Word of Salvation – Vol. 26 No. 08 – November 1979

 

My Grace Will Do

 

Sermon by Rev. A. I. de Graaf, B.D. on 2Corinthians 12:7-9

Scripture Readings: Job 1:6-12 & 1:20 – 2:10; 2Cor.12:1-9

 

On January 16, 1968 Bill van der Kolk died in an accident on a Queensland beach. He was one of our most promising and fruitful ministers, but the Lord decided : “He’d better come Home”. Some of his older colleagues were really troubled about that: Lord why take him… and not me? He could do so much? Lord why handicap Your Own work?

Yes, why? He does it all the time.

Happily married children of God must lose their partners… while couples that fight like cat and dog live on into high age together. Lord, what’s the idea? Is the Lord throwing spanners into His own works? Why handicap your best workers? Why Lord? What’s the idea?

Why put a brake on a car that’s running well? Why? WELL, Paul knew that question, too!

And Paul was allowed – yes even encouraged! – to ask Him that question. God did not say, “Mind your own business!” What He DID say was: “That’s MY business!” YOUR LIFE – says God your Lord who bought you with the high price of the blood of His Son – YOUR LIFE IS MY BUSINESS. What do you think, that I’m not interested? You ask why? Well I may wait a little, but I’ll let you know in good time.

We will think this morning about the riddle of the handicap in the life of God’s children. The torment of the angel of Satan. And God’s answer to our question:

“MY GRACE WILL DO!”

– 1 – A PRESENT I DON’T LIKE …― …yet a present!

The last thing – it seems that God wants in His service, are spiritual Tarzans – guys that roll their muscles and say, confidently, “I’ll fix it!” Even Christ wasn’t wearing a “SUPERMAN” T-shirt. And those who work for the Lord don’t look in the least like Gigantor..! You may say: “Wait a minute, deGraf! What about Samson??” Yes, what about him? When he had been fighting against those 1000 Philistines with that donkey’s jawbone, felling them the one after the other he did a Superman act and boasted:

“With a donkey’s jawbone I’ve made donkeys of them!
  With a donkey’s jawbone I killed 1000 men!!”

But the Lord made him feel how wrong he had been! Soon he lay crying out in the agony of thirst: “Lord, YOU have given your servant this great victory!” Ah, says the Lord, that’s more like it! – and gave him to drink.

Samson the strong…. but how weak he was when in the arms of a beautiful Philistine girl! God sure showed that it was HE the LORD, who gave Israel the VICTORY THROUGH Samson, it proved a hard lesson to learn for this would-be superman.

Well… Paul was a sort of would-be SPIRITUAL superman too, at first. You see he had been a Pharisees and that’s exactly what the Pharisees thought they were: praying on their streetcorners so all and sundry could see them: HERE COME GOD’S GOODIES, the Shock Troops of Perfection! But God does not like these eye-catching supermen to do His work. He is a jealous God. When we show the tendency to show off, God pricks the balloon and brings us down. He sure did that with this ex-Pharisee Paul. In the chapter before ours, 2Cor.11, he is defending himself and his authority as a messenger of God Almighty, against those who said that he was a renegade, a bad son of Israel. “Oh!”, he says “is that what they’re saying of me”? Well, what have they got that I haven’t also?” I’m as good a Jew as any and see what I suffered for the sake of the Gospel! And then in the beginning of this chapter he tells of himself (it becomes clear he hints at what happened to HIMSELF) that God gave him wonderful revelations: Glimpses of heaven, peeps into paradise! – wonderful experiences too rich for words! And then suddenly he stops. It is as if we see him shrivel up and bow his head: O Lord here I go again! And then he says: Yes, God gave me very much. Therefore He had to handicap me otherwise I’d have been running with myself completely! Here Paul – said God – I give you something.

A present for you, have a look what’s inside. But it was not nice at all! A ‘thorn in the flesh’ was given him! A messenger of Satan! What was it? A sickness? A particular temptation to sin? Epileptic fits as some think Paul had? An eye ailment? (look at the big letters he scrawls at the end of his epistles!) Or was it a deformation in his body, a hunch-back or something that made people laugh at him as he suggests in this very letter!? Did he stutter perhaps? (And that for a preacher!) Something was the matter and it was a big bother. It came from the devil himself! Man, was it a handicap! It kept him small! It made him cry out in bitter agony: “GOD WHY ME??“ When we read this, it can even now make us angry can’t it? The kind of anger we had as children when we read the book of Job: God gambling with the devil over Job: O.K. devil, make him poor; Go ahead devil, kill his children – all 10 of them. I bet he will still love me – well that’s not exactly how God said it, but that is how it can come across to our angry souls: O.K devil, make him ill, miserably ill so he doesn’t even know how to sit or lie down, and his friends seeing him will be so stunned they can’t say a word for 7 days…!” God! What a way to treat your children! If you or I would treat our kids that way we’d be up for child abuse and dragged before court! Yes, that’s what Job’s wife suggests too when she sees him sitting there. That comes on top of all Job’s problems: a wife who says to him: “You’re crazy to still serve that God! Pension Him off and die without Him!?!” But then that was a mother who had lost 10 children, too. You are not necessarily very reasonable in that kind of condition. But Job says – to his wife: “Stop talking like that! Shall we take the good things from God and not the bad?”

Yes, the gifts He gives they turn out different at times. Paul gets an angel of Satan. But angels are – says Hebrews 1:14 – servant-spirits, sent out to look after God’s children!’ Look after God’s children! That’s the LAST thing Satan and his angels want to do! But the Lord makes them do it all the same! Here Paul – I give you something! Yes, you have seen right, an angel of Satan to torment and pester you.

That’s my GIFT to you says God. Like it, Paul?

You know, we think of THE BLESSING OF THE LORD when we see PROFIT in our business, a rise in salary – – But when we have a loss, a cut, now who calls that a blessing? We think of health as a blessing from God and sure it is, but who would ever call sickness that? A good marriage is great, but who ever would call it a blessing and gift of God when the angel of Satan takes the form of a cold and awkward marriage partner? Yet some of God’s greatest servants have had that handicap.

God sending these gifts we did NOT ask for. Are you happy? Well, what must we say!? AT LEAST PAUL – who was puzzled and upset – DID say that to God his father and that gets me to point 2: This unexpected awful gift from God did not turn him off his prayer, no, he prayed now even the harder and he got….

– 2 – AN ANSWER HE DIDN’T FANCY… but an answer it was.

Yes, that’s what that devil had not counted on, for Satan wants to turn us OFF our prayer of course.

You see, Satan knows well that it is not always true at all, that trouble teaches people to pray. There are some whom trouble teaches to swear! To doubt everything! To “get off religion”. Then it obviously was the wrong religion. The smug kind.

But when a child of God has walked with his God and God gives him the unexpected and troublesome thing, he runs to Dad and says: Dad, what on earth are you doing NOW? Well that’s what Paul did. Not just once, not for a short time, either. No, he kept at it, as Jacob did: “I do not let you go unless You bless me!” THREE times – it says – and don’t you think that means three times a quick note up to heaven. No, that must have been three seasons of prayer, of wrestling with God, of struggling: Father now WHY are YOU doing THIS!? And as he kept on praying and as Satan’s messenger kept on hitting, Paul was getting smaller and smaller until his praying must have sounded like the cry from the bottom of the pit, the prayer of Psalm 130:

Out of the depths I cry to You O Lord,
O LORD, HEAR MY VOICE!!!
Let Your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy!

And then at last the Lord answers! Psalm 116 says it: He inclines his ears to our prayers. He says to the choirs of angels: “SSh! Quiet! I hear my child crying. Let me hear what he says!”

And then he becomes what Psalm 116 also says about Him: “He who answers prayer!”

And what IS that answer then? That all is fine and dandy and the child gets all what he asks, the whole shopping list – neatly delivered home?? Is it only THEN ‘answer to prayer’ when it goes THAT way? Oh no, God is no Consumer God. He knows better than that. One knew better, too! One who in the darkest night of his life cried to His Father: “Oh Father, PLEASE, PLEASE! Let that TERRIBLE cup pass away from Me…!” But NOT MY will…. but YOURS be done! And the prayer was answered but the cup did not pass, He drank it to the last drop, and in that way opened the way to the Father… for Paul, and for you and me. Now Paul was praying in HIS Name, the Name of that Son who cried like that to the Father and got that kind of an answer. Yes, and whoever does that gets the answer too, – sometimes after waiting a while; sometimes even after waiting a very long time. And even then not the answer we thought at first we would get – or want – or even need.

But the answer came: “I heard You, Paul! Here is my answer. My grace I give you. Grace to cope with that angel of Satan… Grace that will do you, to live with that thorn in the flesh. My grace, enough of it for each day, and enough of it for all days. That is my answer Paul, for I love you. Never forget how I love you!” Never again need you live on your own. Never again need you try on your own. That loneliness will never more be yours. I give what I ask, I am with you all the days. And that angel of Satan, that thorn in the flesh will MAKE YOU REALISE day by day! You do not have to do it in your own strength. I will give you all the strength you need. I am much closer than you thought, Paul! and I am much stronger than you thought! And I plan to make you find out!

– 3 – STRENGTH FOR WHICH I MUST BE WEAK – BUT THEN BOY! WHAT STRENGTH

And so Paul did find out. Satan’s angel stayed on. The thorn in his flesh stung him further. But never before had he found out what God could do with him and in him! Handicapped and still winning the race! Dead tired and beaten and still coming out on top! But then he could only say: Lord that wasn’t me! That was ALL from you! It couldn’t be otherwise. And then it is as if I see God smile at Paul, almost as if I see Him wink at him: “Well, what did I tell You? I wouldn’t let you down, would I?”

Brothers and sisters, we bring up our children and expect them to grow bigger and bigger. But our heavenly Father brings up His children and He expects them to grow smaller… and smaller!

Until we learn to be small enough, weak enough, humble enough to see our sin and misery and turn to God. Small enough by God’s grace to accept God’s Son as the only Saviour, the only strength to make us right with God. Small enough to learn to thank God for and in our weakness, that His grace and His greatness becomes visible in our lives and people see no superman, no Gigantor, no Tarzan, but a little man with a great and wonderful God, David felling the giant in the strength of the Lord of hosts!

God did not promise you and me a quiet first-class trip across, but He did promise us that in His strength WE WOULD MAKE IT! God did not promise us a shopping list of desirable goods all delivered in time. But He did promise us the feast of His presence. And nothing will separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Nothing: No death and no living… no angels – not even Satan’s angels and no powers! Nothing of the past and nothing of the future either! They all must work together – if not for my COMFORT, yet surely for my GOOD. As long as we allow God to teach us what He means by Good!

So that we learn to sing that psalm of that other battered child of His who yet says that out of all tribulations the Lord rescued him: David.

He wrote in psalm 3, the Morning Psalm:

I laid me down and slept
I waked! for I was kept
in His divine protection!
For Thou, Lord God, Thou Art
a shield about my heart!
My Hope and Sure reliance!
Thou IN THE HOUR OF DREAD
Dost LIFT MY WEARY HEAD
And biddest them defiance!
Whene’er to God I cried
He hastened to my side
In all my tribulations.
From Zion’s mountain fair
He looked on my… despair!
AND HEARD MY SUPPLICATIONS!

May the Lord give you all to find that out time and again. 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.

For when I am weak… THEN I turn out – in God! – to be strong.

Try Me – says God. See what I can do, small one!

Amen.