My Strength Is Made Perfect Was an Answer to a Refused Request

I want to say something about my leg before I say anything else, because it changes how the rest of this reads.

The leg is not a mystery and it is not a misfortune. It came from a fall, and the fall came from a night, and the night came from about twenty years of decisions I made with my eyes open. Nobody did this to me. There is no villain in the story of my leg except a man who was in a great hurry to be somewhere that did not exist.

I call it my thorn in my thigh. It is a joke and it is not entirely a joke, and I want to be very careful here, because I am not the apostle Paul and I have never once claimed his mantle by it. He had a thorn in the flesh given because of the abundance of revelations. I have a limp because I fell.

But I have leaned on his sentence for years, and I have watched other people lean on it, and most of the time it gets quoted with the front of it cut off.

So here is the front of it.

He asked three times and the answer was no

Here is the passage, with the request left in.

For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. (2 Corinthians 12:8-9, King James Version)

I besought the Lord thrice. Three times. And the word besought is not casual: it is a word for pleading.

And the answer he got was not the thing he asked for. This is the most important fact about that verse and it is almost always left out. The sentence everybody quotes on posters is the sound of a request being declined.

Which means two things at once, and both matter.

The first is that Paul asked. He was not resigned about it and he did not consider asking to be a failure of faith. He went back three times, which is exactly what Jesus did in a garden about a different cup.

The second is that God said no, and said it kindly, and gave a reason rather than a rebuke.

You are allowed to ask, and Paul asked three times without one word of criticism attached to it. 2 Corinthians 12:8 records the pleading before it records the answer. It is the Spirit of God, Romans 8:26 making intercession with groanings which cannot be uttered, who carries a request a person has already made and had declined.

What sufficient actually means

The word in the answer is doing careful work and it is worth slowing down on.

My grace is sufficient for thee. Sufficient means enough for the purpose. It does not mean pleasant, and it does not mean the situation improves, and it does not mean a person stops wishing it were otherwise.

It means the supply matches the load. That is a promise about capacity rather than about circumstances, and it is the only kind of promise that survives contact with a body that is not going back.

I am going to be plain about something here, because this site is not in the business of selling anybody an outcome. I do not know whether your body improves. Nothing on this page promises that it does, and nothing on this page tells you to stop asking, and if anybody has told you that asking is doubt, they were wrong and I would say so to their face.

You are supplied to the size of the load rather than promised a smaller load. 2 Corinthians 12:9 says my grace is sufficient for thee before it says anything about strength, and it is His Spirit, Ephesians 3:16 strengthening with might in the inner man, who is named for the strengthening that a body may never receive.

The valley of Baca

There is an image in the Psalms about this that I have never heard preached and that I think about constantly.

Blessed is the man whose strength is in thee; in whose heart are the ways of them. Who passing through the valley of Baca make it a well; the rain also filleth the pools. (Psalm 84:5-6)

The valley of Baca means the valley of weeping. It is a dry place on a pilgrim road, a hard stretch everybody going to Jerusalem had to cross.

And what the passage says is not that the valley is removed for these people. It says they make it a well. They pass through the same dry place, and something about their passing turns it into a place where later travelers find water.

That is the most honest picture of a permanent difficulty I have found in Scripture. The dry stretch stays dry. It becomes useful, to somebody else, because a certain kind of person walked through it.

You are able to leave water in a dry place you did not choose to walk through. Psalm 84:6 has them passing through the valley of Baca and making it a well. It is the Holy Spirit, John 7:38 speaking of rivers of living water flowing out of a person, who supplies what a valley cannot produce on its own.

Jesus asks a man a question that sounds insulting

There is a moment at a pool in John that gets misread, and reading it properly matters for anybody who has been carrying something a long time.

A man has been ill thirty eight years. Jesus asks him:

Wilt thou be made whole? (John 5:6)

On the surface it is an absurd question. Of course he does. But thirty eight years is long enough for a condition to become an address, and Jesus, who is never cruel, asks anyway.

And the man's answer is not yes. He explains the logistics. He tells Jesus that he has nobody to help him into the water and that somebody always gets there first. He has an entire operating theory of his situation, worked out over decades, and he leads with it.

Jesus does not argue with the theory. He tells him to get up.

I am not going to pretend that scene answers the question of why some are healed and others carry it. It does not, and anybody who says it does is selling something. What it does is show a Man who asks, who is not embarrassed by a long condition, and who does not require anybody to have their theology tidy before He speaks.

You are being addressed by Somebody who is not put off by how long it has been. John 5:6 has Him asking a man of thirty eight years without one word of impatience. It is the same Spirit, Romans 8:11 quickening our mortal bodies as He wills, who is named for the work no person can command.

And if what you carry has got heavier than the body itself, say it out loud to somebody: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line, which answers every hour there is. Living inside a permanent consequence of your own choices is one of the loneliest rooms there is, and nobody should be in it by themselves.