Advent: Day 18
”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 made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.“
2 Corinthians 12:8-10 NIV
As we continue on in our week of focusing on joy, we need to ask, as we did the other weeks, what do we do when we aren’t feeling joyful? When nothing is going right, and it’s just hard to keep moving forward, how do we keep rejoicing?
This passage in 2 Corinthians Paul is speaking about some thorn in his flesh that was humbling him. He kept asking God to remove it, but he never did. Now, a lot of people when they read this passage get hung up on what the thorn in the flesh was, but honestly we don’t know. But what we do know is how God spoke to Paul when he asked for this difficulty to end. He said my grace is enough. He wasn’t going to end his hardship, but he was going to fill him with the grace and favour to be able to keep going through this hardship.
When we are feeling like our trials are never ending we can remember that God’s grace enough. In fact, Paul was able to get to a point to celebrate his weaknesses because he saw that in those weaknesses, God’s strength was shown.
God gives us the grace we need to keep going. It might be hard to keep joyful, to keep going with the pain and difficulty you are facing, but remember that his grace is enough. It is all you need. It can sustain you, move you forwards, and like Paul, it may even change how you view everything.
Song of the day: