Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - Paul and the Thorn

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

We’re looking at times when people have had close encounters with God. The one Paul gives us is one of the most curious of all. And it’s actually about discouragement. Paul is writing a letter to the church at Corinth. There were false teachers who had come to Corinth, twisting the gospel and claiming to have divine authority. When Paul responds, he does not enter into a direct competition. He does not say, “My revelations are bigger or better.” Oh, no. He says his revelations are different. Let’s see what we can learn from what Paul shares: 1) the heaven experience, and 2) the thorn experience.  This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on October 20, 1996. Series: Daring to Draw Near. Scripture: 2 Corinthians 12:1-10. Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

Welcome to Gospel and Life. Throughout the Bible, we see accounts of people who have had direct extraordinary encounters with God. In today's sermon, Tim Keller is teaching through one of those extraordinary encounters, what happened, and what it means for us today. After you listen, please take a few seconds to rate and review our podcast. Your review can help others to discover our podcast and experience the hope of the gospel.

Now here's today's teaching from Dr. Keller. The series we're using passages in this evening's service in the evenings here this fall. We're looking at places where people have, I guess you could call it, close encounters with God. We're looking at places where people have, I guess you could call, close encounters with God. We're looking at a series. We've started, we've mainly been working in the Old Testament and we're not done.

We have a number of other places to go, both in the Old and New Testament, but we have a number of places. They're all extraordinary passages. They kind of give you, they always kind of give me goosebumps, get the hair on the back of my neck sticking up because they talk about, they're filled with, they fill you with awe because they're talking about coming right into the presence of God, having direct encounters with God. The one that Paul gives us right here is one of the most curious of all and also a very

famous one, but very, very curious. You'll see the way in which he talks, he's falling all over himself. He's an eloquent man, but he doesn't really know how to go about this one. This is 2 Corinthians chapter 12, 1 to 10. I must go on boasting. Although there's nothing to be gained, I will go on to visions and revelations from the

Lord. I know a man in Christ who 14 years ago was caught up to the third heaven. And whether it was in the body or out of the body, I do not know. God knows. And I know that this man, whether in the body or apart from the body, I do not know, but God knows, was caught up to paradise. He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell. I will boast about a man like that, but I won't boast about myself except about my weakness. Even if I should choose to boast, I would not be a fool because I would be speaking the truth, but I refrain.

So no one will think more of me than is warranted by what I do or say. To keep me from being conceded because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me, three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from 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 about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest upon me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses,

insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties, for when I am weak, then I am strong. This is God's Word. Now, because we're going to be going to the Lord's Supper tonight, I won't go as long as I would like to go in some ways on this. One of the good things about a worship service that climaxes with the words Lord's Supper

is that there's a sense in which I, instead of going all three points to my sermon, I just do two and God does the last one to you directly. You take what is in the text and then you have time to process it and to reflect and ask God to bring it home instead of Tim bringing it home and he can do a much better job. He knows you better than I do.

Let's just lay out there for just the basics. And then you'll have plenty to chew on. This is actually about discouragement. Paul says, I have a thorn in the flesh. A messenger of Satan to torment me. Toormant is kind of a bad word. I mean, a bad translation. The old King James Bible, the old authorised version,

used a better word to buffet me. Now, we never use the word buffet except when we have a buffet dinner. I guess. I don't know, but it must be a different root, you know? But anyway, we don't use the word buffet around, but you think about it. Buffet means a messenger of Satan, too, it literally means to take the courage out of me, to deflate me. This courage, this literally is saying, something

has come into my life to discourage me, cast me down, and Paul's letting us all into the center of his life as to how he deals with that. And I was reading one commentator on this who said, discouragement is very important index of where you are in terms of maturity. He said, if you are always discouraged or never discouraged, there's something wrong with you. He says, if you're never discouraged, you just don't care. He says, you don't care. You don't care about people. You don't care about God's cause. You don't care about the world. You don't care if you're not discouraged. He says, if you're a mature person, if you're a caring person, you will be continually

dealing with discouragement. Messengers from Satan. On the other hand, if you're continually discouraged and always cast down, you don't know how to deal. You don't know how to deal with it. You don't know the wisdom, you're not wise. Therefore, if you're always discouraged, you're never discouraged, it's a sign of a maturity. I want to understand discouragement. Take a look at Paul. Now, Paul tells us Therefore, if you're always discouraged, you're never discouraged, it's a sign of immaturity. You want to understand discouragement, take a look at Paul. Now, Paul tells us, in this case,

I'm just gonna go right through it because verse one tells us something about the context, why Paul is talking about this. And verse two to six tells us about the heaven experience. And verse seven to ten tells us about the thorn experience. Paul talks us about the heaven experience and then the thorn experience. Paul talks us about the heaven experience and then the thorn experience. Now before we look at it, let me give you,

let me look at verse 1 just to show you why this is even coming up. See, verse 1, he says, I must go on boasting, although there's nothing to be gained, I will go on divisions and revelations from the Lord. Now, I gotta just take a minute or two here to set this up so you understand the context. Why Paul is saying this? This is a letter. This is a letter to the church of Corinth. And if you read the whole letter and if you read what comes up before it,

this is what you would see. There were some false teachers, people that had come to Corinth and were twisting the gospel. And Paul out of real concern for his people was trying to say, don't follow them, but they claim to be apostles. If you study the Bible in the original language in Greek, one of the great jokes is this place in chapter 11, where Paul calls these people, he calls them the super apostles. Now, because they were claiming to be apostles, they were claiming to have divine authority,

and they were claiming to be better than Paul. They had more apostolic authority than Paul that you should listen to us, they said. Now, Paul, in Greek, he doesn't actually say super apostles, he calls them hoopair, which is for super, he calls them hoopermen. They're the hoopermen. So whenever you, in seminaries, we used to talk about Paul and the Hooper men because that's literally what he says. He says, I am not inferior to these Hooper men. And these super apostles were claiming divine authority. And they said, we have this and we

have that. And this is the reason you ought to listen to us. And that puts Paul into a horrible position. Paul says, you're forcing me out of love for you to show you why you need to listen to me, and therefore you're forcing me to boast. I hated it, stupid, and see, verse 1 is to be understood, although there's nothing to be gained by boasting now. The better translation would be, I'm going on boasting. In general, boasting is a stupid thing to do. In general, boasting is a bad enterprise. It's a useless, fruitless enterprise. There's nothing to be gained by it, but you're forcing me.

So let me tell you about visions and revelations from the Lord. Now, you see, these super apostles have been saying, we have visions and revelations. God comes and speaks to us. Paul decides to say, well, since they're talking about visions, revelations, if I'm going to prove to you that I'm an apostle, that you have to listen to me, I have to talk about it too. I think it's stupid, I hate to do it. You're forcing me to do it, but I'm going to do it. But when he goes into explain to show that he has had visions and revelations from God,

to show that he has had visions and revelations from God. He is not in a direct competition. He is not saying, I want to tell you about a revelation. It's just show you that I have had a bigger vision and a bigger revelation than these guys. He's really not saying, they have one revelation a week, oh, I have two, you know, he's not saying, my revelations are bigger, my revelations are better. Oh no, he's saying, let me show you the validity of my apostleship by showing you that my revelations

are different. They're different. The experience of God that these guys are talking about is a different experience than what I've got. It's not an accord with the gospel, he's saying. So he says, you're forcing me to tell about whether or not I've had visions of revelation. Let me tell you about them.

And this is what he says. He says, I know a man in Christ, who 14 years ago, was caught up to the third heaven, whether it was in the body or not out of the body, I don't know. God knows. And I know this man, whether in the body or part of the body, I do not know, but God knows, was caught up to paradise.

He heard inexpressible things. Things that man is not permitted to tell. I will boast about him. I won't boast about me, but I could boast about him. See, I wouldn't be a fool because it'd be the truth, but I won't. What is this? Now Paul is clearly talking about himself. Obviously talking about it, he says, I'll tell you about a man who has taken up to heaven. Now I could say that I was taking up to heaven, it really happened, but I'm not going to say that, I'm going to talk about him. What is this? Paul says, I hate talking about this.

Now what he's showing us is something very, very important. I've been doing a little bit of reflection on this and it's pretty intriguing. In, first of all, let me show you, he says here that he's teaching us that people who have incredibly high and lofty experiences of God, who have actually come right into his presence, who have had magnificent and overwhelming encounters with the living God are absolutely, let me use an old word, loath to talk about it. One of the marks of these kinds of experiences is that you do not talk about them. I was mentioning this morning in the question, answer time, that I've got a number of mentors, but they're all dead. I like dead mentors.

They're my favorite kind. They can't check up on you. They can't give you homework. And I'm always quoting these people. And by a mentor, I mean, there's certain writers, ministers, thinkers that I've just devoted myself to learning everything about them, reading everything about them, knowing everything about them because I feel like I learned so much from them. It helps that they're dead in some ways.

Anyway, C.S. Lewis's one, Jonathan Edwards's one, another one is a guy named David Martin Lloyd-Jones who died fairly recently in the 1980s, I think. He was a great preacher and he was a Welshman and he preached in a very large church in the center of London. And recently his biography came out and I read it and one of the things that's so interesting is in the 1949, in the summer of 1949, when he got to the summer, when Lloyd Jones got to the summer, he was so burnt out, he was so tired, he was so discouraged, he was so depressed that he essentially took the entire summer off from Brenny preaching. He just went and he went back to Wales, his

homeland, and he just tried to get himself back together. And he went off even away from the family. He couldn't read much, and usually he was a tremendous reader, and he went away from the family just to be apart in places. and he would, he'd get up and he'd read the scripture, and he was trying to pray, and he was trying to also, he was trying to read certain Christian literature, and he was getting no comfort. One morning he woke up, 6 a.m., and he was still in a kind of agony of soul, he say. He was just feeling far from God, and he started to get dressed. He hadn't prayed yet. He started to get dressed and laying on the bed was one of the Christian books he had been reading. And as he was getting dressed,

he looked at the book, his eye just glanced at it, and he caught the word, he saw a word on the page, the word glory. And he says, all of a sudden, let me just read what it says, it says instantly, like a blaze of light, he felt the glory of God surround him. The nearness of God and the reality of heaven and his title to both became overwhelming truths. In a state of ecstasy and joy, he fell to the ground and wept, and remained in this basic condition for several days. The struggle came back as the summer went on, and yet later on the same thing happened for several days, he never wrote the experience.

Even though here's a man who's written dozens of books, he never even talked about the experience, and it really didn't even come out until his biography after he was dead, dug it up out of having known him personally and known the family and so on. The biographer says that after this happened, Lloyd Jones himself made a kind of hobby of studying the journals and the records and the letters,

and he found out that there was a number of people, many actually, many great Christian leaders, who had had very similar experiences, and they all said the same thing. Now one that, for example, I've read here before, but it's particularly interesting in light of 2 Corinthians 12. Dwight Moody, who was a minister in,

who lived in Chicago, but he often came to New York and in the mid 19th century he wrote this, he said, I began to cry out as never before for a greater blessing from God. The hunger increased. I really felt that I did not want to live any longer. I kept on crying out to God that He would fill me with His Spirit.

Well, one day in the city of New York, what a day. I can't describe it. I very seldom refer to it. It is too sacred and experience to name. Paul had an experience of which he never spoke for 14 years. This is all I will say about it. God revealed himself to me and I had such an experience of his love that I had to ask him to stay his hand. Lloyd Jones dug out the Puritans. The Purits had much to say about this, and one very famous Purit, man named William Guthrie, wrote a book called The Christians Great Interest,

and in it he says this, listen. He says, there is a glorious divine manifestation of God unto the soul. It is a thing much better felt than spoken of. It is not an audible voice, but it's a ray of glory that fills the soul with God as life, light, love, and liberty. A corresponds to the voice that said to Daniel, O man greatly beloved, and that said to Jesus,

this is my beloved son, in whom I'm well pleased. Now, do you notice something that they all have in common? It's an experience of love, it's an experience of newness, and they don't want to talk about it. Inexpressible. I don't want to say anything about it. You can hardly drive it out of me. It's a thing better felt than spoken of, and here's what we learn.

First of all, number one. If you hear, and I do, if you hear and I do, when you hear people talking about, very openly about God, having revealed himself to me. God having spoken to me, God having appeared to me, God having said this and that and this and that, at the very best, they must be talking about an experience of God of a vastly lower order than with Paul

or even with Lloyd Jones or Dwight Moody or William Guthrie are talking about because a holy shyness comes upon you when this happens. Anybody that talks openly about this sort of thing, God just came down, he filled my soul with this and he told me this when they talk like that, at the best they're talking about something much lower than this. Because anyone who's experienced this, it takes wild horses to drag it out of them. But on the other hand, it fills you with a holy boldness.

You have a holy shyness about yourself, but it fills you with a holy boldness about Christ. What's interesting is, well, at first glance you might say, oh, I believe that too. I believe that religion is a very private thing. I don't believe you should talk about religion. This is Paul here. Paul is not a shy person about religion. Paul would get up in every street corner and he was quite happy to buttonhole everybody he could possibly do and say, I want to tell you about Jesus, I want to persuade you, you must not push Paul into that kind of 20th century mindset

religion is a private thing. Religion is not a private thing. This is. In fact, this experience turns you, it gives you a holy boldness about Christ, but gives you an absolute, holy, shyness about talking about yourself and your experiences. Why? There have never been stronger calls for justice than those we have heard in recent years. What does the Bible have to say about it? And how does God's Word help bring about justice? In Tim Keller's book, Generous Justice,

you'll discover that the Bible gives us a rich and complex understanding of what justice is and what it means to live it out. The book provides a biblical framework for justice, one that calls every Christian to a life of generous justice, fueled by grace. Generous Justice is our thank you for your gift to help gospel and life share the hope of the gospel with people all over the world. So request your copy today at gospelandlife.com slash give. That's gospelandlife.com slash give. Now here's Tim Keller with the remainder of today's teaching.

Well, here's a couple of reasons. First of all, Paul actually gives us a hint in verse 6. It's really interesting. He says the reason I refrain is because I want no one to think more of me than is warranted by what I do or say, and there it is. When a person starts to talk about the experiences of God, how God has revealed himself to me, how God has done this and that, you automatically are claiming authority for yourself on the basis of your experience. If you've ever done that, or if you've ever been in a situation where that happens,

when a person says, God told me that you too should get married, what happens there? What happens? Well, what that person has just done is they've lifted themselves about six feet above contradiction. How can you have a conversation about that?

Well, gee, I don't know if God's right. You can't do that. When you start talking about your experiences, you see, you're saying, I have authority because of my experiences, and Paul says no. The authority that comes should come because of what I do and what I say. In other words, he says, if I've had experience of God, it should show in my character I should be a person of transparency, a person of integrity, a person of love,

a person of holiness, a person of godliness. You should be listening to me because you look at my life and you say, that man must have met God. Because of the codency of what I say, because of the truth of what I say, because of who I am. That's where the authority should come from. Not because of what I say, because of the truth of what I say, because of who I am. That's where the authority should come from, not because of what I claim to have experienced.

I mean, I could be deluded. People get deluded all the time, sincerely deluded by these things. No. He says, I'm not gonna talk about these things, the way the super apostles are talking about them, that's not the way the gospel works. That's lording it over people. And now he won't do that. He says, that's one of the reasons why he's

reticent. But I'll tell you, I think the, I'll tell you this. I hope you, I hope nobody here takes offense at this. And actually I hope God doesn't take offense at this. I was thinking about this, but listen, there is nothing worse than to hear a man who's got an intimate with a woman tell everybody about it. There's nothing worse than bragging about it the next day and describing the level of intimacy. I mean, if you've ever heard anything like that, if you've ever heard anybody do that, you really know that actually no true intimacy really happened.

When two people, whether friends or lovers, let the barriers down, become vulnerable to each other, reach a new level of intimacy, a new level of understanding, they understand each other, a new level of love, it is absolutely instinctive to protect that. And not to talk about that. You just don't do it. You don't do it. And so Paul, you see, it's so interesting. Paul says 14 years ago I had a revelation. I've never told anybody about it before, and I hate to tell it now, and I'm not even in a sense I'm going to do everything I can to show you how much I hate telling, I'm talking about it. And you know what's funny when he gets down to it? This must have been unbelievable, because you remember,

you know what this is? This is not. This is not his conversion. I mean Paul had all sorts of experiences. Jesus Christ appeared him on the Damascus road and struck him blind. All through the book of Acts, he has all sorts of dreams and visions and revelations all.

And so this is, whatever this is, probably was the number one. This was the biggest. And I mean, I would have to be pretty big. I mean, you know, here's, you know, whatever Paul considers the big one, considering if you read the book of Acts, and you see what he had, this must have been pretty

incredible and you know, he gets his way. He doesn't tell us to talk on thing. I read this, he hardly tells us anything. He gets his way. All the Heming and Haing, you know, verses here, verses, you know, three verses of introduction and four verses of after, you know, reflection and about three words. I went to the third heaven. You know what the third heaven is? That was just an old traditional way of saying. The third first heaven was, is the atmosphere, the second heaven is the stars and the moon and the sun, and the third heaven is the presence of God.

That's all. And that's all I says. I was there. He said, I don't even know if it was a vision or whether I was taken up out in the body. I have no idea. It was that incredible. Doesn't tell us the thing about it.

Doesn't tell us the thing about it. But, there's a holy boldness, there's a holy shyness, and the reason he's caught up, the reason he has this kind of experience. And even though I'm not saying that everybody else can have an experience like this, I really think that apostles did have access that we don't have because of their job. Writing the scripture, a tough job. I hope they had a few pretty incredible revelations. I hope they were way beyond me.

But he doesn't say I had it because I was an apostle. He doesn't say I had it because I have an ability with mystical experiences that I've got psychic ability or something like that. What does he say? Why did he have one? Because he was who or something like that, what does he say? Why did he have one? Because he was who? Because he was what? What?

What does he say? He was just a man in Christ. You see, to be in Christ, to simply position in Christ, to be clothed with Christ, through faith, God sees us as Christ. But when we unite with Christ by faith, then God sees us, He sees Christ record, He sees Christ. And that's the reason when we've got access.

We've got, in a certain sense, as much access as Paul did. That's pretty remarkable. But the other thing that he tells us about is the Thorn experience. He says, we have a heaven experience, we have a Thorn experience, and then he says, but to keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassing great revelations, there was given me a Thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, remember we said before, to buff at me. And when that happened,

this is, he's laying down a principle that's pretty frightening in some ways, but also extremely important, and you've got to see it. And this is what the principle is. In the Christian experience, this is why he's saying that I don't know about these super apostles, they don't seem to have the Christian experience.

In the Christian experience, strengthen weakness, always go together. They are never apart. Lloyd Jones has an experience of weakness which led to experience of strength. And Paul here says, I had an experience of strength which led to an experience of weakness. I was so lifted up that I would have become conceited

unless God put something in my life to show me how weak I am and to make me feel my weakness. Strength and weakness are never part in the Christian life. Just like you're left and you're right foot. You know, when you walk, your right foot is ahead of your left foot, but it can't get too far ahead. It just can't. You fall down.

Next thing, you know, you're dragging your left foot up to reach your right foot and it go beyond, and then that's walking. That's also Christian growth. Always. Experiences of strength lead to experiences of weakness and experiences of weakness lead to experiences of strength. You don't go from weakness to strength. Don't you see what Paul is saying is, you go from weakness to strength, weakness to strength, weakness to strength into higher and higher realms of power.

You see, my power is made perfect in weakness. The strength leads to weakness, the weakness leads to strength, and that's how I grow in power. Power is not antithetical to weakness, not a bit. He says, I wouldn't have anything like the courage I have. I wouldn't have anything like the power I have. I wouldn't have anything like the power I have, I wouldn't have anything like the freedom I have from fear. If God hadn't put this weakness in my life, if I hadn't gotten conceited, I'd be filled with fear.

Don't you see pride conceit comes because our hearts will take any success, any good thing, and we'll use it as a way of self-justification. Anything, even experiences of God. Paul says, my heart would have taken that and said, I must be hot spit. I've been heaven. You know, actually, he said automatically,

he just knows that that's what would have happened, and God sends a thorn. Now somebody says, well, what's the thorn? Interestingly enough, we don't really know. And how wise and how wonderful of Paul not to tell us. You see, that we can identify with them. See, if he told us the thorn is, we'd say, well, that's not me. But since he doesn't tell us what it is, everybody can read themselves in here.

Actually, if thorn in the flesh, see the word flesh, if he means a Thorn in the body, if he means his physical flesh, then he may mean that he had a problem with people, you know, surmise they had an eye problem, that he was going blind, that he had epilepsy, things like that. But if when he says Thorn in the flesh, he means his spiritual flesh, that means his sin. In other words, that he had a go to his sin. He might mean that he had a besetting sin.

He was falling prey to temptation. He was tempted into bitterness or into anger, into lust or into something like that. We don't know, isn't that nice? Because now we can read Arthuran in. And what he says is, God gave me something. No wait a minute, you say, didn't Satan give me something? Well, I get to that as my last point in a here one second.

But the point is something came in that filled him with weakness. And he says, if it wasn't for that sense of weakness that came into my life, I wouldn't have any power. You see, it's the weakness that leads you to cry out to God. It's the weakness that shows you that the only reason why God loves you is not because of your righteousness, but because of Christ's righteousness. And that's the only thing that frees you to go out and say, gosh, the reason that God, I remember the morning, I remember the morning, when I looked at my life, and God was still with me, he was

still helping me, he was still supporting me in spite of the last two or three months in which I thought I'd let him down again and again. And the thought came to me, oh my gosh, he must love me for Christ's sake. You know, that was one of those kind of minor revelations. And everybody who goes through a period of weakness, at some point you'll say, oh my gosh, he must love me. Not because I'm perfect because he's perfect, not because I'm good because he's good. And that just

frees you. Experiences of weakness lead to power. In fact, Paul says, God will never let you go. You know the place in the Psalm 3 where it says he is a shield? This means that whenever God lets anything come into your life that hurts you, it's a pain that shows you your weakness, that makes you feel like giving up, he's shielding you from something worse. He's trying to show, you see, if he's a shield that means even the worst thing that comes into your life, these bad things that come into your life, he's trying to show, you see, if he's a shield, that means even the worst thing that comes into your life, these bad things that come into your life, he's trying to shield you from something worse.

He's always a shield. He's always protecting. Weakness and strength go together. Now, the only thing you have to see, though, one last thing is that Paul doesn't say here that it happens automatically. Now he doesn't give you the impression at all that weakness automatically leads his strength. Rather, he tells you how he processed the thorn.

It says, three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from 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 about my weaknesses. So the Christ power may rest on me when I'm weak, then I'm strong. Now, well, here's what happened. First of all, I don't have time to spell this out. Let me show you the trick.

It's a trick. Not a trick. There's a technique. Look, first of all, he says, the thorn is a messenger from Satan. Now that means that when a bad thing happens to you, Satan attaches a message to it. It's a little bit like email. You know, you can attach a document.

You can attach a document to your email, right? You just attach it and it goes. All right, Satan attaches a message to the thorn and the thing that discourages you is not the thorn but the message with it. Satan wants you to get one message from the thorn but there he's saying, when I prayed to God, I saw that God had another, had his own message with it. You have to look at a problem that comes into your life and you have to say, there's a message from Satan in this and there's a message from God in my discouragement or my strengthening. We'll depend on which message I listen to. I

give you an example that's fairly obvious because especially, you know, I know this since it's so many single people come to this church, this has happened to a number of you. This might be one of the reasons we are single. Listen, has anybody who you wanted to marry turns you down? Somebody who wanted to marry, and they said, nah, and they cut it off. That's a thorn. You feel weak.

It buffets you. But here's what Paul's saying. Satan has a message with it. What's Satan's message? Well, there's a lot of things. So your discouragement is not the result of the thorn, it's the result of listening to the message from Satan. Well, for example, one message that comes from Satan is,

you're terrible, you're a failure. See, it's not the thorn. It's the message, this is scourging you. Or here's another one. Another message that comes with this sort of thorn is maybe the message that you're listening to is, you know, if it's a man who turned you down or a woman that turned you down, maybe the message says, you know, women are terrible. Men, you can't trust them. You know, and you get all down. you can't trust them. You know, and you get all down.

I can't trust them. I hate them. It's not the thorn. It's the message. Paul says though, with every thorn, there's a message from God. What is that message? He says, my grace is sufficient for you.

And my power is made perfect in weakness. Now, that is the generic message. I have to say that what Paul is saying is whatever particular Thorn is coming to your life is a particular message from God. Whether you discourage or strengthen, all depends on whether or not you're going to listen to Satan's message with it or God's. For example, God could be saying to you,

it's my grace that saves you, not what the opposite sex thinks of you. My grace is sufficient for you. And until you understand that, you're not gonna have power. As long as you take your identity and what the opposite sex thinks about you, you're gonna be a person of weakness.

So I sent you this weakness to make you strong. Don't you see? Don't you see? You see Paul found that in prayer. My grace is sufficient for you. Now I'm sorry to pick on you. Somebody here thinks, does he know that somebody just turned me down? No, I'm not.

I just know that this has happened. And just one example. It's pretty remarkable. And if you do that, and if you listen to the message, and you see that the thorn that's there, Satan's got a purpose for it and so does God, and depending on who you listen to, will determine whose purposes are realized in your life. Jonathan Edwards, that other dead mentor of God, has a great little line, I just read this week,

he was talking about safety, and he says Christians are safe, utterly safe, place in Proverbs where it says, he who trusted in the Lord is safe, and Jonathan Edwards says, the mistake that people make all the time is this. He says, the Bible does not teach that Christians are safe from evil things. The Bible says the Christians are safe from the evil of all things.

Evil things will not have an evil effect on you at all. If you understand the gospel and you apply it, if you know that you're saved by grace and you use it at that moment, you see, you are utterly safe, not from evil things, but from the evil of anything. Let's pray. Thank you, Father, for giving us one more story of a man in Christ. And we pray that those of us tonight who are looking at our thorns and looking at our wounds

might apply grace as we come to your table so that we can find that our weakness is really our strength and your power is made perfect through it. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Thanks for listening to today's teaching from Dr. Keller. We pray you were encouraged by it. To find more gospel-centered resources like today's teaching,

you can sign up for email updates at gospelandlife.com. That's gospelandlife.com. This month's sermons were recorded in 1996 and 2009. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel and Life podcast were preached from 1989 to 2017, while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church. you