“Made Perfect in Weakness”

Okay, well, obviously, we’re heading to 2 Corinthians 12. You can tell that, I think, from the deal. But I want to try and make sure that we get to 2 Corinthians 12 because we’ve got some understanding of the context out of which he says what he says. And so, really, we should start at chapter 10. We won’t read all the way through.

But before we just read together, we pray:

Make the Book live to me, O Lord,
Show me yourself within your Word,
Show me myself, and show me my Savior,
And make the Book live to me.[1]

For Jesus’ sake. Amen.

That’s a prayer for illumination, not for inspiration—or revelation, either, actually, for that matter.

Chapter 10, verse 1:

“I, Paul, myself entreat you, by the meekness and gentleness of Christ—I who am humble when face to face with you, but bold toward you when I am away!—I beg of you that when I am present I may not have to show boldness with such confidence as I count on showing against some who suspect us of walking according to the flesh. For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete.

“Look at what is before your eyes. If anyone is confident that he is Christ’s, let him remind himself that just as he is Christ’s, so also are we. For even if I boast a little too much of our authority, which the Lord gave for building you up and not for destroying you, I will not be ashamed. I do not want to appear to be frightening you with my letters. For they say, ‘His letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech of no account.’ Let such a person understand that what we say by letter when absent, we do when present. Not that we dare to classify or compare ourselves with some of those who are commending themselves. But when they measure themselves by one another and compare themselves with one another, they are without understanding.

“But we will not boast beyond limits, but will boast only with regard to the area of influence God assigned to us, to reach even to you. For we are not overextending ourselves, as though we did not reach you. For we were the first to come all the way to you with the gospel of Christ. We do not boast beyond limit in the labors of others. But our hope is that as your faith increases, our area of influence among you may be greatly enlarged, so that we may preach the gospel in lands beyond you, without boasting of work already done in another’s area of influence. ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.’ For it is not the one who commends himself who is approved, but the one whom the Lord commends.”

Amen.

Well, let me begin by this. Let me ask you: Have you ever considered the possibility that your limitations and handicaps may actually prove to be the key to your usefulness in the service of Christ—that limitations and perceived handicaps may actually prove to be to the benefit of the gospel? It’s easy for us to say things like “If I wasn’t such a quiet person, then I’m sure God could make more use of me.” “If I were just a lot quieter,” says somebody else, “and not so boisterous, then perhaps my ministry would be better.” “If my circumstances were only a little brighter, my health a little better, my mind a little quicker, if I weren’t such an old clay pot,[2] then maybe I would be more useful.”

The Evil One encourages us to see things that God has given to us in such a way that we are tempted to doubt the very integrity of God in the way he has put us together.

Now, thoughts like that are not unusual in the Christian life. And Satan, the Evil One, is happy to champion them. You find yourself waking up in the morning and maybe thinking along these lines. I recall, just in passing, they asked Luther on one occasion, “How do you know that it is the Evil One who is inserting thoughts in your mind and not the Holy Spirit?” And Luther said, “My God speaks with sweet reasonableness.” That was his only answer—the idea of something coming in completely tangentially and out of the blue.

Because the Evil One encourages us to see things that God has given to us in such a way that we are tempted to doubt the very integrity of God in the way he has put us together—not only in putting us together but setting us in the place that he desires for us. And in my experience, when we begin to face perhaps peculiar difficulties or we’re confronted by deep sadness or some measure of severe discomfort, whether it is physical or emotional—on those occasions, the Evil One particularly seeks to cast doubt on the goodness of God.

And we mention that because in these chapters—10, 11, and 12, and particularly in 12—Paul is acknowledging to the Corinthians as he writes to them his weaknesses, the fact that he’s confronted by insults, that he faces hardships, persecutions, and difficulties. Apart from that, everything’s going really well! And this is it.

An Array of Accusations

Now, the wider context, which is why I read from chapter 10, needs also to be understood. Because when we read chapter 10, it’s not an easy chapter to read, actually, and I made mistakes of my own, which is no surprise after I talked about people making mistakes, and then you’re going, “Oh, you made them yourself, smarty-pants.” And I understand that, which is good, and I picked up on it as well—says, “Don’t make a fool of yourself in the future. Don’t mention it.” Okay. So, I’ll come back to that.

But here, you will notice that what he’s doing is he is addressing the accusations that are leveled against him. They don’t come as accusation one, two, three, and four. We have to read, and we realize that, for example, in his ironic, almost sarcastic style here, he is identifying the fact that in the beginning of chapter 10, he’s responding to the fact that the people are saying, “You know, the apostle Paul’s really a bit of a coward. He’s a bit of a coward. When he writes, he comes across real strong, but when you see him up close? No. He’s not so great.” He’s responding to that there: “I who am humble when face to face with you, but bold … when I am away!” He recognizes what they’re saying: “You’re a bit of a coward.”

In verse 2: “You know, we really are not sure about how spiritual you are” (“as I count on showing against some who suspect us of walking according to the flesh”). “We think, Paul, that you might be guilty of a worldliness and of a lack of spirituality.”

If you go down to verse 7, they’re calling in question whether he’s really a member of the body of Christ: “Look at what is before your eyes. If anyone is confident that he is Christ’s, let him remind himself that just as he is Christ’s, so also are we.” They’re saying, “We’re not sure you’re actually a Christian.”

Now, we’ve got to be careful about deciding who knows who’s who. And I just saw a video yesterday of a prominent preacher explaining that Martin Luther King Jr. was not a Christian. And I don’t know whether he was a Christian or not, and I don’t know whether that guy knew how he knew that he wasn’t a Christian, since “the Lord know[s] them that are his.”[3] But that’s by the way. They are saying to themselves, “You know, Paul and his coterie that come around with him, I’m not sure that we should really regard them as being members of the body of Christ.”

And by the time you go down to verse 12, they’re having to answer the charge that they’re really second-class citizens: “Not that we dare to classify or compare ourselves with some of those who are commending themselves.” It’s very, very good. You notice what he says here? “When they measure themselves by one another and compare themselves with one another, they[’re] without understanding.” They’re providing their CVs, and they’re writing their own references, and they’re grading their own exam papers. And at the same time, they’re able to insinuate these things concerning Paul.

I don’t think it was that he enjoyed defending himself in this way against accusations and insinuations. But in doing it all, he comes to his point, doesn’t he, by the end of the chapter? There’s no chapter break, as we know. But he says, “You know, if we’re going to get into this kind of boasting thing, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.’ Because it’s not what you say about yourself that means anything in the work of God. It’s what God says about you that matters.” That’s what makes the difference. “For it[’s] not the one who commends himself who is approved, but the one whom the Lord commends.” It’s an important principle, that, isn’t it? Especially when we’re tempted to fall into the trap of comparing ourselves with one another. And on what basis? You know… Yeah, straightforward.

Now, when you get to chapter 11… And what Paul does—he decides to take them on at their own game. So he says, “Okay, you want to do a kind of boasting thing? I’ll take a crack at that as well.” “I wish you would bear with me in a little foolishness. Do bear with me!”[4] And then he goes to launch into it right there. We can’t go all the way through chapter 11. He goes back to his same point that he opens with—the same thing as he returns to in verse 16: “I repeat, let no one think me foolish. But even if you do, accept me as a fool, so that I too may boast a little.” It’s very, very good, this, you know? He’s playing this game with them. And he says—he goes on to say, you know, “What I[’m] saying with this boastful confidence, I say not as the Lord would but as a fool. Since many boast according to the flesh, I too will boast. For you gladly bear with fools, being wise yourselves!” I mean, this is almost Shakespearean in his stuff, isn’t it? It’s really quite good.

In The Message, which we can use to encourage us along the way but not to teach from, Peterson paraphrases 17 and 18, “I didn’t learn this kind of talk from Christ. Oh, no, it’s a bad habit I picked up from the three-ring preachers that are so popular these days.” That kind of rings, doesn’t it? “I’m not speaking the way Jesus would have me speak. I’m just using the kind of nonsense that we’ve grown accustomed to.”

And you’ll notice what these characters were boasting about. In verse 22: “Are they servants of Christ? I[’m] a better one.” Up before that… So, that was 23, but 22: “Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they offspring of Abraham? So am I.” So they were boasting about their Jewishness, and they were boasting also about their service in the cause of God.

Paul’s Bit of Boasting

And so, what Paul decides to do is go down that line a little bit, and that’s from 23 down to 29. And the point that he’s making, of course, is the point that he’s made as he comes back to it in, what, verse 30? “If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness. [And] the God and Father of the Lord Jesus, he who is blessed forever, knows that I[’m] not lying.” “I’m just telling you the truth, folks.”

And then I’ve always wondered about these little pieces like this. Is this him just making the point about his weakness? I think it must be. “At Damascus, the governor under King Aretas was guarding the city of Damascus in order to seize me, but I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall and [I] escaped his hands.”

“And at the Gospel Coalition this month we have Mr. X. He’s just come to us. He was let down in a basket over a wall through a kitchen window, and he’s just got here in time.” This is not exactly “I was picked up at the airport in a large SUV, and I’m sure you’re all ready to meet me.” No. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. That’s exactly the situation.

What he’s doing, of course, is making clear this vital principle: Our weakness is an asset. In other words, we’re coming full circle. Here we are. And when you come to the beginning of chapter 12, he then mentions another area in which his detractors are challenging him, and that is in the realm of spiritual experiences.

Now, of all the contexts in which boasting is inappropriate, this surely has to head the list: to boast of spiritual experiences. Why? Because any genuine experience of God is his gift to us. We don’t earn the experience. We don’t create the experience. It’s his gift to us. If he picks us up and gives us a hug, metaphorically, we don’t have to write a book about “God, the Great Hugger,” but we can cherish the notion. You say, “Well, it sounds like God has been hugging you recently. Ah!” Well, no, not recently. No. I’m up for another one any day.

But I was working in an accountancy office, delivering mail in the summer in London—in the height of the summer—walking down Tottenham Court Road towards Oxford Circus in a huge crowd of people. And I was taken up—completely without preface or anything at all, as far as I knew—I was taken up with an amazing sense of the overwhelming love of God for me. I don’t know what engendered it. I have got no notion of it at all. And it was as like he met me in the street, he gave me a hug, and he was gone, and I just kept walking.

So one of my friends, a Black Pentecostal brother that I felt safe telling this to—’cause you can’t tell this to R. C. Sproul (you definitely can’t now, but you couldn’t even then)—and I told him, I says, “Joel, I was walking down the Tottenham Court Road.” And then I told him this story. He said to me, “Brother, remember that! ’Cause it may never happen again.” That’s all he said.

But I didn’t tell you that to boast about it. Because what would be the point of that? You didn’t create it. And maybe it was—maybe it was pizza the night before, for all I know, and I turned it into a spiritual experience, when it was actually a gastronomical experience. You can tell I’m not boasting about it, right? I mean, yeah, I set it up and then destroyed it immediately. Right? You’re like, “Whoa!” And then you’re like, “Oh, he thinks it’s pizza. Hmm! All right. All right.”

Now, unlike the Tottenham Court Road, what Paul is talking about here is up there, right? I mean, this is special. This is so special that he goes to the third person in order to describe it. Because he clearly does not want to parade this stuff out there in a way that would draw attention to himself, because he’s already told us that the person who boasts should boast in the Lord.

It’s such an expression of his humility, isn’t it? “I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven”—people are like, “Whoa!”—“whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows.”

Now, the details of this are not Paul’s focus, and they’re not our focus either. The point is really straightforward: This experience was, in human terms, worth bragging about. But he determined that he wouldn’t do it.

I mean, these people are boasting of all kinds of things, he’s got the mother of them all in his experience up to the third heaven, and he moves into the third person, and he says what he says. And he says,

On behalf of this man I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses—though if I should wish to boast, I would[n’t] be a fool, [because] I[’d] be speaking the truth; but I refrain from it, so that no one may think more of me than he [has seen] in me or hears from me.

Man, this has got to be on the test all day, every day! This has got to be at the forefront of our thinking. When we go before our people, we go before them as servants of his Word. We go before them as fallen men on our journey towards eternity. We go to them as those who’ve been entrusted with the privileges and responsibilities. We do not go before them in order that they might decide how fantastic we are or to tell them all of our inmost secrets or all our discoveries at all. No! If we want to let them know how good we are, let’s follow Paul in relationship to this. The details are not there, and the danger that is represented in it is spiritual pride.

Now, I say to you again: Of all the areas in which boasting is just taboo, it’s got to be in the realm of spiritual experiences. And when I do that, I’ve lost sight of the cross. I’ve lost sight of my dependence upon Jesus. I’ve lost sight of the fact that ultimately, there’s nothing really good that dwells in me.

Paul’s Pain and Paul’s Perspective

And even the very good things that God will give to us, the Evil One will do his best to try and turn that to evil. And so Paul theologizes this for us. He’s explained this encounter in guarded terms, purposefully; and then he says, “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”—twice in the space of just a few words! “To keep me from becoming conceited, to stop me from getting a fat head, a thorn in the flesh was given me.” Who gave it? God gave it! The Evil One seeks to use even things that God gives us for our benefit to discourage and perhaps debilitate us along the journey.

Now, people spend a lot of time… And maybe you’ve done this. This is another of these preaching moments, if you like, or how you want to preach it. Do you want to spend, you know, fifteen minutes of people’s time explaining how you know what the messenger of Satan is, or another fifteen minutes on the thorn? And you tell them, like, “It could be this. It’s perhaps his eyesight. Perhaps he was this. He fell off a donkey,” or whatever you want. So you go all through all this stuff. Why are you doing all that? If we were supposed to know what it was, we would have it explained to us in the text! “There’s a thorn in the flesh; the guy was blind as a bat,” move on. No! “There was a thorn in the flesh.” So why are you going to spend all that time doing that? You just showing people that you were studying during the week or whatever that is? Or the “messenger from Satan.” But you got to do something with it, right?

So, what do you say? Well, this is what I say: I take it that it was physical. I take it that it was harmful. I take it that it was something that he would definitely not like to have. Now, I think you can say that with straightforwardness from the text. You haven’t violated anything at all.

Well, what about the “messenger from Satan”? Well, if you think about it—back to Luther (“My God speaks with sweet reasonableness”)—the God who has entrusted him with the privilege of living with this thorn is not the God who’s going to come and disturb him on the strength of that which he has given him in order that he might be increasingly useful in his service. But that’s not true of the Evil One. He just comes and says, “Why you, Paul? Why would God allow you to experience this disablement? Paul, without it—I think you would be far more useful to God if you didn’t have this. Paul, why should a good God allow this in your life?”

The principle didn’t remove the pain, but it changed Paul’s perspective.

I think that at least gives us some indication of the way in which that which has been given in the sovereignty of God is picked up by the Evil One, who’s able to take even the good things that God gives us and twist them in such a way that we either… Well, it’s straightforward, isn’t it?

So Paul does what we would expect him to do: He asks God to take it away. It’s really good, this. Because it wouldn’t be so good if he just had sang the “Hallelujah” chorus there at that point or something—he said, “There was a thorn in the flesh, a messenger from Satan, and it’s been a wonderful life, and I’m looking forward to everything.” No! No, this is far more helpful to me: “Three times I pleaded with the Lord … that it [would] leave me.” “Leave me.” “Take it away!” Now, you know, it’s akin to three times in Gethsemane, right? Three times: “If you’re willing, let this cup pass from me.”[5] Paul: “I’d like it to be taken away.” And what’s the answer? “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’” “My grace is enough. It’s all you need. My strength comes into its own in your weakness.”

So the principle didn’t remove the pain, but it changed his perspective. His perspective was changed by this—that the word of God to him did not answer the longing of his heart, but it changed the way in which he then responded to that which, I take it, was an ongoing situation. “Therefore,” he says, “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[’m] content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, … calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

Here’s Peterson again:

Once I heard that, I was glad to let it happen. I quit focusing on the handicap and began appreciating the gift. It was a case of [God]’s strength moving in on my weakness. Now I take limitations in [my] stride, and with good cheer, these limitations that cut me down to size …. I just let Christ take over! And so the weaker I get, the stronger I become.[6]

Again, I find that really, really helpful: “Now I take limitations in [my] stride.”

You come back to the question I started with—you know, “If only I’d had a better education,” “If only I was taller,” “If only I was shorter,” whatever it was. I mean, you think about a situation like Gladys Aylward. Most people don’t know about Gladys Aylward. Who knows about Gladys Aylward in this room? One person. Two people. Your buses will wait for you. Do I see another hand? Okay. There we go. All right. Gladys Aylward, the “little woman,” brought up in London. She’s a servant girl. She’s a servant girl, and she’s living in a garret, you know, up on the fourth floor of an apartment building in London, and she senses the call of God on her life to go to China. But she’s a little person, and she never liked how little she was. And she never liked the fact that her hair was jet black when so many other people seemed to have nice, bouncy, curly hair.

So she goes to a missionary society, and she offers herself for service in China. In that context, it would be like Victoriana England. The guys are in black suits and everything, top hats that they lay on the table. And they listen to her. And at the end of the time they said to her, “You know what? You’re too weak. You’re too small. You’re too uneducated. You’ve got basically nothing going for you. But thanks for coming by.”

She goes back to her place. She’s still convinced that God has a purpose for her, although she can’t figure out what it might be. She kneels down by her bed, she takes her belongings, she puts them on the bed—the tiny amount of money that she has to her name—she puts it all there, and then she prays, “Dear God, I’m offering myself and whatever I have in order to serve you, despite my limitations.”

Okay. When she goes to China on the boat, and she comes into the harbor in China, and she looks over to the esplanade or whatever it is—the harbor—and she suddenly realizes, “This is full of tiny little people with jet black hair!” And so she exercises an amazing ministry amongst the children of China over the duration of her life, discovering that what she thought was actually a hindrance proved in many senses to be the key to her usefulness.

The insinuations of the Evil One, which seek to cause us harm, God turns… No, let me put it this way: The insinuations of the Evil One in seeking to do us harm prove to our benefit if they turn us afresh to God in childlike, prayerful dependence upon him—in other words, so that the things that God may choose to entrust us with, in his mercy and in his providence, is because he doesn’t want us to end up like Uzziah.[7] He wants us to walk down the pathway of Jehoshaphat.[8] That’s why we can be humbled by our difficulties: so that we can be strengthened by the Savior’s grace and goodness.

Now, all of us—if we took time now—all of us could run through things in our lives where we recognize that we would never have it this way. I don’t have a lot to say about suffering. I honestly don’t, experientially. I know, from pastoral ministry, people who have suffered. And it doesn’t mean that we haven’t. But when we lose a loved one “against the run of play” and we stand at the open grave of our mother when my sister’s only eleven or fifteen and I’m twenty, at that graveside, something’s going to happen there. It’s either going to become the occasion of a discovery of God’s grace, or I suppose it could become an occasion of bitterness and disappointment and resentment.

And the Evil One’s happy to come and stand alongside you as you stand there and say to you, “See, all that stuff about you and your stinkin’ 2 Timothy 2:15 stuff—how’s that working for you? Look at this! What’s going to happen now?” All of us have got things like that. When you’re no longer going to visit the person with cancer, now you have cancer—that’s a different day! That’s a whole different day! Some of you’ve been there. You know exactly that’s what it is.

We are humbled by our difficulties so that we can be strengthened by the Savior’s grace and goodness.

And the thing is: Do we actually trust God to believe that he knows what he’s doing? That he gave you your DNA. All the days of your life were written in his book before one of them came to be.[9] We’re on his divine timetable. We can rest in this. Providence is a soft pillow.

And sometimes, some of those old crazy songs from the 1960s will come flashing back into your head—depending on how bad your background has been—and sung by children. But do you remember, you know, “If I Were a Butterfly?” You don’t have to admit to it. It’s okay. I’ll keep it on the down-low. But

If I were a butterfly,
I’d thank you, Lord, for giving me wings.
And if I were a robin in the tree,
I’d thank you, God, that I could sing.
And if I were a fuzzy, wuzzy bear,
I’d thank you, God, for my fuzzy, wuzzy hair.
But I just thank you, Father, for making me, me.

Because you gave me a heart, and you gave me a smile,
And you gave me Jesus, and you called me your child.
And I just thank you, Father.[10]

“I’m not what I want to be. I’m not even what I could be. But I am what I am.” The Anglican prelate: “I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. What I can do, I ought to do; and what I ought to do, with God’s strength, I will do.” Paul doesn’t need to boast about this. He understands that he’s in the school of God’s divine control.

So I want to say to you guys as we go back, you know: Difficulties, disappointments, are inevitable. Jesus never put them in the small print. He didn’t spring it on you after you’ve already committed, you know, like when you, you know, you sign up for something, and it sounds great, and then all of a sudden you get the thing that comes after and say, “Oh! I didn’t know I signed up for that.” But in terms of our following Jesus, it’s really straightforward.

And I think it’s vital—more vital than, perhaps, we understand; that is, vital to our progress—that we acknowledge weakness and we learn to see it not actually as a detriment but as an asset. We like to quote Isaiah 40. Chadwick used to read it every Monday morning after his Sunday. Every so often, we do it as a pastoral team. I get to Monday, and I go, “It’s an Isaiah 40 Monday for sure. We’ve just got to read the whole of Isaiah 40 together.” Because “he gives strength to the weak, and to those who have no might, he increases strength.”[11]

Well, of course, you’re never going to ask somebody to pick you up if you think you can do it all yourself. We’re never going to go to Christ in our bedroom if we’ve decided that we got to a certain point in the game where, hey…

I hope you never say this to anybody when you’ve invited somebody to preach in your church. And hopefully, you will pray with the person before you send them out to preach, although I’ve discovered that happens sparingly as well. But he sends you out from the “green room” with a slap on the back, and they say, “Go get ’em!” When anybody says that to me, I want to go home. I want to leave. Because presumably, when I get in there, there’ll be another group of people going, “You can do it! You can do it! You can! You can!” It’s a disaster! It’s a trainwreck! He deliberately “chose the weak things of the world.”[12] He deliberately put his treasure in jars of clay so that the transcendent power would be seen to belong to God and not to us.[13]

[John Berridge], in the eighteenth century, observed, “A christian never falls asleep in the fire or in the water, but grows drowsy in the sunshine.”[14] “Grows drowsy in the sunshine.” The hymn writer, in the hymn which begins, “My God, I thank you, who has made the earth so bright”—starts with the doctrine of creation, goes on from there—has a verse in it that says

I thank you more that all my joy
Is touched with pain,
That shadows fall on brightest hours
And thorns remain,
So that earth’s bliss may be my guide,
But not my chain.[15]

You see, it’s in those moments, isn’t it, that we make those discoveries?

The last Gaelic-speaking minister of the Presbyterian Church in Newmilns in Ayrshire wrote a hymn that nobody ever sings. I think he was in a bit of a bad mood when he wrote it, but he wrote it for his fellow ministers. And the opening stanza goes—it begins, “Courage, brother[s]! Do not stumble.” It’s like, “Okay?” And then it goes on to say,

Some will love thee, some will hate thee,
Some will praise thee, some will slight.
Cease from man, and look above thee;
Trust in God, and do what’s right.[16]

Let me ask you: Have you ever considered the possibility that what you regard as your limitations and the difficulties that you need to set aside may actually, in the economy of God, be entrusted to you as a key to your usefulness, so that… Yeah, ’cause we just want to be useful. Useful. Success, maybe, however you would wage it—but useful and faithful. Useful and faithful.

Well, I’ve said more than enough for the day. And since I’m in charge of when I can stop, I’m stopping now. And I would pray right now, unless there’s another thing that, Bob or Ryan, you need me to do?

Well, let’s pray:

We hear the Gettys’ words in our ears: “O church, arise, and put your armor on”—in the strength that you provide for us, that you will enable us, the weak, to say that we are strong in the strength that you grant to us.[17] We thank you, Lord, for the wonder of this. It’s like, really, nothing else in the whole world. I mean, if anybody was here, like, on a medical junket, and we were all doctors, and somebody stood up and said what I’ve been saying, the place would have exited under talk one. Because all that we would need to be saying is how good we are, how accomplished we are, how exceptional we are. And here we are, confronting ourselves with the Scriptures that have pointed to the very inadequacy of our existence.

So we pray, Lord, that in thinking about these things, that we will take a strong stand against the accusations of the Evil One, who roams around looking to devour us, roaring at us with his accusations and insinuations. We resist him, firm in the faith.[18] And we pray that as we go on from here today and into the weeks that lie ahead, that the company of one another, the welcome of those who have cared for us, our privilege to look into the Scriptures together, that all these things might combine—that there might be a confluence, as it were, of these streams of your grace that pick us up if we are feeling ourselves to be overwhelmed, that correct us if we’re getting a little high in the saddle, that speak peace to us if we find ourselves stressed by issues that are apparently beyond our ability to fix.

So, into your custody and care we commend ourselves. And we thank you for one another. We pray that we might always be a help and not a hindrance to each other. We pray that as we have occasion to know of each other, it may be that we can rejoice with one another in every evidence in each other’s life of the usefulness that you have enabled us to enjoy and the faithfulness in which you have kept us. May it be so, for your glory. And we pray in Christ’s name. Amen.

[1] R. Hudson Pope, “Make the Book Live to Me.” Language modernized.

[2] See 2 Corinthians 4:7.

[3] 2 Timothy 2:19 (KJV).

[4] 2 Corinthians 11:1 (ESV).

[5] Matthew 26:39 (paraphrased). See also Matthew 26:42, 44.

[6] 2 Corinthians 12:9–10 (MSG).

[7] See 2 Chronicles 26.

[8] See 2 Chronicles 20.

[9] See Psalm 139:16.

[10] Brian M. Howard, “The Butterfly Song” (1974). Lyrics lightly altered.

[11] Isaiah 40:29 (paraphrased).

[12] 1 Corinthians 1:27 (NIV).

[13] See 2 Corinthians 4:7.

[14] Berridge to Samuel Wilks, Everton, August 16, 1774, in The Works of the Rev. John Berridge, ed. Richard Whittingham (London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1838), 396.

[15] Adelaide Anne Procter, “My God, I Thank Thee” (1858). Lyrics lightly altered.

[16] Norman Macleod, “Courage, Brother, Do Not Stumble” (1857). Lyrics lightly altered.

[17] Stuart Townend and Keith Getty, “O Church, Arise” (2004).

[18] See 1 Peter 5:8–9.