Applying the Gospel Study Bible
Church & Ministry Resource Guide
The Spiritual Strength God Gives to Sufferers
Unanswered Prayer as Suffering
Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this [the thorn in the flesh], 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, then I am strong. (2 Cor. 12:8–10)
Why does God allow his children to suffer? One of the most helpful answers to this question in the whole Bible is found in these verses. Since Paul pleaded three times to have his thorn removed (2 Cor. 12:8), perhaps it is appropriate that Paul articulates this final purpose for suffering in three different ways:
- “for my power is made perfect in weakness”
- “so that the power of Christ may rest upon me”
- “For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
One of the reasons why God allows his children to suffer is so that the power of Christ will both rest on them and strengthen them in the midst of their weakness.
Paul received a thorn in the flesh—most likely, a physical ailment—to counteract any conceit that could have arisen because of the heavenly vision he had seen and the revelation he had received.
God's Purposes in Our Pain
Kenneth Berding, Keith R. Krell
Written for Christians who are struggling to understand why they experience grief, this book explores 10 powerful statements from 2 Corinthians about God’s good purposes for suffering.
But now Paul mentions a different category of suffering: “Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me.” These words of Paul are both surprising and sobering. He prayed three times for God to remove his thorn—prayers that were probably spread out over many years. Yet each time that Paul begged for relief, the Lord responded with a resounding no.
Can you imagine that? The apostle Paul, one of the greatest Christians who ever lived, the man who introduced Christianity to Europe and wrote a significant portion of the New Testament, didn’t receive an answer to one of the most personally significant prayers he ever prayed. It reminds us of Jesus praying three times in the garden of Gethsemane for his cup of suffering to be removed. It certainly was not lost on Paul that his Lord’s suffering included a crown of thorns. A crown of thorns! Paul knew that the Father did not remove the crown of suffering from Jesus, despite his Lord’s fervent prayers. As with Jesus, Paul came to understand that he also must endure the deep pain of thorns. In this he identified with the sufferings and death of his Lord.1
Of all the sufferings that weigh us down, perhaps none is greater than the silence of God when we pray. How painful it can be to fervently pray without receiving an answer:
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A father prays faithfully for his teenage daughter, who has become involved in a sinful lifestyle and is distant from the family. He remembers when she was active in church and youth group. Despite his prayers and attempts to guide her back to faith, she continues down a troubling path, leaving him feeling helpless and confused about why his prayers seemingly go unanswered.
-
A woman cares for her elderly father, who is seriously ill. She prays daily for his recovery and for strength to support him. Despite her prayers and help from others, his health worsens, and he eventually dies. She is left with deep sadness and struggles to understand why her prayers for healing were not answered.
- A couple desperately wants to start a family but faces ongoing challenges with infertility. They pray together for a child, hoping that God will grant their wish. After years of disappointment and failed treatments, they still cannot conceive. The emotional burden of unanswered prayers leaves them feeling lonely and questioning their faith in God’s plan for them.
Such scenarios have caused many godly people to secretly harbor doubt that God answers prayer. They feel disappointed by God. We know how deeply distressing unanswered prayer can be. Perhaps, though, the tension is that when we pray, we often focus on receiving answers whereas God wants to use the process of prayer to help us acknowledge our utter dependence on his grace. Sometimes this means our prayers will be answered in amazing and miraculous ways. Other times our prayers will not be answered at all.
Remember Job. He lost his home, his fortune, his children, his health, and his reputation. All he counted dear was taken away from him. When he finally hit the bottom, still struggling with anger and thinking death might be better, he uttered words of faith: “Though he slay me, I will hope in him” (Job 13:15). It’s as if he’s saying to God, “You can take my life, but you can’t make me stop trusting in you.”
Power Perfected in Weakness
God gives grace for whatever we face. In 2 Corinthians 12:9, Paul tells us that he received an answer to his desperate request. In the only recorded words of the risen Jesus in Paul’s letters, Jesus himself powerfully spoke words of encouragement and hope: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Dane Ortlund comments about the word “grace” in this passage:
Paul is using “grace” more broadly as shorthand for the presence of God—sustaining, empowering, calming, supporting, comforting, emboldening, satisfying. “My grace is sufficient for you” means “I am sufficient for you.” Why, then, use the word “grace”? Because the Lord sought to reassure Paul that he need not earn or deserve God’s presence. It is of grace.2
George Guthrie adds, “Thus God told Paul in effect, ‘You do not really need the thorn removed. All you need is my grace to deal with it.’”3
What was Paul’s response to this message that God was not going to heal him but would increase his power through Paul’s weakness instead? Did Paul turn his why into a whine? Did he stubbornly insist that God remove the thorn? Did he permit himself to sink into a long-term seething anger catalyzed by unmet expectations?
May we welcome weakness for spiritual strength.
No. He responded, “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me” (2 Cor. 12:9). Paul proclaimed that, going forward, he wouldn’t fight his weaknesses; he welcomed them so that he might become a conduit for the power of Christ.
Paul knew that his weaknesses (all of them!—notice the plural) kept him connected to God and his sufficiency. This means that, as with Paul’s thorn, our suffering is not a barrier but a pathway to usefulness. Through suffering, God provides the sufficiency and power of Jesus himself. That’s why Paul was willing to openly proclaim that he was weak.
Be forewarned, though, that power is not automatically activated through weakness. Power is made perfect in those who acknowledge that they are weak, in those who moment by moment live with the truth that they are utterly helpless to deal with the sufferings they experience unless they look to Jesus for strength. Paul exemplifies this. Even though he was writing a letter to the entire Christian community in Corinth, he openly acknowledged how weak he was. He even wrote about his physical pain for which the Corinthians would have likely looked down on him. But Paul knew that by openly acknowledging his weakness, he was making space for God’s power to transform him and powerfully use him.
Like Paul, we must acknowledge our weakness to experience Christ’s power. We ourselves can testify that some of the times we’ve felt closest to God are when we’ve endured our most disturbing and debilitating trials. We find ourselves on our knees crying out, “God, help us through this. We cannot endure it on our own! Oh, how we need you, Lord!”
The very thing we want most removed from our lives might be the very thing we need most. May we welcome weakness for spiritual strength.
Delighting in Suffering
But Paul doesn’t stop there. In his modeling of a Christian response to suffering, he takes us one step further—a step into our most “discomfort zone.” He writes, “For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:10). Paul not only welcomed weakness, but he also tells us that he is excited about it.
You’ve got to be kidding, Paul! We can (sort of) accept the idea that we need to stoically embrace suffering, especially if we know that God will release his power through our weakness. But Paul was unwilling to stop there. He continued to say that he was “content” with his suffering. Actually, he wrote more than that since the English word content might not be strong enough to represent the Greek word Paul used. Other versions translate this word as “take pleasure” or “delight.”4 Paul wasn’t merely content with his sufferings; he was positively fired up by the idea that God was going to use his weakness to magnify God’s power!
This sentiment feels very uncomfortable to us. When facing suffering, we often think that we are not allowed to rejoice in what God will do through our suffering, even if we know that God has benevolent purposes. But in seeking to rejoice in suffering, Paul is not alone in Scripture:
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matt. 5:12)
Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. (James 1:2–3)
But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. (1 Pet. 4:13)
Paul himself also wrote elsewhere, “Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance” (Rom. 5:3). And tucked away at the end of the short prophecy of Habakkuk are these moving words:
Though the fig tree should not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
I will take joy in the God of my salvation. (Hab. 3:17–18)
Please don’t misunderstand. We are not telling you to put on a happy face when you suffer. There is nothing wrong with openly expressing grief, pain, loneliness, and feelings of abandonment to the Lord. Recall how many laments God made sure to include in his Bible (especially in the book of Psalms)! But it is also not wrong to lean into joy as you consider how God is likely going to use your weakness to display his power. Strange as it may sound, lament can coexist with rejoicing—perhaps not at exactly the same moment or to the same degree but certainly in the same person for whom God has graciously appointed weakness and suffering.6 God does this so that we who suffer might know him more deeply and display his power more prominently through our weakness.
It took him some time to get there, but Paul eventually learned to be grateful for his suffering because he knew that God’s strength would present itself through his weakness. To flesh out Paul’s words and catch his intended meaning, we might say, “When I am weak in me, then I am strong in him.” Paul believed that his weakness manifested God’s strength.
Notes:
- It is likely that Paul found spiritual help in comparing his sufferings to the sufferings of Jesus. See Kenneth Berding, Thorn in the Flesh: New Clues for an Old Problem (Lexham, 2023), 139–52.
- Dane Ortlund, 2 Corinthians, in Romans–Galatians, vol. 10 of ESV Expository Commentary, ed. Iain M. Duguid, James M. Hamilton Jr., and Jay Sklar (Crossway, 2020), 548.
- George H. Guthrie, 2 Corinthians, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Baker Academic, 2015), 593.
- KJV, NKJV, CSB, NLT: “take pleasure”; NIV, NASB: “delight.”
This article is adapted from God’s Purposes in Our Pain: 10 Ways God Uses Suffering for Our Good by Kenneth Berding and Keith R. Krell.
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