Enough for This
St. Paul asked for something to be taken away.
Whatever the thorn was, he wanted relief. He prayed for change. Instead, Christ gave him a sentence.
“My grace is sufficient for you.”
Not: I’ll remove it.
Not: You’ll understand it.
Not even: This will turn out the way you hope.
Only this: My grace is enough.
There’s something difficult about that answer because we’d rather have evidence.
We like things we can count. Progress. Results. A repaired relationship. A prayer answered in the form we recognize as an answer. A ministry growing. A child coming home. A temptation disappearing. A wound finally closing.
We want to know the thing is working.
And beneath a great deal of Christian obedience there can hide a quiet bargain with God: I’ll be faithful, Lord, but eventually I need you to show me that all this faithfulness is accomplishing something.
So we pray, and then we look.
We forgive, and watch to see whether the other person changes.
We sacrifice, and wait for gratitude.
We serve, and notice whether anyone noticed.
We try again, and when the old weakness returns we wonder whether anything has happened at all.
Without meaning to, we stop asking, Am I being faithful?
We begin asking, Is this working?
That’s a different question.
Suppose you send the message you know you should send. You swallow your pride, choose your words carefully, press send. Then you set the phone down.
Twenty minutes later you pick it up.
Nothing.
You check again before bed.
Still nothing.
By midnight the silence has become an argument. See? Pointless.
But the dark screen of a telephone knows almost nothing about grace.
It can tell you whether someone answered.
It can’t tell you what obedience has done in you. It can’t tell you what God is doing in another person. It can’t tell you whether something has begun beneath the surface where you’ve got no access and no control.
This is one of the humiliations of faith. Much of what matters most happens where we can’t inspect it.
Paul’s weakness remained.
That matters.
Christ didn’t tell him the weakness wasn’t real. Christianity doesn’t require us to rename defeat as victory or pain as pleasure. A strained marriage is strained. A distant child is distant. A small ministry is small. Dry prayer is dry. The temptation that returned this morning actually returned.
Grace doesn’t require us to lie about any of it.
It asks something harder.
It asks us to believe that visible weakness and spiritual fruitlessness aren’t the same thing.
“My power is made perfect in weakness.”
We tend to imagine grace as the thing that finally makes us strong. Sometimes it does.
Sometimes grace is what keeps a weak man faithful.
There’s a difference.
A man may spend years asking God to remove the thing that makes him feel inadequate, only to discover that his inadequacy has been teaching him something his competence never could. He isn’t self-sufficient. He never was. The strength he thought would make him useful might only have made dependence harder to admit.
That doesn’t make weakness holy by itself. Weakness can make us bitter. Frightened. Envious. Self-protective. It can become an excuse.
But weakness given to God is no longer merely weakness. It becomes a place where a man may finally stop pretending he’s his own source.
The danger comes when we make visible success the price of continued obedience.
I’ll forgive if reconciliation follows.
I’ll pray if consolation comes.
I’ll sacrifice if somebody changes.
I’ll endure weakness if eventually God lets me become impressive.
We’d never say it quite that plainly.
We usually make it sound more reasonable.
Surely God wants results.
Of course he does. But growth belongs to God. We plant. We water. We don’t reach underground and pull on the roots.
Maybe my weakness means I’m useless.
Christ seems remarkably uninterested in that conclusion.
I’ll obey when I feel stronger.
But some of the most important obedience of our lives will happen while our hands are shaking.
Nothing is happening.
Maybe.
Or maybe nothing you can see is happening.
Those aren’t the same sentence.
At some point faith requires us to stop demanding from God the kind of certainty he hasn’t promised.
Usually we already know the next thing.
Make the call.
Offer the apology.
Keep the promise.
Say the prayer.
Refuse the compromise.
Forgive again.
Get out of bed.
Do the work sitting in front of you.
The next act of faithfulness is often embarrassingly small compared with the outcome we want. We want the marriage healed. God gives us tonight’s conversation. We want the child restored. God gives us the next patient act of love. We want holiness. God gives us this temptation, this moment, this choice.
We want a map.
Grace gives us enough light for the next few feet.
Perhaps that’s what sufficient means.
Not abundance we can store away against every future sorrow. Not proof that everything will work. Not the strength to carry tomorrow’s cross today.
Enough for this.
Enough to tell the truth.
Enough to stay.
Enough to leave, when leaving is what faithfulness requires.
Enough to forgive without knowing whether reconciliation will come.
Enough to pray without consolation.
Enough to keep loving someone who can’t presently receive the love.
Enough to do the good that belongs to us and leave the harvest in hands that aren’t ours.
There are really only two ways to live before God.
We can obey while the evidence satisfies us.
Or we can obey because he is God.
The first way feels safer. It keeps one hand on the ledger. It watches the numbers. It checks the phone. It keeps asking whether the return justifies the investment.
The second way may lead through obscurity, weakness, disappointment, unanswered prayer, and years in which almost nothing looks the way we hoped it would.
And somewhere inside such a life, perhaps quietly enough that nobody notices, grace may be doing its deepest work.
The phone may still be dark on the table.
The prayer may still feel unanswered.
The thorn may still be there.
And Christ may still be saying what he said before:
My grace is sufficient for you.
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