God’s grace is sufficient.

2 Corinthians 12: 7 – 10. Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given 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 on me.    That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

The Lord told Paul that in spite of his “thorn in the flesh”, God’s grace is sufficient for him.

How did God’s grace make the difference?  How did it meet Paul’s needs?

1. Grace could meet Paul’s needs because it expresses God’s acceptance and pleasure in us.  When we receive his grace, we enjoy the status of favour and approval in God’s eyes.  Grace means that God loves us, that he is favourably inclined towards us; we have his acceptance and his promise of care.

2.  Grace could meet Paul’s need because it was available to him all the time.  When we sin or fail, or fall short, it does not put us outside of the reach of God’s grace.  Since grace is given freely to us in Jesus, it can’t be taken away because we stumbled.  When we come to God by faith, through the blood of Jesus his grace is ever ready to meet and minister to our insufficiencies.

3.  Grace could meet Paul’s need because it was the very strength of God.  So much of the power of this world is expressed in things and in ways that bring harm and destruction to ourselves, to the world we live in and to God’s work.  It happens when we take a worldly perspective about authority, spiritual power and strength, and deny God’s truth about the strength of grace and love.  God’s grace is not weakness or the tolerance of impurity.

Instead, it is the power of God to fulfil what we lack.

Being spiritually pretentious and conceited kills the working of God’s power through our attempted witness and our lives!

But to trust in God and believe in his grace, enables us to be true vessels of his love, and as such, of his power!