The Pain That Was Not Taken

First light and the kettle. He is up because staying in bed past a certain point makes the day worse, which took him about three years to learn.

The first hour is the worst hour. That is just the arrangement now.

Eleven years.

Four churches. He has been prayed for by four churches and he has counted, and one of them twice, and he went every time and he went believing every time and he would go again if somebody asked him tomorrow.

The first one was the best. There were eleven people and they were not dramatic and one of the men had known his father. The second one had a visiting speaker who was very confident, and afterwards a woman asked him whether he had checked for anything unforgiven, gently, meaning well, and he said he would think about it, and he did think about it, for about six months.

He still believes God heals. That is the part people find hard to follow. He is not a cynic and he has watched two things happen in his life that he cannot account for otherwise.

He just no longer believes it about himself, and he does not know when that changed, and there was no moment.

The kettle clicks off.

What he cannot work out is what to do with the mornings in between. Not the theology. The mornings. He has a whole day and it starts like this and he has stopped having a way to begin it.

If you have prayed for the same thing for years and stopped expecting an answer without stopping believing, you know this kitchen at first light. And you know the sentence: I am not angry and I have not lost my faith, I have just quietly moved myself into a different category, and I did it without noticing.

The word, and then the fourth time

Let me stand at that kettle and say the plain thing, because it is not what people usually say to you and you have heard the usual thing four times.

The problem is not that you have doubts. You have fewer doubts than most people who would advise you. The problem is that you have quietly filed yourself under a different heading from everybody else, and a man who has done that stops praying for himself in the way he prays for others, and nobody notices because he still prays.

So let me put the word straight, because on this subject it gets used cruelly and usually by accident.

Blessed does not mean the body is well. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. It is about where He is looking. There is no verse anywhere that makes a healed body the qualification, and any teaching that implies it has to explain away most of the New Testament.

Now, Paul. And I want to be careful, because his thorn gets used as a blunt instrument in both directions.

And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.2 Corinthians 12:9

Here is what actually happens in that passage. Paul has something he calls a thorn in the flesh. He does not tell us what it is. He asks God three times to take it away, and he uses a word that means he begged.

He is not a man with weak faith. He is the man who wrote most of the letters and who saw people healed under his own hands, repeatedly, and it is recorded in Acts. And he asked three times and it was not taken.

You are in company you have not counted yourself in, and the man in that company had the strongest healing ministry in the book. Second Corinthians 12 records the asking and the not taking side by side without embarrassment, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one Paul says helps our weakness, which means the weakness in that verse is a place He works rather than a place He leaves.

What he did the fourth time

Now the thing nobody points out about that passage, and it is the whole answer to your mornings.

Paul asked three times. The text says thrice. And then he stopped asking about the thorn and started saying something else instead.

He did not decide God does not heal. He kept praying for other people and they kept being healed, and it is in the same book. He did not decide he had failed. He did not go looking for unforgiveness for six months.

He stopped asking about that one thing, and he received a sentence in its place, and he then quoted the sentence for the rest of his life.

Which is a real option and nobody offers it to you. You have been holding two positions, ask again or give up, and they are not the only two. There is a third, which is what Paul actually did: to stop making that one request the whole of your dealings with God, without ever deciding He will not.

You have permission to stop asking about that one thing without deciding anything about God, and that is what the apostle himself did. Second Corinthians 12:8 says thrice and then stops, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named as the one making intercession when a person does not know what to pray, which means the asking does not stop just because your part of it does.

And notice the word sufficient. My grace is sufficient for thee. That is a word about supply. It means: there is enough, and it will keep arriving, and it is measured against the thing rather than against your resistance to it.

It is a present tense verb. Not will be. Is.

You have a supply that is sufficient this morning, in the first hour, and sufficient is measured against the actual weight rather than against an easier one. The written word puts that verb in the present, and it is the Holy Spirit whom Paul elsewhere calls the one who strengthens with might in the inner man, which is where the sufficiency actually lands.

What I will not say to you at first light

Now let me be plain about the things that have been said to you, because two of them were cruel and neither person meant it.

The woman who asked about unforgiveness was doing what she had been taught. She was wrong. There is no case anywhere in Scripture where a person's ongoing pain is diagnosed that way by a stranger after a meeting, and Job's friends spent thirty five chapters doing exactly that and God's verdict on it at the end is not gentle.

And the confident visiting speaker was not lying. He believed it. But he attached a promise to an event, and when the event did not deliver, the bill went to the man in the chair.

I am not going to add to that. I am not going to tell you your healing is coming, because I do not know, and I am not going to tell you it is not, because I do not know that either and I have seen enough not to be certain in that direction.

And I am not going to tell you the pain has a purpose or is a gift. Paul calls his a messenger of Satan. He does not call it a blessing. He says God's grace is sufficient in it, which is a completely different claim and is the honest one.

You are favored and the first hour is what it is, and neither of those is evidence about the other. Scripture keeps the thorn a thorn and the grace sufficient in the same passage, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a man able to hold both without needing the thorn to become a gift.

Keep taking what your doctor gives you. Go back if it changes. None of that is unbelief and it never was.