God has the ability to pour out enough grace so that it literally overflows you and always you will have all sufficiency for all the issues of life and an abundance of grace for every good deed. You have all the grace necessary to endure suffering and disappointment and pain and sorrow. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. A great preacher said that all trials serve two purposes, to better acquaint you with your own sinful heart and with your Lord and Savior. Well it's one thing to rejoice in that truth when the trial is over, but what do you do when your times of suffering never seem to end? And why can you be certain God will get you through even the toughest struggles?
John MacArthur has encouraging answers today as he continues his series, Making Sense Out of Suffering. If you have a Bible, turn to 2 Corinthians chapter 12 and follow along with John. As we come to this wonderful time in the Word of God together, I want to draw your attention back to the text of 2 Corinthians chapter 12. As we approach this text, one phrase, one expression in the text stands out and it's in verse 9, and He has said to me, my grace is sufficient for you.
And by way of introduction, let me just start with that word grace and then we'll get into the text itself. This is a magnificent Greek word used 155 times in the New Testament. The word in the Greek is charis and it basically means a favor bestowed. It means a generous gift given.
That is its sort of normal, common meaning. But in the sense of the New Testament, in its redemptive sense, it means a favor bestowed and a generous gift given by God to people who are totally undeserving and unworthy. It is God's favor, God's goodness, God's generosity to provide for those who are unworthy of that provision.
It starts at salvation and it goes right on forever because it tells us in Ephesians that through the ages to come, God will show the riches of His kindness in His grace toward us. Grace starts in a very general sense, theologians call it common grace, with the rain falling on the just and the unjust and God giving us life and breath and families and the joys of life and the beauties of life and just life itself. That's common grace. Then grace reaches a completely different and wonderful proportion when it saves us and we go from common grace to the uncommon grace of salvation and we are given salvation, forgiveness of all of our sins, all the blessings that our gods and the heavenlies are then bestowed upon us and held for our disposal.
That goes on then through sanctification and on through glorification. God is generous to undeserving sinners. He is generous to those who are in Christ from the time of their salvation forever and forever. This grace is a dynamic force.
It is a dynamic force by which God applies to us everything we need to save us, to keep us, to enable us, to deliver us, to sanctify us, to glorify us. We were saved by grace, Ephesians 2 says, through faith, but it is God's grace that just initiates there and sustains all the way through all of eternity. Every benefit in life, every benefit in eternity is by God's grace. And this great redemptive aspect of grace comes only to those who know Jesus Christ. It is faith in Jesus Christ that brings us into God's uncommon grace, into God's special saving grace and eternal grace. When we think about the Christian faith, we could sum it up in the word grace. No word more clearly sums up the message of our faith than grace. No word sets us apart from all other religions of the world than grace, for all others have inherently in them some attainment of salvation through some human achievement, religious or moral, or a combination of both. But ours is a grace religion.
Ours is a faith that includes the concept, the overriding concept that we deserve nothing, and yet God gives us everything. Because of His goodness, He bestows on us eternally favors undeserved. One of the most wonderful statements ever made about our Lord Jesus Christ was the inspired word by John, the Apostle in John 1.14. When John said of Jesus, He was full of grace. He was full of grace. We shouldn't be surprised by that since He was God incarnate and God is a God of grace. If God incarnated Himself and came into the world, we would expect Him to be full of grace.
Now the wondrous fact of His being full of the attribute of grace was followed by an even more thrilling reality in two verses later, John 1.16. It says, Of His fullness have all we received and grace upon grace. God is grace. Christ was full of grace. And when Christ comes into our lives, we receive grace upon grace upon grace. That is to say, those of us who know God through faith in Jesus Christ are the recipients of the outpouring of God's continual blessing and favor. We accumulate grace.
We accumulate it moment by moment by moment by moment all through our lives and even on into the glories of eternity. No wonder Luke, writing about the early Christians in Acts 4.33 says they were experiencing abundant grace. And Paul, writing to the Romans in chapter 5 verse 2 said, We stand in grace.
In other words, he was saying it's as if grace is the environment in which we live, the air we breathe. We have received, according to Romans 5.17, an abundance of grace and Ephesians 1, as I told you, and 2 talks about the riches of His grace. James adds that whatever great need we might have, God gives us a greater grace and Peter calls it the multifaceted, many-colored, multiplied, manifold grace of God. And from just those few Scriptures, you get the idea that God doesn't skimp on it, don't you? When it comes to grace for salvation, when it comes to grace for sanctification, grace for service, grace for suffering, there's plenty of it. In all areas of life, His kindness abounds, His benevolence abounds, His goodness abounds.
This is contrary to the gods of the pagans who are at best indifferent and must be coddled and cajoled and appeased so that they don't destroy their subjects. Our God is a God who by nature is gracious, who incarnated Himself in the Lord Jesus Christ, who is full of grace, who comes to live in our lives and pour out upon us grace upon grace upon grace upon grace. Nowhere is it more magnificently summarized than in this very epistle, 2 Corinthians. Go back to chapter 9 for a moment and verse 8. This is the greatest statement on the sufficiency of grace made anywhere in the Scripture. Notice its comprehensiveness. 2 Corinthians 9, 8, and God is able, that is He is powerful enough, He is capable to make all grace abound to you, that always having all sufficiency in everything you may have an abundance for every good deed.
The superlatives here are almost overwhelming. All grace, all sufficiency in all things, all ways and an abundance for all or every good deed. God has the ability to pour out enough grace so that it literally overflows you and always you will have all sufficiency for all the issues of life and an abundance of grace for every good deed. You have all the grace available you need to believe. You have all the grace you need to remove your sin and apply the righteousness of Christ to you. You have all the necessary grace to understand the Word. You have all the necessary grace granted to you to apply the Word, to overcome temptation, to triumph over habitual sin. You have all the grace necessary to endure suffering and disappointment and pain and sorrow. You have all the grace necessary to obey the Lord, all the grace required to serve Him effectively and powerfully, all the grace necessary to worship Him in truth and in spirit. No wonder verse 14 of 2 Corinthians 9 calls it the surpassing grace of God.
I love this, in you. When you became a believer, the floodgates of grace were opened. Grace for everything was poured out on you and continues and will continue to do that. It's no wonder the hymn writer in looking for an adjective to describe it came up with amazing grace. Now against that background of this great sufficient grace in our text, the question is posed, is there sufficient grace to help us in every issue of life?
And Paul is finding out in our text as we remember that indeed there is. Life is filled with trouble, isn't it? Life is filled with difficulty. Life is filled with pain and sorrow and suffering.
There are fears that abound in life. A lot of people made much out of the book written by Rabbi Kushner called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. I'm going to write a book and the title of it is going to be Bad Things Happen to Everybody. Why sort out good people? Bad things happen to everybody because we are bad people living in a bad world. This is fallen humanity in a fallen environment. Obviously things go wrong.
They go wrong all the time. God has given us the grace to save us. God has given us the grace to sanctify us. God has dispensed to us the grace that will bring us to eternal glory. God has given us the grace to serve Him and proclaim His truth. The question here is, has God given us the grace to handle the sufferings of life?
That's the issue. We find Paul in this text at the low point of his life, depressed. He says he is in chapter 7, depressed, heart sick, heart broken, betrayed by the people he loved the most. And we've pointed out the fact that the deepest pain in life comes from people and the closer we get to people and the more intimate we become with people and the more we love them and the more devoted to them we become and the more of our hearts we give them, the more potential there is for them to hurt us deeply. There's nothing as profound as being wounded in the house of your friends.
Far greater than any economic pain or physical pain is that pain of unrequited love and betrayal. And that's where Paul was. The Corinthian church had turned on him. They had betrayed him.
They turned away from his love to them and were abusing him and following false teachers and believing lies about him. And his heart was broken and it was affecting the joy of the church and affecting the witness of the church as well and so there was that suffering as well because he cared so deeply about the work of the church. And we find him at this point in his life where he's really at the bottom and he can't seem to do anything about it and therein is the right place to ask the question, did he find sufficient grace for his trouble? Was God's grace sufficient in the deepest pain of his life? Many would say today, well, if you're really talking about deep issues, if you're talking about the deep pains of life, the depressions of life, the deep profound disappointments of life, the deep anxieties of life, you certainly don't want to give shallow answers.
And I would agree with that. Some would suggest that when you get to the deep things, you have to turn away from the Scripture because the Scripture is only good for the light touch. If you want the deep things to be dealt with, you've got to turn to psychology and psychiatry and therapy and counseling and even medication. You have to fill in the lack in our Christian life with some human insight or human wisdom. Sad to say, as bizarre as that sounds, most churches have bought into that. Most evangelical churches have bought into the idea that the serious problems that Christians have are beyond the realm of the spiritual. They're beyond the realm of the power of God. They're beyond grace.
They're beyond divine grace and they require human technique, human technique for the large part invented and defined and basically altered over the last 120 years. Psychology is offered as the source of power in solving the deep problems while divine grace is adequate only for the shallower ones. You have to turn to some human source for the deep things and you can turn to God for the shallow ones. I was reading in a Christian periodical that came out an article advocating psychology as the necessary source for solving the problems of Christians. And in the article they attacked me. And of course in some periodicals being attacked is an honor because you don't want to particularly be identified with it. And so they said, and it was kind of interesting the way they said it, they said, John MacArthur has written a book called Our Sufficiency in Christ and in it he says that Christ is sufficient for all our needs and that the Word of God is sufficient for all our needs.
And I forget the exact words, and the Holy Spirit is sufficient for all our needs and all that we ever need is available to us in Christ and through divine grace. And then their response was, can you believe anybody would say something like that? They didn't even try to argue with it. They just said, how archaic is this guy and where did he come from?
Where has he been for the last 30 years? They just quoted me without comment like people would say, wow, what kind of bizarre belief is that? Pastors and Christians who give people the Bible and call them to prayer and to intimacy with God and to the resources of God's grace are even thought to be potentially dangerous and maybe even liable. That's why I was sued for clergy malpractice, a ten-year lawsuit that ran from 1980 to 1990.
Some of you don't know about it. I was sued for clergy malpractice because a young man had taken his life in a suicide and the family sued me and sued Grace Church. Obviously all lawsuits have money as their ultimate end, but the lawsuit was based upon the fact that in ministering and preaching and speaking to this young man and giving him biblical truth to apply to the problems of his life, we had exacerbated his precondition and driven him to suicide and were therefore guilty of clergy malpractice.
While happily by the goodness of God and the sensibility of the court system, we won the case all the way to the California State Supreme Court which ruled in our favor and finally the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision of the California court. Whatever the court said isn't the issue, simply to say that there's a whole community out there who believe that if you try to solve people's deep problems with the Word of God, you're a threat to society. That may be the worst of it. On the other hand, the best of it might be churches that believe only shallow things can be dealt with by divine grace. Deep things need human wisdom.
How strange is that? Is the Word of God so insufficient? Which Word is perfect, totally transforming the whole person according to Psalm 19? Is the wisdom from above which confounds all the wisdom of man and calls it foolishness so insufficient to call upon that foolishness to help it? Is the Lord Jesus Christ in whom we are complete, in whom we have all things that pertain to life and godliness and have become partakers of His own divine nature and possessors of all His fullness so insufficient that He can't provide what we need? Is the Holy Spirit who has filled us with might in the inner man and given us all the fullness of God so we can do exceeding abundantly above all we can ask or think so weak and insufficient as not to be able to help us cope?
It's unthinkable. Is the package of spiritual resources we have received in salvation which enables us to do everything in which we are strengthened unto all things in Christ, unable at any point in our lives? And what does human wisdom add to us when Paul said, Our sufficiency is from God? Was that just ignorance? Was He wrong? Was that foolishness when he said in 2 Corinthians 3, 5, Not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God who also made us adequate.
Was He wrong? Are we not adequate for every issue of life in the grace of God that is lavishly poured out on us? What a tragic delusion in the world, but what an infinitely more tragic delusion in the church and what an affront to our God and our Christ and our Holy Spirit and the Word. Truly, to borrow the words of Galatians 5, 4, we have fallen from grace. What fools people are in their troubles, not to realize there is a throne of grace where we can go in time of need to find help, Hebrews tells us. Where did Paul go in the time of his deepest depression, his greatest sorrow?
Let's go back to our text. Let me read verses 7 to 10. And because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, for this reason to keep me from exalting myself, there was given me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan, to buffet me to keep me from exalting myself.
Concerning this, I entreated the Lord three times that it might depart from me. And He has said to me, My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness. Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore, I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties for Christ's sake.
For when I'm weak, then I'm strong. This is a monumental passage. Here we find Paul in his deepest disappointment. Here we find Paul with a broken heart, in pain and sorrow and depression, rejected, betrayed, resigned, suffering from supernatural attacks on what was most precious to him, the church, particularly the church at Corinth.
You remember the false teachers had come in? He defines all of that in verse 7 as a thorn in the flesh. Literally the word thorn is a stake. He was impaled by this thing. It was just rammed through him, impaling him.
And what was it? He defines this thorn in his flesh, a messenger of Satan. That's another word for a demon, an angelos of Satan, Satan's angel, a demon. A demon had moved into some false teachers, brought the false teachers into the Corinthian church, and they had created this terrible betrayal and this mutiny in Corinth. They were tearing up Paul's church. They were trying to destroy his reputation. They were maligning his character.
They were assaulting his people. They were starting to destroy the effectiveness of that church, potentially its witness. When Paul saw this as a thorn in his flesh, it was something that was just ripping into him because of his great love for the church and the people in it. Remind you in verse 7, there was given me, and I told you it was given to him by God. And I remind you that most people want to wander through life thinking that God brings all the good times and the devil brings all the bad times and don't understand that the bad times come at the will of God just like the good times. And the bad times are by God's design and far more productive than the good times. There was given me by God this demon-inspired conspiracy that just ripped and tore me like a stake driven through my flesh to buffet me, the word buffet meaning to punch.
This thing was hammering on me. God had brought this. You know, people, you need to understand this. There is this idea in Christianity today that if you have a problem, it needs an immediate solution and you've got to run somewhere and get it fixed. Counselors' offices are filled with people who want quick fixes on the issues of their dilemmas, people who are suffering from being hated or rejected or abused or misrepresented or maligned or betrayed or unappreciated or whatever it might be. And all these human problems of unfulfillment and dissatisfaction that create all these problems with people are brought before the counselor and there's this passion to get them all solved. But the right perspective is to understand that in the midst of life this is part of it and don't look for a quick solution to try to discern what God is doing in the midst of it.
And don't assume that the devil brought it independent of the allowances of God because God has purposes in our suffering. And sometimes God's purposes are really amazing. It's hard to imagine in one way that God wanting to achieve something in the life of such a special man as Paul would allow one of His own beloved churches to be torn up to achieve that. It doesn't seem rational to us that God would allow this discontent and this chaos and confusion in the church at Corinth so that He could accomplish something in Paul's life but in fact that's exactly what happened. Now it isn't that God didn't love Paul, He loved him greatly as he loves all his own.
It isn't that God was indifferent to Paul, not at all. In fact, our dear Lord Jesus Himself after He had already gone to heaven and taken His seat at the right hand of God, came back to earth to visit Paul three times and one time took Paul to heaven to see him there. So He came down to visit him three times and took Paul to heaven once to confirm His love and to strengthen Paul for the immense amount of suffering he had to endure. He appeared to him on the Damascus road face to face, made him blind and then He took him to heaven. And then He appeared to him in Acts 18 just in the moment of Paul's suffering when he was starting the church at Corinth, Acts 18. And then He appeared to him again in jail and the Lord came to him in powerful, unique, unequaled encounters.
And the Lord was personally involved in Paul's life to shape him into the man he ought to be. But it was not that that did the work of shaping Paul. It wasn't the Damascus road vision. It wasn't the vision that he had when he went to heaven as noted earlier in the same chapter. It wasn't the vision in Corinth.
It wasn't the vision in jail later on. What really made Paul the man he was were not those high and elevated and holy and glorious experiences with the risen Christ. What made him the man he was was suffering and pain. The Lord came to Paul to shape and mold that man into the man He wanted him to be through his suffering and his pain. Painful trials used by God for the good of a Christian.
That's a consistent theme in the life of the Apostle Paul and it's encouragement for every believer as John MacArthur is showing you in his study called Making Sense Out of Suffering here on Grace to You. Now, John, despite all the biblical evidence we're seeing in this series about how God uses suffering for our good, the suffering and pain that overshadows so much of life often leads to a whole series of questions about God. Mainly, how can He be a God of love?
Is that a fair question to ask? That's the question that non-believers ask. How can He be a God of love? That's the agnostic question.
That's the rejector's question. And the reason people ask that question is because they look at their own circumstances or the circumstances in the world that aren't going the way they think they ought to go and they draw their conclusions about God from that. If you want to know whether God is a God of love, you look somewhere else. You don't look at the fallen world, you look at the plan of redemption. When you're going to ask the question, is God a God of love, look at the whole history of redemption. Look at sins forgiven. Look at the sacrifice of Christ on the cross for utterly unworthy, undeserving sinners. Look at the lavish grace of God poured out from His love on all those who believe in Him.
If you wonder whether God is a God of love, look at what the Bible says about eternal heaven, where we will live forever in sheer joy and peace and bliss and glory and be joint heirs of everything that belongs to Christ. You've got to get your focus on the right thing to get the answer to the question. You know, that happens to us a lot.
We get diverted away from the things that would really take us out of our despair and distress. Let me mention a book. It's called Anxious for Nothing. We want to send a free copy to anyone who requests.
That's right, a free copy. This book has been used by God literally through the years to help people struggling with anxiety, fear, doubt, depression. It's called Anxious for Nothing. It'll show you how to cultivate contentment, defeat anxiety, and get on the triumphant side of life no matter how challenging the issues might be. Just request a free copy of Anxious for Nothing. We'll send it to you.
Right. When people ask us how they can overcome fear, depression, and worry, this is the book we point them to. It's had a tremendous ministry in the lives of many people. Again, we'll send you a copy of Anxious for Nothing free of charge. Just ask for your free book today. Just anxiousfornothing at gty.org, or call us here at 855-GRACE. Anxious for Nothing lays out the spiritual resources God has given you not only to endure trials, but also to experience God's supernatural peace and even joy in the midst of those trials. Again, we want to send you a free copy of Anxious for Nothing while supplies last. Just call and ask for it, 855-GRACE, or go to our website, gty.org. And thank you for telling us what these daily broadcasts mean to you, and thanks especially for praying for us. We rely on that more than you know. To let us know how God is using this listener-supported ministry in your life, you can write to us at Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412, or send an email to letters at gty.org. And again, be sure to request your copy of Anxious for Nothing when you get in touch. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson reminding you to watch Grace to You television this Sunday, check your local listings for Channel and Times, and be here tomorrow when John continues his study, Making Sense Out of Suffering, with another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time, on Grace to You.
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