery and sober for a number of months and had removed all the alcohol from her home. But that afternoon, for reasons she couldn’t explain, she’d gone to a liquor store, purchased some vodka, and got herself drunk. Her remorse was great, and she came to church in this diminished condition because, in her words, “I knew you guys were praying this evening, and I wanted you to pray that God will deliver me from my bondage to alcohol.”
I quickly decided to dispense with the plans I’d put in place and invited everyone to gather around the altar at the front of the church and pray until God moved. Those present knelt, took turns, and bombarded heaven asking God to work in in Linda’s life—to bring glory and honor to Himself by delivering her from this proclivity that caused her such pain and bondage. After about half an hour or so, while others were praying, I was thinking, “How do I bring this thing to an appropriate close if an obvious breakthrough doesn’t come? But before I could , Linda suddenly stood up and said, “He’s done it. God’s delivered me—I know it! I felt something.” With that, we rejoiced and I brought the evening to a close—thanking God for what He’d done and asking Him to give Linda the strength and resolve to walk in victory. From that moment forward, until I wrapped up that pastorate some two or three years later, Linda never had another drink—in fact, she said she was never even tempted to do so. It was an amazing moment!
Compare that to Paula—a lady from the church I pastored in North Carolina. To borrow the language from Jesus’ parable of the talents, she was the proverbial “ten talent person”—incredibly gifted and talented … very warm relationally … extremely successful professionally as the Regional Vice President of a food services company. She was smart, organized, caring, generous, but also very humble-spirited and unpretentious. She and her husband Raymond were people that were an absolute privilege to pastor. Paula had an autistic older sister, and the grace and kindness with which she related to her was beautiful to watch. Lisa was unable to live on her own and Paula knew that, when her parents passed away, care of Lisa would fall to her. And she didn’t mind in the least. So, you can imagine what a shock it was when, at the age of 42, Paula was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer and given six months to live. As a church we prayed … we anointed with oil … did everything we knew to do, inviting God to step in and miraculously turn things around. Paula expressed great faith and demonstrated a tremendous attitude. And while she fought bravely and ended up holding on for 18 months, one of the last things I did before leaving that pastorate was conduct her funeral. In this instance, our prayers and petitions went unheeded.
One of the things I struggle with is why God chose to honor our prayers for Linda and intervene in her life and not do so for Paula. If you’ve walked with God for any length of time, you’ve undoubtedly dealt with the reality of unanswered prayer and why a God who can supposedly do anything sometimes says “yes” and on other occasions says “no.” Is there something about the faith of the people involved? Is there something about the manner in which we prayed that caused a different result? Or is this something we need to chalk up to God being God and know that, in spite of our best intentions and desire to understand, there are some things this side of heaven that we will never be able to fully get our minds around?
If we walk with God for any length of time, we’re going to encounter this reality. Look at the apostle Paul. Acts 19:11-12 says of Paul’s ministry in the city of Ephesus, “God did extraordinary miracles through Paul, so that even handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick, and their illnesses were cured and the evil spirits left them.” But in 2 Timothy 4:19-20, when Paul is closing out his brief letter to Timothy with a few personal remarks, he says, “Greet Priscilla and Aquila and the household of Onesiphorus. Erastus stayed in Corinth, and I left Trophimus sick in Miletus.” When I read those words, the first thought I have is why didn’t Paul just pull out a hanky and place it on the guy like Acts 19 tells us he did in Ephesus? How do we deal with it when God doesn’t answer prayer? How do we move forward and not discard our faith when He doesn’t orchestrate a breakthrough? For if we don’t learn how to handle these kinds of circumstances, we’ll become fatalistic … or blame ourselves for not doing something right … or stop praying altogether … or—worst case scenario—decide there isn’t a God at all. But if we can learn how to respond to a “no” or a no answer from God in an appropriate and suitable way, we’ll come away from the process with a deepened and more intimate connection with God.
With that in mind, I want us to look at a passage of Scripture:
I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows—was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell. I will boast about a man like that, but I will not boast about myself, except about my weaknesses. Even if I should choose to boast, I would not be a fool, because I would be speaking the truth. But I refrain, so no one will think more of me than is warranted by what I do or say, or because of these surpassingly great revelations. Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from 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 about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:2-10)
Paul begins this section in a rather odd way. It’s clear by the end of the section he’s speaking about himself, but he starts out by referring to himself in third person—“I know a man who …” instead of “I”. And then he references an unforgettable and memorable encounter with God that happened some 14 years previous. If you look at the previous chapter, it’s clear he doesn’t want to come off as blowing his own horn unnecessarily—chapter 11 closed out with that memorable section about the numerous hardships he endured over the years in his service to the Lord—robberies, shipwrecks, insults, opposition, beatings, attempted stonings—you name it. His life is a catalogue of resistance and antagonism. So he won’t come off as patronizing and condescending, he couches his words in third person.
But he doesn’t get very far for, by v. 5, it’s clear he’s talking about himself. And he proceeds to pull back the curtain and welcome us into a very private and painful reality in his life—a condition he calls “a thorn in the flesh.” What was it? We don’t know. He doesn’t divulge the essence or nature of this malady. My guess is it was so obvious to his original audience that, when they saw him, it was immediately apparent. All we know is (1) it made him miserable. He referred to it in v. 7 as “messenger of Satan that tormented him—i.e., it was something Satan used to wreak havoc in his life … to try to get him to doubt God or question the depth of His care. (2) On three separate occasions, he prayed to God to have this thing removed from his life and, on all three occasions, the answer was “no.” This guy who’d been a channel of the supernatural in numerous other people’s lives—who’d been used by God to facilitate the miraculous in the lives of some people he encountered during the course of his life’s journey and ministry—when he petitioned God about realizing a similar breakthrough in his own life, the answer he got was “no”.
What can we learn from this? First—I think we have to acknowledge that we’ve all got our unique thorns. We don’t know what Paul’s was, so we can’t say whether ours lines up and aligns with his. But we’ve all got them. Maybe, for us, it’s financial pressure—we made some unwise decisions early in our adult years and dug a really big hole that we’ve never been able to fully get out of to where we’re always barely scraping to get by. Maybe it’s a physical or mental condition—anxiety … depression … a crippling sense of fear … OCD. Maybe it’s a broken relationship … or a job-related thing … or a person who constantly puts us down and leaves us feeling devalued or less than. Maybe it’s something going on in the world—a situation we continually bump up against that we lack the power to do anything meaningful in terms of changing or resolving it. I don’t know what it is, but I believe each and every one of us has something going on in our life that we would classify as a “thorn”—something that torments and plagues us … something that Satan uses to discourage and demoralize us.
Whatever your thorn is, noticed that, according to v. 8, Paul prayed three times for God to deliver him. I’m not thinking he only prayed on three occasions; it was probably something he prayed about repeatedly. If I’m reading the passage right, it appears this thorn entered his life sometime after this blissful vision that happened some 14 years previously. Paul prayed about it over and over but, on at least three distinct occasions, he prayed specifically for God to eliminate this thing from his life. “Lord, please, I beg you—take this thing away from me.” “God—I know you have the power and that you love me. Take away this torment.” “Father—you know how frustrating and difficult it is for me to do what you’ve called me to do because of this limitation. Please eliminate this from my life.” And the answer, on each occasion, was “no.”
But the answer Paul got—the response he received—was something so profound it’s still encouraging those of us who are followers of Jesus some 2000 years later. What did he learn? But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (v. 9a). “The answer to your prayers, Paul—all three of your prayers—is ‘no’. But here’s something even better. My grace will be enough for you. My divine power is going to keep you going—in fact, when my power comes alongside and meshes with your weakness, something wonderful will happen. People will look at your life and think, ‘How does he keep going? How does he keep trusting God when he has this debilitating presence—this limiting factor—in his life? It has to be God; there can’t be any other explanation.’”
There’s a sense in which, had God chosen to liberate and deliver Paul, people who observed his life might look at it and conclude, “This guy had the benefit of a top-notch education. He had some privileges and advantages available to him that aren’t a part of my life. Faith may work for a guy like him, but it’ll never work for me.” Had the answer to his prayer been ‘yes’, people’s attention could have easily been drawn to him and not to the Lord. But by virtue of him not having his prayer answered—by continuing to have to deal with this obvious frailty in his life—perhaps people concluded, “Wow! God must really be real to be able to use somebody that powerfully in spite of his shortcomings and deficiencies.” The long-term presence of the thorn caused people to conclude God was genuinely at work in his life. To have been delivered from the thorn could have resulted in him sacrificing the perceived sense of Christ’s power upon his life.
As it relates to you and me, I believe that whenever we encounter a restrictive or limiting factor in our life, we should pray. We should ask God to deliver us … to facilitate a change in the situation … to do something to where we no longer have to deal with the negative consequences it creates. There’s nothing wrong with praying for God to move in this fashion—He’s certainly capable! But we should also be open to the fact His answer may be ‘no’—that He may choose to bring glory to Himself not by freeing and delivering us, but by giving us the courage and fortitude to bear up under the difficulty. We should keep asking God until we get a “yes” … or until he gives us the grace to live w/ the fallout of a “no.”
Yesterday was Pentecost Sunday—the “birthday of the church” if you will. Pentecost marks that breakthrough moment in history we read about in Acts 2 where the Holy Spirit burst onto the scene and filled the lives of those who’d been gathered and praying in the Upper Room. They went out into the streets, testified to the death and resurrection of Jesus, and many people placed their faith in Him, resulting in the birth of the church. The Holy Spirit became a constant and permanent presence that was available to all and not just a sporadic presence that was limited to a select few people on special occasions.
When we think about the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, there are a number of things that come to mind: The Spirit regenerates—renews that sin-stained heart of ours and resets it so we can live a life free of the guilt and shame of our past. The Spirit cleanses—purifies our character so we can manifest a “Jesus frame of mind” and “Jesus consistent actions” in any situation or circumstance. The Spirit guides—nudges us so we can sense the mind of Christ when we find ourselves in a perplexing or baffling situation. The Spirit convicts—lets us know we’re approaching dangerous territory that could threaten or compromise our relationship w/ God. The Spirit illumines—enables us to perceive the things of God and discern what’s true in a puzzling or confusing situation. But in addition to all those things, I’d add one more. The Spirit empowers—enables us to live a grace-filled, victorious life when God says ‘no’ to our prayers. The Spirit makes it possible for us to manifest a resilient and unsinkable attitude in the midst of the unwanted realities of life.
We should always pray and seek a “yes” from God as it relates to the numerous thorny issues in our lives. But the good news is that, when the answer is ‘no’, we can still rejoice—not fake rejoice … not “plaster-a-forced-smile-on-your-face-while-saying-everything’s-OK” rejoice, but genuinely and truly rejoice. This is not some masochistic arrangement where we derive perverted pleasure from pain. It’s recognizing that, many times, the winsomeness and beauty of who God is can be more fully discerned by those around us through a ‘no’ than a ‘yes’. And if the primary purpose of our life is to bear witness to the majesty and grandeur of God before a skeptical and suspicious world, our attitude ought to be, “OK God, bring on the ‘no’. And if that is your answer, give me the strength to represent you well in this process.”