Thankful for a Thorn [Part 1]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright.

In order to be fulfilled in this world, the primary thing you need to do is change your circumstances. That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light. I'm Daniel Britt, excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series, Victorious Living, as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program, I want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. It's a book written by Pastor Alan called God Moments, and it can be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries.

As you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. Contact us at PastorAlan.org. That's PastorAlan.org. Or call 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. More on this later in the program. But right now, let's get started with today's teaching.

Here is Alan Wright. Are you ready for some good news? If you're in the middle of a spiritual battle, it doesn't mean you're outside the will of God. It probably means you're right in the middle of it.

We're in 2 Corinthians again today, and we're at chapter 12 to talk about the famous thorn in the flesh, Paul's thorn in the flesh, 2 Corinthians chapter 12, verse 1 is where we are. I must go on boasting, Paul writes, though there's nothing to be gained by it. What he's saying is I've got to do this. I don't want to do this.

I can't believe I'm doing this. I've got to tell you about some of the spiritual revelations I've had is what he's saying. There's nothing to be gained by it, but I'll go on to visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a man in Christ.

He's speaking now in the third person about himself. I know a man in Christ who 14 years ago was caught up to the third heaven, whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know. God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into paradise whether in the body or out of the body, I don't know.

God knows. And he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter. On behalf of this man, I will boast, but on my behalf, I will not boast except to my weaknesses. Though if I should wish to boast, I would not be a fool for I would be speaking the truth, but I refrain from it so that no one may think more of me than he sees in me or hears from me. So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited.

Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave 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 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, I am strong. Some years ago, the story was told that there was a fishing company, they were sending cod across the country from the east coast to the west, and they were trying to find the best way to deliver it fresh. At first they just froze it, and they had complaints about its taste after it had been frozen. So then they tried just putting the cod into some water and send it across, but they found that by the time it got there, the fish had lost its texture, become kind of mushy, and it still had a stale taste to it. So somebody had the idea, evidently, that they would put a catfish in there who was sort of a predator of the cod, and let them swim around together all the way over there with this one fish chasing the other fish the whole time, so that they're kind of being chased the whole way, and by the time that they got over there, they were tasting fresh, they'd just come out of the sea. And the moral of this story is, unless something's chasing you, you're liable to become mushy and stale.

It's strange how we don't tend to do things unless we need to do them. I don't know why this caught my attention, but I was observing at the beach the seagulls. They have to be the laziest creature on the face of the earth because have you ever noticed that a seagull who could fish the wide open blue sea for all the fish it wants will come and just stand there forever if some human has a sandwich or some cheese doodles on the beach? Now you see this.

It's amazing. I don't know how they'd know what kind of instinctive radar they've got built in if some toddler's got some cheese doodles down on the beach like was the case near me, and you just hate it when it happens because you're like, oh, man, put on the hat and get under the umbrella. The birds are coming. And how they know, as soon as you break out those cheese doodles, there's boom, there's three, four, five gulls there, and within about 10 seconds, here come the gulls all down the beach. What do they got a little radio in their ear?

Break our one-niner. We got some cheese doodles down here north of the pier. It's a green alert, green alert. It's a child. It's a child that will be dropping and throwing of the noodles. And next thing you know, there's a hundred seagulls who come and get within a reasonably safe distance and just sit there. And I was watching these birds, and I thought, how long are they going to sit there just hoping that the child will drop a cheese doodle or something?

They sat there for about a half hour. Now these birds have wings. They can fly over 20 miles an hour. They have excellent eyesight, far better than a human. One of the only birds that has eyes that can move around in its socket the way human eyes do. They're smart enough to know how to pick up a clam, drop it down into a hard rock so they can get to the meat of the clam. They even know and have been seen to have a tapping motion on the ground in certain areas that causes worms to come up so they can get them.

These are pretty smart birds, and they can fly, and they can see, and they can fish for the millions and millions of fish that are out in the sea. But if there's a chance that they can just stand there and have a cheese doodle dropped in their mouth, they'll stand there all day long. We're too much like the gulls. We tend to just do the things that we need to do. And if you don't need to do it, then you probably don't do it. Have you ever noticed that about human nature? God knows that about our human nature. That's just kind of the way we are.

If there's something that we need to work on, unless we have a sense of passion or a need for it, we don't really tend to go for it. We laugh in our house because the first church I served in Durham, there was an old man there. His name was Claude Harris. And Claude was a remarkable, one of the most positive, energetic old people I'd ever been around in my whole life. He was in his 80s, and he still plowed his garden with a mule. He worked all the time. He was positive all the time, and I think it might have been at his 85th birthday. I just asked him, I said, Claude, what is the secret? You know, I was a very young man at the time. I said, what is the secret?

Here you are. You're sharp as a tack. You're active every day. You're still working your garden.

You seem to have, I said, and how do you, what's the secret to such health at your age? And he said, unforgettable, he said, you know how when at the end of a long day you feel tired and you just feel like maybe sitting down on the couch, maybe just watching a TV show, just kind of sitting there. You know how you feel like that?

I said, oh, yeah, I know that. He said, don't. Get up.

Do something. So in our household we always quote Claude. Any time somebody just sits down, get up, do something, what would Claude say right now? Well, what he's saying is if you don't use it, you'll lose it, but we're going to talk about something today that is a bit deeper than that. The point of all this is to say if in the natural realm of things a seagull won't even use its wings unless it feels like it has to and a human being won't grow unless you feel like you need to, how much more so in things of the Spirit, the deepest things of life?

Could it be that unless we have a sense of urgency and need to draw upon the grace and power of God that we aren't likely to do so, or at least not to the depths that God wants us to go? And I think that's really what Paul is describing in this text. It's a text in which he really is talking about three different things here. He's talking about unspeakable glorious revelations, and he spends some time talking about that.

We'll talk about that. And then he talks about an excruciating relentless thorn, something that's intensely painful and won't go away, just keeps happening over and over. And then he talks about a surprising powerful grace, unspeakable glorious revelations, excruciating relentless thorn, surprising powerful grace. That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. When you see God's faithfulness yesterday, you'll find it easier to trust Him tomorrow. Your life is full of God moments.

And through Alan Wright's teaching series and book, you'll have a treasure map to help you discover them all. When you make a gift, we'll send you a very special bundle. It's Alan Wright's faith-building book, God Moments, and the CD album of the series that he has preached on the subject. We'll send you both when you make your gift today. It's time to discover your God moments from yesterday and be filled with fresh faith for today.

Call us at 877-544-4860 or come to our website, PastorAlan.org. Today's teaching now continues. Here once again is Alan Wright. Let me just preface this with a very, very important truth that comes into conflict with the prevailing ideology of the spirit of the age. I think it's important to step back and identify what are the wrong assumptions and deceptions that are inherent within today's culture. And here's one of them.

It essentially is something like this. In order to be fulfilled in this world, the primary thing you need to do is change your circumstances. Now, this is not to say that God doesn't care about your circumstances.

I want to be very clear about that. He does. He cares about your environment. He cares about circumstances. He cares about us being well fed. He cares about us being taken care of. God cares about all of those things. But the lie is that it's the fundamental or the primary thing that you need to be spending your time on is changing things outside of yourself. And the reason it's wrong is because when Jesus came, He said, Repent, which means change your way of thinking, for the kingdom of God is at hand. He said, I have come and I've changed everything because I've brought my kingdom with me. Therefore, the primary thing that needs to change is you.

It is to say that God cares about our prospering, but if you are a bitter, unforgiving, and angry person in your shack, if we put you in a mansion, you're still going to be a bitter, angry, and unforgiving person. The more important thing that needs to change is something that changes inside of you. We moved our daughter into college this week. I'm two nights of an empty nest. And it's just, it's hard to believe my baby girl and everybody says, well, how are you dealing with the emotions of this? And I said, good old fashioned denial.

I'm just in denial. I told Abby, I said, it's no big deal. We're just dropping you off for summer camp. Last thing I said to her is have fun at camp.

See you soon. And so we dropped her off. But it must be some rule of thumb that in North Carolina, when you take a child to college in August, that in order for it to be an official drop-off, the temperature has to exceed 90 degrees.

I think it must be every parent that's dropped a student at college must know that's a, and it has to have a least relative humidity of 85%. And so you're carrying stuff in. And the funny thing is that a lot of these parents, they're getting to be about my age where you don't really want to carry heavy things anymore. And yet you do because you're carrying it in for your baby girl. And so for once in my life, I was the smart guy and I had a dolly. And so it came time to move the dorm refrigerator in. I just put that on the dolly. I'm just one handedly just carrying that thing in. But unfortunately there was a guy in front of me, poor guy, and he had the thing still in its box and he couldn't carry it very well. So he just had it by the little plastic, you know, tie that's around it and he's dragging it. Now I've heard him dragging it and I'm thinking that probably not good for the refrigerator and it sure is annoying, but I'm behind him a little bit and he goes around the corner. His wife doesn't know anybody's within earshot. And all of a sudden I hear her say, would you quit dragging that thing?

Driving me crazy. I just lagged back with my dolly. I didn't want to embarrass him because I understood that the fact of the matter was she thought her whole problem in the world was the sound of a refrigerator dragging. But I'm telling you her problem was deeper than that.

I thought about offering my services to her. Ma'am I'm a pastor, I think you need some counseling. I don't think your real issue is your husband dragging a refrigerator. I think that just as your last child going off to college you're facing your own mortality, aren't you?

If you'd like to talk about it. We're all like that though, you know. It's like I'm so sad I'm dropping my kid off at college, let me yell at my husband for dragging the refrigerator. I came around the corner, the poor guy, he had his arms full of refrigerator trying to carry it in like this. I said I come back and bring my dolly for you, I'm alright. We always tend to displace our issues into something on the outside, don't we?

It's not me, it's you need to carry the refrigerator differently and then I'll be alright. Paul is talking about this in the deepest sense. What he's saying is that there was something that he calls the thorn and he wished he could get out of it and not have to deal with it and God said no because it was a transformational process that he wanted to take place inside of Paul that had to do with Paul drawing upon the power of God.

But I get ahead of myself. The first thing Paul talks about here are these unspeakable glorious revelations and he says that these are unspeakable in this sense that these are the things a man's not even allowed to utter. He's talking about a time he says he was caught up into the third heaven, probably he's just talking about the presence of God. Not the earthly realm, not the atmosphere of the heavens, probably what he's talking about. Some speculation about that or the different stages of heaven but I think for our purposes he means he was in the express immediate glorious presence of God. So palpably present was the spirit to him in visions that he had that Paul became unaware of himself so he didn't even know whether he was in his body or whether God had just raised him into some kind of ecstatic vision. But he speaks of himself in the third person and he just says I know a man in Christ. Now why does he say it that way? He's saying essentially that this experience that I've had of God is not because there's something special about me, it's just because I'm in Christ.

And honestly the experience of God is available to anybody in Christ. Remember a big part of the issue we've been seeing in 2 Corinthians is that there were one or more people in Corinth who were lauding themselves as super apostles and they were saying that Paul was not glorious enough, that he was too weak, he had too many weaknesses. He didn't seem impressive when they'd seen him in person. He didn't seem to be boisterously eloquent.

He seemed to be strong in his letters but not strong in his physical person. And they were trying to discount his apostolic status. And so Paul in chapter 11 has gone and said I'll tell you what I've been through and then he comes to this point he said now I gotta tell you about spiritual revelations. Probably there were some false leaders in Corinth that were saying look at all these revelations and visions and trances and things that we've had and prophetic times that we've had with Paul.

They're trying to establish their leadership based on this and Paul is utterly reluctant to share anything about this and then he doesn't share hardly any specifics about it at all. He's saying this is just stuff I'm not even gonna talk about this but I'm gonna just tell you I have been in the presence of God so vividly I can't even tell you if I was in my body or not but I'm not gonna talk about those things. You know part of this is that there are just some things that are too holy and too intimate to talk about. Right? You don't talk about the most intimate things that you share even with another human being. Spouses don't come and share about all of their intimate interactions because that would just prove that it wasn't actual intimacy.

Right? Because something that makes it intimate is something that you're not sharing with somebody else. And I've had times like this with God where it's very clear to me this is between me and this is me and God and it's not to be shared. And Paul's speaking of these visions this way and then he says that this thorn in the flesh was given. It is a subject of much, much commentary and I don't like the ESV's translation of this word that is rendered here conceited in verse seven to keep me from becoming conceited.

I just don't think that's the right word. The word literally in Greek is exalted. The reason I don't like this word conceited is because conceited means stuck on yourself and really prideful and we just don't see any evidence that this was Paul's battle. Paul everywhere he goes and everywhere he writes he's talking about the paradox of God's power in our weakness and he knew all of his earthly credentials. His resume was so strong, one of the most erudite men of his age and so many miracles that had taken place through him.

I don't think that because he'd had these special revelations from God that he was going to become conceited like everybody look at me how great I am. It's so far from Paul but and I'll get to why I think that in just a moment but he says that I was given a thorn in the flesh and the way it reads it's unclear who the subject is a thorn was given. It's in the it's in the passive so it doesn't say God gave me a thorn.

It doesn't specifically say Satan gave me the thorn and I think the reason that the language is carefully passive here is because there are things in our life that come to us from the powers of hell as an attack against us and yet God is so sovereign and so wise that though the enemy has intended it for evil God has meant it for good. Helen Wright Today's teaching how to be thankful for a thorn from our series on 2nd Corinthians all about victorious living and Alan is back in a moment with additional insight on this for your life in a final word God's always been there in every moment you narrowly escaped from danger in every moment you were surprised by a blessing in every moment you just knew the direction to take God was there your life is defined by countless moments of God's grace. Perhaps they've been covered by the sands of time or have just gone unnoticed in the rush of life but your life is full of God moments when you make a gift we'll send you a special bundle both Pastor Alan's heart stirring book God moments and a CD album containing all his audio messages on the subject make your gift today and start your spiritual treasure hunt to uncover your God moments how you remember yesterday will determine how you live tomorrow. The gospel is shared when you give to Alan Wright Ministries. This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support when you give today. We will send you today's special offer. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks from Alan Wright Ministries. Call us at 877-544-4860. That's 877-544-4860 or come to our website Pastor Alan.org. Okay, Alan on the surface thankful for a thorn and how to be thankful for a thorn we're going to it sounds like we had to work on this because it's going to come natural. It's not it doesn't and this is a message that I just cannot overemphasize the importance of it because it's not just about the issues of suffering in this world but about this seemingly mysterious statement of Paul's about the thorn that God didn't take away and what is meant by that and we're going to bring real clarity to that but in the midst of Paul's glorious revelations he did experience something that was an excruciating thing and I'm going to point to how that really is the picture of spiritual warfare but the surprising grace of God all of this Daniel I just think it begins with this essential we have to demolish and just cast aside the lie of the culture the spirit of the age that says what you need most is you need some better circumstances you need less problems in an easier life now listen I'm all for God fixing our circumstances but the big message the big takeaway here is that no what we need is the grace of God and we're not just saying there's a cliche but we're going deep with that truth today and tomorrow. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.