Our Painful Thorns

As we’ve seen, the Apostle Paul had a painful thorn in the flesh that wouldn’t go away. The reality is that all of us have thorns. I know I do. Sometimes these are irritating like a rosebush thorn. At other times they are debilitating, more akin to a dagger or spear. Author and pastor Timothy Keller put it this way: “Suffering is everywhere, unavoidable, and its scope often overwhelms.”

We are all in a sense, sufferers, but not all of us experience the extremity of human pain. Pain doesn’t happen in the abstract. It is personal and screams for our attention. None of us is immune, whether they involve wounds like the agony of betrayal, the tentacles of cancer, the frustration of loss, or countless other disappointments. “Pain is not the islands of our lives but the ocean;” says Dane Ortlund, “disappointments or letdown is the stage on which all of life unfolds, not an occasional blip on an otherwise comfortable and smooth life.”

Paul, in 2 Corinthians 12:7 talks about a singular thorn in the flesh, but in 11:24-28, he chronicles multiple painful episodes. As I prepared to write The Point of Your Thorns, I asked friends, “What is your thorn in the flesh?” How would you have answered that? It turned out that most had multiple painful thorns, not just one.

Bible characters like Job, and Jeremiah, had numerous physical, emotional, and relational thorns. Job endured tragic family deaths, agonizing sores all over his body, and unrelenting accusations from his “friends.” The Prophet, Jeremiah, in Lamentations 3:13, describes his thorns as arrows from God’s quiver. Not one, but many.

Jesus, in John 16:33, reminded his disciples that in the world they would experience multiple troubles, but that this need not paralyze them, because he had overcome the world. That’s similar to what Jesus said to Paul in 2 Corinthians 12:9 – my grace is overwhelmingly adequate and unfailingly available for every one of your debilitating thorns.

As you consider the pain of your thorns, reflect on three elements of Paul’s thorn in the flesh.

1. For him, it was a pain that wouldn’t go away.
2. It was suffering that reminded him how weak he was.
3. It was a pain that had the potential to drive him into God’s all-sufficient arms of grace.

How do those three elements relate to your own thorns?

Excerpts from The Point of Your Thorns: Finding Purpose in Your Pain

by Rowland Forman