Sufficient Grace- One of the reasons II Corinthians 12 is so meaningful is that it teaches all of us that God’s grace is what carries us through suffering.
One of the heartwrenching questions of life is, how do you not only explain, but live through trials,involving suffering? The passage concludes my grace is sufficient for you. That’s the answer that Paul received from the Lord. Paul went to God three times, pleading that this thorn in the flesh would be taken away. And so, the question is, how do you live through trials, involving suffering, specifically illness or disease or chronic conditions?
We met a family around 2012 whose newborn was misdiagnosed. The level of bilirubin in the blood caused serious problems. Now the child has special needs and the family has all of these extra tasks they do in order to care for the child. It is a lifelong trial. We think, “Why is this happening to me or my family?” Or what’s the purpose? Wouldn’t it be easier if we could know what the purpose is? We want to know reason behind certain elements of physical suffering.
Or we just wake up and we think, “how can I function daily with this condition or with this messenger of Satan, the thorn that Paul talks about?” People of faith have spectrums of beliefs or practices regarding sickness, faith and medicine. The two ends of a pendulum so to speak, if it were to swing from one extreme to the other.
One Extreme View- Pursue medicine instead of healing from God
This view says God does not heal miraculously today. Miracles ended with the signs and wonders of the apostles. God now has provided medicine and we live in a scientific era. And so we should just simply use medicine. That’s one extreme view.
Another extreme view- Healing is more important than living by Sufficient Grace
Another view of many different groups actually is that God wants you to be healed. You do not need medicine; it would be sinful of you even to use medicine, and that’s the promotion of the Christian Scientist-Church of Christ Scientist, or Christian Science, which is neither Christian nor scientific, interestingly.
We’ll talk about that a little bit later, but the Achilles heel of both extremes is what happens when you cannot get relief. How would each of those extremes answer a lack of healing? What do you attribute it to when you can’t get relief?
If you say that God does not heal today, then what do you say to someone who cannot get relief?The answer ends up being, “You’re not pursuing the right treatment, you’re not doing the right things. You haven’t found out the right information. You need this or that.”
The answer that the faith healers would give is this: “Something must be wrong with your understanding.” Or, ” You don’t have enough faith,” or something like that. In Christian Science, the term ‘belief’ is a mental illusion. A Christian Scientist attributes any disease to wrong belief. They will say things like, “Well, so, and so is suffering from a belief of cancer.”
That’s how much they distance the spiritual from the physical. Physical suffering is an illusion in Christian Science. They will say you need to get in touch with God’s love to a higher degree. They will say you need to achieve a higher level of awareness so that that the illness does not exist.
Other Messages on 2 Corinthians-
The Ecstacy and the Agony- Ray Stedman (2 Corinthians 12:1-10)