Facing Darkness with Grace - Part A

Negatives get turned to positives over and over and over again, whether it's with Joseph or with Moses or with David or with Daniel or now with Paul.

It's basically the same story, isn't it? How all things work together for good to those who love God and are the called according to His purpose. So we have negatives, positives, but we have God's directives. Today, Pastor Skip begins a message encouraging you to see the blessings in the darkness and to face dark times with grace. Hi, this is Pastor Skip, and we have prepared a package about seeing this life through the eyes of eternity.

Here are the details you'll need to receive this resource. Here's what C.S. Lewis said about this subject.

C.S. Lewis wrote in his book, The Problem of Pain, these words, There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and especially of our Lord's own words.

It has always been held by Christendom, and it has the support of reason. Ecclesiastes says God has put eternity in our heart to help you understand what awaits both believers and unbelievers in eternity. We've put together an exciting resource called the Eternity Package featuring Skip's booklet, Hell No, Don't Go, and seven of his strongest teachings about eternity, including the truth about hell and what most people don't know about heaven. This powerful new resource package is our thanks for your gift of $50 or more to support the broadcast ministry of Connect with Skip Heitzig. So get your copy of the Hell No, Don't Go booklet and the Eternity Package on CD or as a digital download today when you give a gift of $50 or more.

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Give online securely at connectwithskip.com slash offer or call 800-922-1888. Okay, now we're turning to 2 Corinthians 12 as Skip kicks off today's teaching. There was a ship out at sea and in a storm and the ship sank to the bottom of the ocean. One man escaped. He made it to an uninhabited island. He just had a few belongings. He built a hut on that uninhabited island to protect himself and the few belongings that he had. Every morning he would wake up and scan the horizon for ships. Every afternoon he did the same.

He never saw a ship come by. One evening when he is coming back to his hut after foraging for food, he finds his hut enveloped in flames. Evidently lightning struck it in a storm and everything that he had built and everything he owned was burned up. He was pretty devastated. He spent the night in the open that evening on the beach, but when he woke up, there was a ship that was docked at the shore. Down came the captain and the captain said to him, we saw your smoke signal and so we came. Now think about that.

Everything he owned had to be lost before he could be rescued. God allows bad things to happen to good people. That's sort of an oxymoron to say that because the Bible says there is none good, no not one. Maybe it would be more accurate to say God allows bad things to happen to God's people or to decent people, innocent people, people who didn't provoke anything or ask for any hardship.

Those things can happen. This happens to be one of the biggest impediments to the Christian faith. You've had the experience of sharing your faith with unbelievers only to have them say how could a God of love allow disease and famine and war and the evil that happens. It's difficult for people to grasp a loving God in the midst of a suffering world. I mean, if only bad things happen to bad people and that's it, but not good people, godly people, righteous people, we could get that.

In fact, that might be an incentive for some people to believe, they would say. Now, enter Paul the Apostle, a good, godly, righteous man, courageous, bold, faithful, truthful, honest. He planted churches, he taught scripture, he preached Christ, he took collections up for poor people, and yet God allowed him to suffer. He refers to it here, he calls it his thorn in the flesh, some painful experience that he had. And you should know this, Paul had the expectation that God would remove that difficulty in his life, because he even says here, he prayed three times that God would do that, but God did not do that. Now, think about your own dark experiences. The dark room, the dark times, the difficult experiences challenge your view of God, because you don't expect those times. You might not articulate it that way, but it's an affront to your experience with God. We want God to heal, we want God to cure, we want God to soothe, we want God to remove the difficulty, and sometimes he does that.

It's awesome when he does that. Sometimes he does not do that. And when he does not do that, then what do we do? How are we to think? How are we to process that? Where are we to go? What are we to learn?

Well, that takes us to 2 Corinthians 12, but I want to go back to what we did the very first study in dark room. I kind of pulled out some positives and negatives. So I have a print, this is a print, and this is what the print came from. This is the positive, this is the negative. The positive, the print, is what we expect to see. We look at it and we go, that's familiar to me. The dark places are where they should be, the light places are where they should be. And when we look at photographs, positives, prints, from your own history, your own family, they evoke some good feelings usually.

If you look at yourself, I look pretty good back then. Or I don't like that picture. Whatever it is, it draws you back to a reference point, but it's what you expect to see. When you look at a negative, it's the exact opposite of reality.

The light places are dark, the dark places are light, it's not what you expect to see. But then there's this, a book, a manual on photography. This explains the process, this gives examples of the process, this shows you how negatives become positives.

So it's very helpful to understand. Now think about your life. Your life is the print. God imprints His image in your life.

You are in the image of God. Some of your life is filled with positive experiences. And when they happen to you, how God moves powerfully and gives you things and blesses your life, it's what you expect to see.

It's good. But also your life has negatives that happen to it. And when negative experiences happen to your life, it's not what you expect, it's certainly not what you signed up for, what you want. But then there's this. The manual filled with examples and instruction about how negatives get turned to positives over and over and over again, whether it's with Joseph or with Moses or with David or with Daniel or now with Paul.

It's basically the same story, isn't it? How all things work together for good to those who love God and are the called according to His purpose. So we have negatives, positives, but we have God's directives. I want to show you that in 2 Corinthians chapter 12. What I want to show you is three observations that are true in God developing the life of any of His children and all of His children. Though this is an experience unique to Paul, his thorn in the flesh experience, the ministry of the thorn, it's also true for every child of God. So it's a pretty basic and simple outline today.

It's this. God blesses us with positives. God balances us with negatives. And God benefits us with directives. I'll explain all of those.

They're pretty straightforward. But let's begin with a positive experience. In verse 1, Paul says, it is doubtless not profitable for me to boast I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord. Now, I'm not going to give you all the background of this epistle.

Wednesday night, if you want to go in depth, we're going in depth and you can get the background. Paul here is defending his apostleship for a number of reasons. But he says, I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord.

Now watch what he does here. I know a man in Christ who 14 years ago, whether in the body I do not know or whether out of the body I do not know, whether it was an actual experience or whether it was just a vision. God knows such a one was caught up into the third heaven. I know such a man whether in the body or out of the body I do not know. God knows how he was caught up into paradise and heard inexpressible words which it is not lawful for a man to utter. If such a one I will boast, yet not of myself I will not boast except in my infirmities. Now this is sort of an obtuse, obscure, mysterious sounding text. Paul is actually talking about himself, his own experiences.

Almost every scholar agrees with that statement. Paul is talking about himself but in the third person. It was a typical rabbinical way of being autobiographical is to use the third person, sort of a humble thing. I'm not going to talk directly.

I'm going to talk about myself but as if I'm talking about somebody else. It's pretty clear that Paul is referring to an experience he had. If you look at verse five and verse seven, he bears that out.

He says, I'm talking about me. These are experiences that I myself have had. What I want you to notice is how he introduces this little section in verse one. I will come to visions and revelations.

These are positive experiences. Paul the apostle had visions and revelations. He had God actually talk to him verbally and saw visions for direction, something that you and I don't have a lot of. He had a lot of.

He was no lightweight. He had supernatural vision. The first one is on the road to Damascus in Acts chapter 9. He gets knocked off his horse. It's a vision of the glorified Christ and it's his conversion experience. In Acts chapter 16, Paul is on the beach at Troas not knowing where to go. He gets a vision from a man from Macedonia.

Remember that? Saying, come over to Macedonia and help us. So he wakes up the next day, says God wants us to go to Macedonia.

I got a vision. Well, that continues in the 18th chapter of the book of Acts. He is in Corinth. He faces opposition.

It's hard. That night he gets a vision. The Lord says to him, do not be afraid, Paul. Keep on speaking.

Do not hold back, for I have many people in this city. That encourages him to go on. A few chapters later, he's in Jerusalem. He gets arrested there. And the Lord appears to him and says, be of good cheer, Paul.

As you have testified of me in Jerusalem, so you must also testify of me in Rome. So he becomes a prisoner for the next two years in Caesarea. Eventually they ship him off to Rome on a boat. A storm ensues.

It looks like the boat's going down. The angel appears to Paul in a vision and says, do not be afraid, Paul. You must be brought before Caesar, so you're not going to die on this boat ride.

And indeed, God has granted you all and all those who sail with you your lives. So all of that to say Paul gets vision after vision after vision after revelation after revelation. His life is stacked full of direct revelations from God.

Now, to top it all off is this. And this is where he is caught up, whisked up into the third heaven, something that he says happened 14 years earlier, where he saw heaven and he heard heaven. All of these are positive experiences. Wouldn't you say direct revelations from God being taken to heaven?

Pretty positive. I want you to look at verse four. How he was caught up into paradise and he heard inexpressible words which it is not lawful for a man to utter. Now, I'm a little mad at Paul for this because he gets taken to heaven. He sees and hears things that you and I won't see till we get to heaven. He saw them before he went permanently to heaven.

And he just says, oh, by the way, I went to heaven. And it was cool, but I can't tell you about it. Give us something.

Nah. It would be a crime for me to use human language. It can't be articulated in human words. Well, we understand that. I mean, how do you explain the inexplicable? How do you describe the indescribable? Sometimes you have a feeling. It could be love of another person. You really can't articulate it in words. The feeling that you have, the experience that you have. It would sort of be like trying to explain to a four-year-old that he's really going to enjoy his honeymoon.

Good luck with that. Vance Havner wrote, there are lots of questions the Bible doesn't answer about the hereafter. One reason can be illustrated by a boy sitting down to a bowl of spinach when there's a chocolate cake at the end of the table. He's going to have a rough time eating that spinach when his eyes are on the cake. Paul says, before I tell you about my spinach, let me tell you I tasted the cake. I saw the cake. I tasted the cake. I just can't tell you about it.

It would be a crime to do so. But he said I was caught up into the third heaven. Now, what does that mean? The Bible describes heaven in three ways. Actually, three different heavens. Heaven number one is the terrestrial heaven, the heaven around the earth where birds fly.

We now know 62 miles deep before you get into outer space. The Bible says in several places, it talks about the rain that comes down from heaven or the birds of the heaven. That's the terrestrial heaven. That's the first heaven. The second heaven we would call the celestial heaven.

After the atmosphere comes space, outer space, the final frontier, as Captain Kirk would say, where the planets are and the sun and the moon reside. The Bible says the heavens declare the glory of God. Then there's this heaven, the third heaven, the heaven where God's glory dwells in its fullness, and that's the heaven Paul said he went to. So a jet pilot can take you through the first heaven. An astronaut can take you to the second heaven. Only Jesus can take you to the third heaven. So he said, I was caught up to the third heaven in verse four, caught up into paradise. I've always loved the story about the Russian cosmonaut.

In the 1960s, Gherman Titov, the Russian cosmonaut, was the second man in history to orbit the earth. And he stood up in front of a crowd after he got back to earth, and he was an atheist, and he kind of boasted in that. You know, I have been up to heaven, I've been up to the skies, and I looked around, and I didn't see God, and people say God created and God did this. Well, I circled the earth and was in outer space, and I never saw God.

Well, somebody in the audience whispered to his friend, if he had gotten out of his space suit, he would have. Now look at verse four. In verse four, Paul calls the third heaven by another term, paradise.

Oh, by the way, caught up means to be seized immediately. It's the word harpazo. If you know your scriptures in 1 Thessalonians 4, it's the same word as the rapture.

It is to be instantly taken up or whisked up. I was caught up, harpazo, into paradise. Jesus used that word in Revelation 2 to describe heaven, where he said, where the tree of life is in the paradise of God. The word paradise literally means a walled garden, and the walled garden is where Persian kings would spend a lot of their time. In fact, it was the highest honor to be invited into the paradise, the walled garden of a Persian king for a time of respite and fellowship to walk together. If you wanted to be honored immensely, the king would invite you into that paradise. So Paul is saying, I had the honor of being raptured, whisked away by the king into his paradise of heaven. What's fascinating to me is that most people who had an experience like Paul would tell everybody about it. Like immediately, they'd write books, they'd want to make movies about it, they'd want to go on talk shows. My experience with heaven, I saw the bright light and da-da-da-da.

They'd make money off of it. We don't hear about Paul's until 14 years later. Oh, by the way, I know a guy who went to heaven. That's me. What? Yeah, I heard things.

What was the light? I can't tell you. So he just sort of drops this on his audience. And the reason he has kept it secret, he said, is because it's not to be a source of pride. God used this to humble me. So that's the first observation.

God blesses us with positives. Vision, revelation, vision, revelation, and heaven. Can you imagine Paul in a room talking to a bunch of dignitaries like today, and one of them says, you know, I've been to the White House many times. Somebody else says, well, I've been to Buckingham Palace, met the Queen, we're friends.

And then there's an astronaut who says, I've been to the moon. And then there's Paul. Where have you been, Paul?

Heaven. Yeah, God took me there. Oh, was that the time God spoke to me? Or God, you know, I mean, he had so many of these things.

So let's continue and look at the second observation. That is, God balances us with negatives. Verse 7. And lest I should be exalted above measure, by the abundance of the revelations, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan, to buffet me.

Buffet means to pound or to rough up. Lest I be exalted above measure. Concerning this thing, I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart from me. Now let's begin with this thorn in the flesh.

What is that? What is he speaking about? He said, I had a thorn in the flesh.

Well, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Nobody knows. There's a lot of guesses. I've read a lot of different guesses, but Paul doesn't describe what it is.

He just says, I've had a thorn in the flesh. But I want to drill down a little bit on that. I looked at several different commentaries over the years, and I've sort of written down all the different guesses people have had.

Here's a list. Some say it was a constant temptation. Others say it was ophthalmia. Others say it was epilepsy. Somebody else says, migraines. Somebody else writes, probably malaria. Somebody else says, a speech disability. Somebody else, gallstones. Another commentator, gout. Another commentator, rheumatism. Somebody else, an intestinal disorder. So take your pick.

Or maybe even none of those. That concludes Skip Heitzig's message from the series Dark Room. Find the full message, as well as books, booklets, and full teaching series at ConnectWithSkip.com. Now, here's Skip to share how you can connect many others with the truth of God's Word with a gift to keep these messages going out around the world through Connect with Skip Heitzig.

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So be sure to download it today wherever you get your apps. Next time on Connect with Skip Heitzig, Skip continues his series, Dark Room, with more verse-by-verse teachings straight from Scripture. Make a connection, make a connection at the foot of the cross and cast all burdens on His word. Make a connection, connection. Connect with Skip Heitzig is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.