Prickly Problems

The Lord laid this verse on my heart yesterday in our prayer meeting at the Church - II Corinthians 12:7-10. It is the portion of Scripture where Paul pleads with the Lord to remove this "thorn in the flesh" that he had been contending with. You would think that God would do this for Paul; after all, it is Paul, I mean, come on! But God doesn't! Surprising. Which would then make one wonder why. Because we all believe that God has nothing but the best in store for us, and He would never want any of us to hurt. But I came across a statement recently in one of the many books that I have been reading lately, and it said something like, God doesn't have our here-and-now in mind, He has our eternity in mind. With that said, and it being true, then we might be able to understand why we have to go through some of the problems we do.
For Paul, the problem he had was more than a little antagonist, but it was huge. The word used for "thorn" in the text here does not refer to a sliver, but it actually inffers a stake - something like an 18" tent stake sized problem. This was not small thing that Paul was up against, yet it seemed best in God's eyes to permit it to remain. Things that make you go, "Hmmmm?" Why not remove it Lord?

Well, there is some reason to believe that God was using this "thorn in the flesh" to keep Paul humble and leaning upon Him. After all, Paul just got done talking about boasting in the verses previous this, and maybe this was the Lord's way to keep Paul in a humble and yeilded state before Him? I think we all know that pride is the one thing that found its way into Lucifer's heart, and lead to his expulsion from Heaven, and pride will do that very same thing in us as well. Pride seperate us from God.

I guess the lesson that we can gain from this is that God allows such "thorns" to remain in us so that we will stay humble upon the Lord. Why did God strike Jacob's hip in Genesis 32? That injury was a permanent thing, and God did it to him, why? I like to think of it as a way the Lord was able to constantly remind him that he had met with God, and that limp was a reminder of that, and of how he now had to lean on the Lord for strength to stand that day and each day after that. That is just what we need to be reminded of too.

We have to lean on the Lord for everything in every day. However, at times we have difficulty doing that, so the Lord will permit prickly problems to come our way to get us in a place where we will be overwhelmed and admit that we can't make it without Him, and we can't. The Bible tells us that "with God, all things are possible," Matthew 19:26. The key - WITH GOD. We have to be reminded of that, and that is just what a prickly problem will do.

Plus, the Lord gave a word of assurance to Paul as an answer to his prayer, "May grace is sufficient for you, for My power is perfected in your weakness." The point - God wants us to get to this weak place in our lives, so that we will lean upon Him and find that we can only do and be as we have found it in Christ. Paul's response was that he would boast in nothing, but in the Lord from now on, and isn't that what we are to do in the first place?

Seems like the Lord can use these prickly problems to produce in us a revival of dependancy upon the Lord!