Invincible

So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, 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 Corinthians 12:7-10 ESV). Yesterday I mentioned a Scripture. It comes from our reading today. The Apostle Paul said, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Today I have a long quote from the afterword of the book I have most recently written, A Time to Laugh and a Time to Cry. It is written by my oldest son, Kyle. It will sound self-serving. Please don’t take it that way. I use it only as an illustration to emphasize how wrong I was in my early years as I lived within my own strength rather than that of God. Once I learned that lesson and began to depend more on His grace, so many good things happened in my life and the lives of those I love. I desire that you be inspired by the Scripture, because His grace is sufficient to you as well! Kyle wrote: When I was a child, my father was larger than life to me. On Sundays, I watched him thunder from behind a pulpit, delivering sermons to hundreds of people sitting in the pews of our church. Dad also taught me how to hunt and fish. He spent hours upon hours pitching batting practice or catching baseballs from me as I pitched off of the mound he had built in our backyard. When I was six years old and decided that I wanted to play soccer, my father went out and bought all of the books on soccer he could find and began to learn a game that was totally foreign to him and just about every other man his age living in East Texas in the 1980s. That was Dad – preacher, baseball and soccer coach, hunter, and fisherman. Like a lot of kids, I thought he could do just about anything. Also, like most kids, I was ever so wrong. When I was in high school, Dad got really sick. At first the doctors thought it was arthritis, but it wasn’t. It was a rare disease called hemochromatosis that caused iron to build up in his bloodstream, eventually leading to iron deposits in his joints and tissues. One of the prescribed treatments was weekly phlebotomies – removal of a pint of blood each week. This and other treatments made Dad incredibly weak and sick. Not the sort of thing that I was used to seeing. During this period, I noticed some other changes as well. If Dad lost his temper with one of us, he apologized. More and more though, he didn’t lose his temper. Times when I had broken the family rules were times of discipline to be sure, but they were also moments when I sensed the unconditional love and acceptance of my father. One other thing, Dad also talked about ‘grace’ – all of the time! See, during this time, I believe that he was experiencing the sufficient grace of his Father – his Heavenly Father – so that His power could be made perfect in Dad’s weakness (2 Cor. 12:9). Dad eventually got better and now manages his disease with much less frequent trips to the phlebotomist. But things have been different ever since, and how glad I am for that. I am equally glad for that! Turn to Him… His grace and only His grace is sufficient!