When Grace Meets Grief

A Sunday Devotional on Thorns from 2 Corinthians 12:1–10 and Psalm 90:12–15

Thorns are common to God’s people.

Paul had them. Peter had them. And you have them, too.

Yet sometimes—even if we would never say it out loud—we are tempted to think: If I were more faithful, I would have greater health… greater wealth… greater ease… greater peace.

You may not believe the “prosperity” message. But it has a sinister way of slipping in through a crack in our thinking. We begin to reason:

If I were more faithful… these things wouldn’t happen.

If my husband or wife were more faithful… this wouldn’t happen.

If my child were more faithful… God would stop this.

But one of the first articles of faith in a fallen world is this:

Thorns are common to everybody.

A thorn in the flesh afflicts all of us in one way or another.

And the question is not whether we will meet them—but whether we will learn to meet them with a holy understanding of grace. In other words, can we make sense of God’s grace in a fallen world?

Today, I want to begin developing what we might call a theology of thorns.

2 Corinthians 12:7-10

“So to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is perfected in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly in my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest on me. That is why, for the sake of Christ, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

A Word From My Own Story

I was orphaned when I was a little boy. And so my Aunt Eva—my father’s sister—raised me. She was 65, and I was 9 months old, living on a little chicken farm on the Louisiana–Mississippi border. When they placed me in her arms, she began to cry.

She held her breath, as it were, waiting for the day I would confess faith in Jesus Christ.

But the great existential questions of life pressed hard on me:

Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going?

I went on a journey to find answers. And I went to some great “theologians”—Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne, Dan Fogelberg, and a few others. They gave me some answers, but not the truth.

It wasn’t until I heard Ephesians 2:8–9 preached—through the witness of Dr. D. James Kennedy—that I understood:

I am saved by grace, not by what I have done, but by what Christ has done for me.

And Aunt Eva—who had prayed over me for 21 years, who had placed her hands on my head every day of my life—got to see the covenant promises of God fulfilled.

Grace.

Augustine defined grace with a prayerful phrase: “Lord, what You have required, You have provided.”

And that is exactly what we learn as believers:

What God requires, God provides.

Through His only begotten Son—Jesus Christ—who lived the life we could never live, and who died the death we deserved to die, so that by faith we may receive the free gift of eternal life.

But What Happens When Grace Meets Grief?

Grace becomes the very ethos of the Christian life.

It is the heartbeat of the Reformed faith. The Reformation was not first about arguments; it was about grace recovered—grace proclaimed—grace treasured.

But then, as a pastor, I get a call from a young couple:

“We lost the baby.”

And I sit with them in their home, and they look me in the eyes through grief and tears and ask:

“Why us?”

Or I hold the hand of a young man—at the prime of his life—slipping from this world into heaven because of cancer. It is two o’clock in the morning. The room is holy with prayer. And I look up and see the eyes of his wife and children.

They are trying to make sense of God’s grace.

I can explain, later and rightly, that we live in a fallen world. I can say:

Lab reports come back positive.

Calls come at two in the morning.

Gunshots echo across a campus.

Tragedy arrives uninvited.

But when it happens to you, you want more than a doctrinal statement.

You want to understand how to live with grace inside sorrow.

That is why we turn to Paul’s “thorn” in 2 Corinthians 12.

The Old Testament Prayer of a Thorn-Bearing Saint (Psalm 90)

Before we go to Paul, we listen to Moses—who gives us one of the most mysterious prayers in all the Psalms:

“So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.

Return, O LORD! How long? Have pity on your servants!

Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,

that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.

Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,

and for as many years as we have seen evil.” (Ps. 90:12–15)

That strikes me as almost bizarre—unless Moses had a theology of thorns.

The Prayer of Jesus—and the Gift of Deliverance (Matthew 6:13)

Jesus taught us to pray:

“And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil.” (Matt. 6:13)

That last petition is not merely about protection from outward harm. It is also about God rescuing us from the deeper evil of self-reliance, pride, spiritual blindness, and ruin.

Now listen to Paul.

Paul’s Thorn and Christ’s Answer (2 Corinthians 12:7–10)

Paul writes:

“So to keep me from being too elated by 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 being too elated.

Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me.

But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’

Therefore 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 am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities.

For when I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Cor. 12:7–10)

We do not know what Paul’s thorn was.

It could have been physical. It could have been spiritual torment. It could have been opposition. It could have been a relentless affliction of some kind.

There are many theories. But perhaps the Spirit leaves it unnamed so that Paul’s thorn can become your thorn.

The anonymous thorn is a mercy—because it lets us enter the passage with our own suffering.

Blackberry Bush Theology

When I was a boy, I loved going blackberry picking.

Aunt Eva would gather a couple of boys and hand each of us a big plastic ice cream container and say:

“Now go get some blackberries. And remember—the big fat ones, you’re going to have to reach back through. So put a long sleeve on. And whoever brings back the most gets the first piece of pie.”

Now, Aunt Eva had her own purposes in that plan.

She didn’t want to go blackberry picking. She didn’t want to get scratched up. But she did want blackberries for the pie.

So she sent the children out to do the work and made us think we were having fun, which we were.

But here’s the truth about blackberries:

The plumpest, richest berries are always in the back.

And reaching them means thorns.

Even with long sleeves on, we would come back with hands scratched up—sometimes bleeding.

And it’s funny like that in life, isn’t it?

Sometimes the choicest things come with cuts.

Sometimes the sweetest blessings come with thorns.

What God Does With Thorns

Here is the amazing thing:

The Lord uses thorns—hardships, trials, adversity, suffering—to shape His people and fulfill His purposes.

Paul’s thorn delivered him from pride. It kept him from a spiritual fall. It made him cling to Christ.

So when Jesus teaches us to pray, “Deliver us from evil,” part of God’s answer may come through the very thing we are praying would go away.

Not because God is cruel, but because God is wise.

God ministers to us in the hard places in such a way that:

He gets the glory, and we get the good.

And yes—mystery remains.

Sometimes healing includes mystery. Sometimes maturity includes unanswered questions. Sometimes the thorn stays, but the soul grows stronger.

And in the thorn, Paul makes his great confession:

“For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

A Closing Prayer

O Father God, who sent Your Son, theLord Jesus Christ to live the life we could never live and die the death of thorns and nails and the cross so that we might live, who walked through locked doors into the trembling disciples on the first day of Your resurrection, come now through the locked doors of our hearts. Enter the hidden places, the painful places, the scarred places, the places we do not want to touch. Speak again to Your people: “My grace is sufficient for you.” And grant that in our weakness, Your strength would rest upon us, that the power of Christ would be made known, and that even through thorns, we would learn the sweetness of Your sustaining love. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

The Audio Message

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