The Thorn That Stays

FOR MANY YEARS I have carried what Paul called a thorn in the flesh. I want that on the table in the first paragraph, because this chapter is a confession before it is a teaching. The older I grow, the clearer it becomes that this thorn will likely persist for my entire life. I have prayed about it in every posture a body can take, upright, kneeling, and face down on the floor. I have fasted over it and wept over it. More than once I knelt while people I trusted laid their hands on my head and begged God, with real faith and real love, to take it away. I rose from those prayers with my hair still warm from their hands and the thorn sitting exactly where it had always sat. As far as I can read God's answer after all these decades, the answer is No, and it shows every sign of being a lifelong No.

I am not going to tell you what the thorn is. Part of the reason is shame, and I will not pretend otherwise. The better part of the reason is Paul, who never named his thorn either. Preachers and scholars have been guessing for twenty centuries: his eyes, malaria, a stammer, the scars of his beatings, a temptation that never retired. The guesses tell us more about the guessers than about Paul. I believe his silence was deliberate, and that it was a mercy. Because the thorn stays unnamed, every sufferer since has been able to write his own affliction into the blank space. Yours fits there. So does mine. If Paul had told us it was his eyes, the verse would belong to the dim-sighted, and the rest of us would be reading someone else's mail.

That verse belongs to everyone, and here is its teaching, stated plainly before I show you where it comes from. God sometimes answers the repeated, faithful prayer of someone He loves with a flat No. When He does, He often binds a promise to the refusal: His grace will be enough for the one who carries the thorn, and His power will do its perfect work inside the very weakness He has declined to lift. The thorn that stays is neither a punishment nor a verdict on anyone's faith. And prayer for healing remains right, commanded, and real; God still heals, and we are told to ask. What no one is handed is a formula. Hold those truths together and you have the doctrine of this chapter. Everything that follows is what it cost me to believe it.

Consider first who carried the most famous thorn in history, because he was no spiritual weakling. Paul had seen the risen Christ on an open road and been blinded by the sight of Him. God worked miracles through his hands, so many and so strange that Luke records how handkerchiefs that had touched his skin were carried to the sick, and the sick recovered (Acts 19:11-12). This is a man from whose laundry healing flowed. He had also been caught up, he says, to the third heaven, into Paradise, where he heard things no human language is licensed to repeat (2 Corinthians 12:2-4). Then came the other half of the parcel. Here is his own account, the spine of this chapter:

And lest I should be exalted above measure by the abundance of the revelations, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I be exalted above measure. Concerning this thing I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart from me. And He said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness." Therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. (2 Corinthians 12:7-9 NKJV)

Pleaded is a strong word. The apostle who taught the rest of us to pray without ceasing is on the floor here, begging. Three times means the begging had seasons; he put it down and picked it up again, as we all do with ours. Then an answer came back, which is itself rare. God does not usually explain a refusal; He lets it stand. Here, once, in a sentence spoken to one man and preserved for all of us, He did: the thorn would stay, the grace would be enough, and the power of God would be made perfect in the weakness Paul had begged Him to remove. Notice also what Paul says the thorn was for. Lest I be exalted above measure appears twice in a single verse, the way a man repeats the only explanation that has ever made sense to him. The revelations and the thorn arrived in the same delivery. Whatever lifted him toward heaven came packaged with something that kept his face near the ground, where the rest of us live, and where grace is handed out.

One more detail in that passage speaks straight to our own noisy generation. Paul sat on the greatest spiritual experience a man can have for fourteen years. He mentions it almost against his will, in the third person, and will not describe what he saw. The thorn, he decided, was the part worth writing about. I have watched preachers do the opposite with far less. A vision, a voice, a shiver at the right moment, and it becomes a platform, a claim of authority over other souls, sometimes a revenue stream. Paul boasts of the one credential nobody would ever counterfeit: his weakness. When that finally landed on me, my own shame changed color. The thing I had spent years hiding was, by apostolic accounting, the most valuable thing I owned.

The shame deserves its own paragraph, because I suspect its shape is common. The thorn was never merely a torment to me; it was a humiliation, and not only before men but in the eyes of God. There is a widespread notion that the moment we take Christ as Lord we should wake each morning offering effortless gratitude and move through the day seamlessly angelic, sinless without trying. My own experience refutes it, and I suspect yours does too. For years I believed the thorn survived my prayers because my faith was too small to kill it. I blamed myself for not having enough faith, for not trying hard enough, and for my sins, because I had absorbed that arithmetic from confident preachers long before I thought to examine it. Under that math God grew elusive to me, and every relapse became a fresh verdict. Every time I approached Him in prayer a sense of unworthiness overwhelmed me, and I was ashamed before the Lord and ashamed before the people I serve. I assumed they would be scandalized to learn that the man opening the Scriptures to them carried an unanswered petition of his own, decades old and still tender to the touch.

An old clergyman I trusted with my soul finally broke that isolation. I told him my secret and waited for his face to change. It did not change. He said quietly that some of the people we both admired carried afflictions far heavier than mine, had carried them all their lives, and had served God magnificently the whole while. Years before, that same man had told me I served not because I was the most qualified, but because I was all God had. Under grace, he was saying now, there are no special persons, only forgiven ones. Every one of us is carrying something. Many believers carry a thorn and hide it, ashamed that grace has not "fixed" them. I hid mine for years on exactly those terms. The thorn has stayed. I have stayed too, because His grace is enough.

So that nobody hears this chapter as permission to stop asking, let me say the other half with equal plainness. Prayer for healing is right, and Scripture commands the arrangements for it in plain words:

Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. (James 5:14-16)

Where I serve we do exactly this, and without embarrassment. The sick come to us, or send for us, and we pray over them and anoint them with oil, ordinary oil made extraordinary by the name spoken over it. I believe in divine healing. I have seen it, been unable to explain what I saw, and given thanks for it. So ask. Call for the elders. Anoint. Pray the prayer of faith with your whole heart, for yourself and for the people you love, because behind James's instruction stands the God who, in the days of His flesh, touched lepers other men would not look at.

Years ago I passed a counterfeit of that healing, on a street in a large city, in a building that looked like a church. The sign out front said that miracles happen there every day, just as in the days of the apostles. The building was empty. I stood on the sidewalk wondering why, if miracles were happening daily inside, there was nobody there to receive one. Then I walked on.

What Scripture never teaches is healing as a transaction with a guaranteed yield. That teaching exists, it is popular, and it sells, the whole watered-down gospel of seven ways to obtain God's blessings, and I want to speak plainly about it, because I once lived under it and I have spent years sitting with its casualties. It says: name it, claim it, believe hard enough, and the healing must come, so that if it does not come, the failure is yours. It has a surface logic, and it can quote verses. But watch what it does with the sick. It hands a woman her diagnosis and then hands her the blame for it. It stands at a hospital bed and audits the patient. It leaves a grieving family wondering, in the worst week of their lives, whether their beloved died of their unbelief. I have listened to these people, and I can tell you what that teaching leaves behind: exhaustion, a believer convinced God is inspecting their trust for defects, and finally a soul too ashamed to pray at all.

The teaching is false, and Scripture itself takes it apart. Paul, whose prayers healed other people's diseases, could not pray his own thorn away, and God's answer to him breathed not one word about insufficient faith. The same Paul told Timothy, his beloved son in the faith, to take a little wine for his stomach and his frequent infirmities (1 Timothy 5:23); he prescribed a remedy for a man he loved, and no rebuke followed. Trophimus, a companion who traveled at the apostle's side, Paul simply left sick in Miletus (2 Timothy 4:20), with no explanation and no blame. Luke tells us that great multitudes gathered to hear Jesus and to be healed of their infirmities, and that He often withdrew from them into the wilderness and prayed (Luke 5:15-16). Some in those crowds went home sick, and their sickness measured nothing about their faith; the Son of God had gone to the hills to be with His Father, and His movements were never governed by demand.

A miracle, by its very nature, cannot be a norm. If a technique reliably produced one, it would belong to the ordinary laws of the world, and its product would be medicine, not a miracle. And if guaranteed healing had ever been available at any address on earth, the whole world would have converted centuries ago. As for the prayer of faith that will save the sick, it lives in the same short letter that teaches us to say, "If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that" (James 4:15). The faith in that prayer is aimed at a Person with a will of His own. He is neither a law of physics nor an employee.

So if someone has told you that your sickness persists because your faith is too small, hear me with all the weight my years can give the words: that teaching wounded you, and it is false. You have been hurt twice, once by the affliction and once by the verdict, and the second wound often festers longer than the first. Bring the verdict to God and let Him tear it up. Nowhere in Scripture does God promise His people a life free of the cross, and every teacher who promises it in His name is writing checks against someone else's account. Some of the most faithful people I have ever knelt beside were sick the whole time I knew them, and sick when they died, and I expect to be looking for them near the front of the kingdom.

✦ ✦ ✦

NOT EVERY THORN IS an illness. Paul's word flesh covers more than the body's tissue, and twenty centuries of argument over it only prove how wide the category runs. A thorn may be a mind that turns on its owner every winter, a temptation that has out-lasted forty years of resisting it, a memory, a marriage, a wound driven so deep into a family that three generations walk oddly because of it. I think here of a letter I once received from a man who, like me, serves God in public. It began, in effect, with the word Help.

Before his calling he had believed that men in our position live above the ordinary struggles of the flesh, carried along in a permanent state of anointing, their temptations dissolved by grace and their desires wholly purified by divine intimacy. Then he became one of us and discovered that his oldest struggle had come with him. He had begged God for years to take it away. He had tried to starve it, medicate it, out-argue it, and outrun it into old age. It remained. He wrote that he sometimes felt abandoned, sometimes angry, and that in the worst hours he wondered whether his whole service was a lie.

I answered him slowly, over several days, because I knew I was also writing to myself. We are not supermen, I wanted to tell him, not even those of us who serve at the altar. The idea he had believed, that holiness means the absence of struggle, is a beautiful lie, and I honored the reverence behind it before I contradicted it. The saints did not become saints because they ceased to struggle. They became saints because they refused to hide the struggle from God. They dragged their most humiliating desires into the light and said: this too is Yours; take it, burn it, heal it, use it. Then I told him what I believe about why God had left his begging unanswered, which is the conviction underneath this whole chapter.

God intended to meet him inside the very ache he kept begging Him to remove. He wanted holiness; God wanted communion; and sometimes the only road to that communion runs through a wound that stays open long enough for grace to enter by it. His desire, I told him, was not a curse, nor was it a thing to be worshiped. It was a fire, wild and unshaped, capable of warmth or of ruin, and Christ does not come to put that fire out. He comes to sit beside it until it becomes an altar. Holiness turned out to be a simpler and more terrible business than either of us had been taught: giving your whole self to God, even the part that embarrasses you. The Cross is not a quick fix, I wrote him; it is a slow resurrection, and He is not ashamed of you.

I once saw an old carving of the crucifixion in which the right arm of Christ had come loose from the cross and reached downward, toward whoever stood beneath it. I have never forgotten it. The carver knew what the thorn teaches slowly: you do not carry your cross alone. Christ has taken it up already, and He reaches toward the one standing under it, even now.

Now the other half of my own confession, the half that took me decades to see. The thorn is the thing that drove me into the Word of God. It worked on me by force. A man in my position must stand up and open the Scriptures to other people whether his own soul is in order or in ruins. Week upon week, year upon year, with the thorn throbbing, I had no choice, so I went to the Book. At first I went like a patient, hunting a cure, some verse that would finally kill the thing. Later I went like a beggar, hunting a promise that would get me through the month. Somewhere along the way, on a day I could no more fix than I can fix most of what God has done in me, I noticed I was no longer hunting.

I was staying. The Scriptures had become the one room in my life where I could sit without shame, because the Book is crowded with limping men: Jacob with his hip, Moses with his mouth, David with his history, Jeremiah with his weeping, Paul with his thorn. The longer I endured the affliction, the deeper it pressed me into the Word of God and into the promise of a kingdom where there will be no more pain or tears. I was sure the thorn was destroying me. All the while it was herding me into the presence of the Shepherd, which is where He had wanted me from the start.

Paul went further with all of this than I have yet managed to go. He heard the same answer I have been given, that the thorn stays and the grace suffices, and he adopted it as the settled policy of his remaining years:

Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in needs, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ's sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:10)

I will not pretend to have arrived at pleasure. I have begun to understand the sentence just before it, where Paul resolves to boast in his infirmities "that the power of Christ may rest upon me" (2 Corinthians 12:9). The word translated rest upon is a tent-maker's word; it carries the picture of a tent being pitched over something, and Paul sewed tents for his bread. He is saying his weakness became a campsite. The power of Christ spread itself over that exact spot of ground like canvas over poles, and the weakness and the power lived there together for the rest of his life. So instead of divine healing, this is what I am left to preach: divine strength, made perfect in weakness. A friend once told me, kindly, that my preaching on this subject will never be popular. He is right. Strength made perfect in weakness makes a poor advertisement. You have to survive it before you can testify to it.

People sometimes ask whether I still pray for the thorn to go. I do, though rarely now, the way you raise an old subject with an old friend, without heat or bitterness. Paul stopped at three ask-ings; I stopped counting mine long ago. What changed over the years was the weather inside the asking. I used to pray against the thorn like a man at war. These days I mostly pray with it, the way you walk with an old injury, adjusting, leaning, letting it set the pace. I have also learned to hear the tense of God's answer. My grace is sufficient for you: sufficient now, this morning, for this day's portion of the thorn. Grace has come to me a day's worth at a time. I have never once been issued a season's supply in advance, and I have never once run out. My prayer about the whole matter has worn down to a single sentence:

Lord, You know what is still in me. Your grace was enough yesterday; let it be enough today.

And so far, against every prediction I made as a younger man, it has been. If you are carrying a lifelong No of your own, I will not tie a ribbon on it. A thorn hurts, it goes on hurting, and much of what it is doing in you cannot be seen from inside the years it takes. I can only tell you what I have seen from this end of several decades. God does a work in the wound He declines to close, and that work is a kind of healing too, deeper down than the wound itself. He healed my shame in a place where He left my thorn alone.

He can be trusted in the dark with the thing you have begged Him about, and He has never once been indifferent to the begging. He has been inside this conversation Himself. Long before Paul pleaded three times, another Man asked three times for something to be taken away, on His knees, at night, in a garden, among olive trees, while His friends slept. Everything we have carried through these pages, the asking, the silence, the tears, and the No, meets among those trees, and it is time we went there.