Friday, June 5,2020

“My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” – 2 Corinthians 12:9

I think we’ve all done it. We’re anxious about something that’s going on in life and once we’ve exhausted all other options, we reach for the Bible thinking “Maybe this thing has an answer in it.” Then without looking, we open it to a random page and point at a verse hoping that it will speak precisely about what it is we’re facing.

It’s like playing Bible roulette or using the Bible like a magic 8-ball. While that method rarely works, we are right somewhere in the Bible is the answer to what we’re facing.

Today’s verse is part of a famous section from 2 Corinthians. In this section, Paul vaguely refers to a “thorn in his flesh” that he’s prayed for God to take away from him. But rather than taking it from him, Paul says that God gave him this verse in response.

God is saying that the grace extended to followers of Jesus means that we don’t need to look ahead to tomorrow when the trial we’re facing goes away. Right now, in this moment in the middle of whatever you are facing, God’s grace is sufficient.

The famous preacher Charles Spurgeon put it this way in 1876, “ It is easy to believe in Grace for the past and the future, but to rest in it for the immediate necessity is true faith…At this moment and at all moments which shall ever occur between now and Glory, the Grace of God will be sufficient for you! This sufficiency is declared without any limiting words and, therefore, I understand the passage to mean that the Grace of our Lord Jesus is sufficient to uphold you, sufficient to strengthen you, sufficient to comfort you, sufficient to make your trouble useful to you, sufficient to enable you to triumph over it, sufficient to bring you out of it, sufficient to bring you out of 10,000 like it…”

Our instinct to go to the Bible when facing difficulty is correct. But rather than waiting until we’re out of options, we need to be reaching for the Bible each day so that we read and reread the truth’s about God’s character and the promises God has made to us. When we do that, we reflexively call to mind passages, stories, verses that are applicable to what we are dealing with. Trusting that God is present right now, trusting that will be more than enough.