All Sufficient Grace

 Greetings to you all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ,

     Second Corinthians 12:7-9 says, “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.  And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”

     Things in life don’t always go the way we want them to go.  We would prefer the easy path with all of its fluff instead of the thorny path with rocks and unknown pitfalls.  I have painted the inside of probably twelve different houses.  We rented a lot of different places in our moves from one place to another and usually we had to paint the inside of the place.  I soon got tired of painting as I am not a good painter, but had to do it anyway.  One house had tomato seeds all over the kitchen walls and ceiling from what I guessed to be an explosion of a pressure cooker full of tomatoes.  There have also been times when i simply screamed at the top of my voice in frustration.  Yes, it was not appropriate and probably irritated those that heard it.

     I feel that the passage above shows the apostle Paul with just a tad of frustrat ion in h is life.  He had the thorn in the flesh, that no one knows exactly what it was, but it was irritating him so much that he prayed to God three times for it to be taken from him.. I feel it may have frust rated him because he ws a man of God that had prayed over others and they were cured of diseases and even eutychus was brought back to life after falling out of the third story window.  Our faith gets tried day after day.  We come to God with our heart aches and our problems and find relief by giving them to the Lord only to find more coming the next day and the next and the next.  We often wonder just how much we can bare with the load.  We don’t see what’s taking place.  Our faith is growing day by day as God works in our lives.  Each time we get to that really hard bump in the road, we ask, “How much more can I bear?”  God answers, “My grace is sufficient for thee, ford my stgrength is made perfect in weakness…”  Get the perspective right.  It is God’s grace and it is God’s strength and it is my weakness.   We should never lose hope in the Lord meeting our needs.  What we often do not see, is the growth of our faith from day to day and we can’t always answer why things are the way they are but someday we will know the reason when we stand face to face with Christ our Savior.  Praise God for His sufficient grace.