Session 2: The Helping Heart

Hey, good morning. So glad to see you guys here again. Thank you for coming. It has been so sweet for me to get to know some of you and I hope some more. There's still some faces that I haven't met and I would love to do that later on. Let me pray for us and then we'll dig in. Father, we are grateful that you hold us fast. It is not our grip on you, but your grip on us that sustains us. And that truth is marvelous and precious to us. We praise you that we stand in your grace today, not on the basis of our performance, but on the basis of Christ's sacrifice. We praise your name and we adore you for revealing to us who you are through your son that he came to be with us. He came to be Emmanuel. We pray that we would learn all we need to learn from that fact. It affects everything we do. So I pray that you would give us a ten of hearts to your word, that we would all listen to your word and submit to it. Me first. I want to do that, Lord. I need to be taught from you, from your word, and I'm so grateful that your word never changes and it is constant the grass withers and the flower fades but the word your word stands forever thank you so much again for this time be with my words let them be yours and may they be acceptable to you in Jesus name amen So early in my marriage, I competed in triathlons. So don't think about the Ironman, think about kind of mini, mini versions of the Ironman. But I love the challenge of putting swimming, biking, and running together. And the last triathlon I participated in, it's been several years ago, but it was an Olympic distance. So it was about a one-mile swim, a 25-mile bike, and a little over a six-mile run. But the swim was an open water ocean swim which added a little bit of complexity. It was early spring, it was quite cold and actually wetsuits were permitted because of the temperature of the water and the air temperature. There were dozens of women and the wind was so strong so the swells were huge and the waves were huge and so you're kind of fighting wind and waves at the same time. And it's just part of the process that you're going to get kicked in the face, or elbowed, or somebody's going to swim over top of you. Because everybody's kind of going in together. And it can be hard. I knew that if I didn't keep my focus very clear that I was going to have a hard time finishing. So I had to repeat some very specific things in my mind and I had some friends who had told me, you're going to need to know this because you don't feel like you're making any progress. You don't really have really great markers to know where you're headed. So being in a trial is a little bit like doing an open water ocean swim in a storm. I wasn't really in a storm, but when you're in a trial, it's like doing a swim in a storm. It's so hard to keep your bearings. And it's really hard to think straight. You don't feel like you're making any progress, and you feel totally alone except for the people that are trying to shove you out of the way and beat you to the finish line. So if that's one way to describe being in a trial, I think discipleship is a little bit like giving your friend a pep talk before she heads into the water. Or, this might even be more apropos, it's like getting into the water and swimming with her. You know she's headed into a storm and she's got to go. She's got to swim over there and around that corner and around that buoy and back to the shore. And so you get in the water with her and you start swimming together. Either way, you've got to know truth that's going to point her to the Savior and help her to keep focused. Say, nope, everything's going to be okay. You can trust God. One more stroke, one more stroke, one more stroke. So every single woman in this room I know has suffered and is suffering in some way and will suffer in the future. It is a common feature of our life. Sometimes it's more intense and acute and at other times it just is daily. Your suffering will certainly look different than the person sitting next to you. You may be grieving the loss of a spouse. I know that that's a reality that is true for many. You may be suffering because your child has walked away from the faith. you may be struggling with just the unrelenting responsibilities of parenting. Or you may feel utterly alone and longing for a husband. You may be wrestling with how to honor God when your husband isn't interested in spiritual things. So even though all these types of suffering are so different, I want to kind of make a pretty broad statement. I want to say that all suffering is the result of sin. Let me explain what I mean by that. Sometimes we suffer because we personally sin. We do the wrong thing and God in his love and kindness disciplines us. Sometimes we suffer because other people sin against us, so it's their sin that's causing our suffering. It still hurts, but the root cause is still sin. And sometimes we suffer because we live in a world that's broken by sin. Earthquakes and tornadoes destroy, machines fail, cars malfunction, factories explode. These are elements of suffering that's not tied to someone's specific sin or even an intent to sin, but because our world is now groaning under the effects and consequences of the fall from Genesis 3. So there are specific remedies to apply for each of those when suffering comes from our sin, when suffering is from the sin of others, or when we're suffering just because we live in a world broken, not as God originally intended it. But God's comfort is available in all of them. And what I'm sharing today and what I shared last night is applicable. God is totally sovereign and completely in control of the extent and the intensity and the details of our pain, no matter the cause. God's providential care rules over all parts of our lives and his perfect purposes prevail. And that truth is essential when we think about discipleship. So here's how our pastor at Mount Vernon defines discipleship. I'd love to hear some of your definitions later. Discipleship is regularly, deliberately, and personally helping another believer grow in Christlikeness. regularly, deliberately, and personally helping another believer grow in Christ-likeness. So God makes it really clear in his word that we're supposed to be discipled by other women and we're supposed to disciple other women. So it's a two-way street. We're getting it from one end and we're giving it out from the other. So we can think about verses like Matthew 28, 18. This is the Great Commission. Jesus comes and says to his disciples, all authority on heaven and earth has been given to me. So go, go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded." That kind of encapsulates that discipleship piece. I'm going to teach you to observe all that Jesus has commanded us to do. And behold, I am with you always to the very end of the age. We could also think about Titus 2, 3. And I know these are familiar verses. I just love them because it's just so clear that what God commands us to do. So Titus 2, 3. Older women, likewise, are to be reverent in behavior. not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled. So we know that God commands us to evangelize and to disciple, but suffering can make discipleship really confusing and scary. We don't feel adequate. We don't know what to say or what direction to take. And our fears are really quick to enter in when we see someone in pain. If you think about kind of getting into the water with someone who's going to swim through a storm, that means you're kind of going through it with them. And you start experiencing some of the fear and the anxiety that they're experiencing, not because it's your trial, but because you're really close to them. So it can almost feel like problems are contagious or the emotional experience of problems are contagious. It kind of rubs off on us and you're kind of like, oh, I don't want to get too close to that. One biblical counselor put it so well, we are afraid to jump into the complexities of someone else's life. Who are we to help someone else? We have troubles galore. Our past makes a mess of the present. Sin always threatens to overtake us. We feel broken ourselves and fear we will only make things worse for others. We feel unqualified. I so resonate with that. Our own sinfulness and suffering can tempt us to retreat in fear or fatigue. So when we are walking with others, seeking to help them grow in Christlikeness, we need to know that our sufficiency is from God. That's our main idea this morning. God makes us sufficient through Christ to minister to others. God makes us adequate through his son to swim strong in the stormy waves and to help others keep their head above water. So turn with me again to 2 Corinthians. And this morning we're gonna primarily be in chapter three. So a little refresher on context. Remember that Paul's defending his ministry and authenticity as an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ. He has been forced to defend himself because of the false teachers in Corinth are denouncing Paul. They're discrediting him and undercutting his ministry. And in the process, they're undercutting the very heart of the gospel. So following Jesus, like we talked about last night, it means we'll suffer. But these false prophets and apostles, Paul calls them super apostles later in the chapter, kind of almost as a mocking term, they want to eliminate the idea of suffering. So Paul needs to tell them, like we looked at last night, how much he is suffering as a worker of Christ. But he realizes that the defense of his ministry, when he's proving, no, these sufferings don't mean that God has abandoned me, they're proof that I'm actually following our suffering Savior, he realizes it's going to sound like boasting. And they're going to be like, what are you doing? He's got to make sure he starts on the right foot. So look at chapter 3, and I'm going to read verses 1 through 3. Are we beginning to commend ourselves again, or do we need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you or from you? You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on our hearts to be known and read by all, and you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink, but with the spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone, but on tablets of human hearts. So Paul turns the table on the Corinthians by saying that his ministry is not authentic because of who he is, but because of what Christ himself has done in the Corinthians' heart. Christ has given them a new heart through the Holy Spirit, and Paul points to their transformation as evidence that he's a real apostle speaking for the living Christ. So the Corinthians themselves are his letter of recommendation written on his heart. He delivered it. Christ wrote it on his heart. And he said, anybody can look at my heart and know that I'm really an apostle because you are written there. I love that. Such a beautiful analogy. Now look down at verse four. Such is the confidence we have through Christ toward God. So Paul says, I'm completely confident through Christ because God is at work in your church. Now Paul knows, again, that these false prophets, these false teachers are going to accuse him of boasting. So he follows up just the next verse with this, he follows up this statement of confidence with another amazing declaration in verses 5 and 6. Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God. who has made us sufficient to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter, but of the spirit. For the letter kills, but the spirit gives life." Paul is confident, not because he is adequate and sufficient in himself, but because God has worked in him and has given him the competence he needs to minister to others who are suffering. How would you define sufficiency? This is the word that Paul uses in the ESV translation. Not that we are sufficient in ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God. I looked up the word because I wanted to kind of know what a modern definition was. So I think about words like adequate, competent, qualified, able to satisfy the demands of the task. He was sufficient for it. He could do it. So what is he sufficient to do? What is he sufficient to be? It says God made him sufficient to be a minister of the new covenant. We have to ask what the new covenant is. To answer, and to answer that question, we need to talk about the old covenant. And when we talk about the old covenant, we are talking about the way God chose to relate to his people in the Old Testament. And particularly in our passage, Kozon, it's really clear that he's talking about the covenant that Moses mediated between God and his chosen people. This covenant was more than an agreement. It was more than a promise. It was more than a contract. It was a binding relationship that specified how God and his people would relate to each other. If God's people fail to walk by the letter of this agreement called the law, there would be terrible consequences. And as you know, they utterly failed and we have also failed to live by the letter of the law. But here's what's astounding. God is so full of grace and mercy and passion for his great name that he himself took the curse that we deserve when we break his covenant, the letter of his law. So we deserve God's wrath and judgment. We have sinned against him and treated him like he's our enemy. But instead of leaving us to endure the curse without hope, God provides a new covenant. This new covenant is most fully described in the New Testament and it centers on the person and work of Christ. So Jesus is God himself, so he could perfectly fulfill all the requirements of the old covenant. And he gave his perfect life and spilt his perfect blood to satisfy God's wrath toward our sinful covenant breaking. And not only that, Jesus' life and death and resurrection purchased for us all the blessings of the new covenant. This includes the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Paul sums this up beautifully. For the letter, which is the law, this old covenant kills, but the Spirit gives life. We have life through the Holy Spirit. So, through this new covenant, Jesus has rescued us and given us His Spirit. But there's more. We not only have new life, but we are also ministers of the new covenant. So we have our sinful covenant breaking atoned for. We're brought into the new covenant and given all sorts of blessings, including the Holy Spirit. But then that Holy Spirit equips us to be ministers of the new covenant to others. So God makes us sufficient. So what does it practically look like to be sufficient to be a minister of the New Covenant to believers who are suffering? Well, to minister to someone is simply to love and serve them. You love and serve them humbly, knowing your strength and your competence come from God. And it also means you minister by focusing on three things. You focus on God's presence, God's promises, and God's power. God makes us sufficient to minister to others through Christ, and he does this through his presence, his promises, and his power. So I'm going to tell you a story about a woman who did this for me. God made her sufficient to help me during a time of struggle. So five years ago this month, I was starting my graduate work in biblical counseling at the Master's University. It was a really intense schedule. I was going to be on campus in California for three weeks and they encourage, well they don't encourage you, you're required to complete a bunch of work before those three weeks and then you're in class for three weeks from like eight to five, Monday through Saturday. And then you have a couple more, actually three more months of work to do afterwards. So it's a compacted program, it's really, it is intense, it's a great program. I was working really hard to complete all the assignments, but I missed a deadline. Totally my fault, I just misread the syllabus and I missed the deadline. It wasn't a huge deal to my professor. I immediately called him and told him what was going on, but it was a decisive moment when the Lord started uncovering some things I didn't really even know were still going on in my heart. I became very, very anxious. And especially when I arrived on campus for classes, I wasn't sleeping well, I wasn't eating well, and I was really panicky. And I met a woman the first night that I was on campus, and she looked in my eyes and she said, are you okay? And I said, not really. And she said, Well, tell me about what's going on. And she had had a similar experience the year before. She came along beside me that first week and was God's means of grace to me. She was a minister of the new covenant. She was humble because she knew her sufficiency didn't come from herself. But she was also confident because she knew that God and his promises are real and trustworthy. So, thinking about the three things I mentioned, God's presence, promises, and power. She didn't know she was going to meet a very needy classmate that day, but she had soaked in God's presence. She knew how much she needed the Lord every moment, and God had made her humble and patient and tender because she sat at his feet. She was ready to help me because she had soaked in God's presence that day and every day. amazing how she meets with the Lord every day. She also talked to me about God's promises and shared precious truth with me from the word. She reminded me that God had not brought me to this time of trial to destroy me. When she said that, when she looked me in the eye, and she said, God did not bring you to this place to destroy you. I didn't even realize I had been thinking that, like I'm gonna come apart, I'm not gonna make it. And she said, no, Jesus does not despise our weakness. And she kept repeating Matthew 12, 20. A bruised reed he will not break, and a flickering burning wick he will not extinguish. And the verse goes on to say, until he brings justice to victory. we can love God's victory in justice because Jesus has taken what we deserve. So it was just a beautiful verse that God doesn't despise our weaknesses. Jesus is patient with our weaknesses, and so was my friend. She expected me to need to hear the same thing over and over. She would look at me and she said, God's grace will meet you today. It's okay. Take a deep breath and focus on what you need to do. And she said the same thing over and over. And I realized, even as I disciple women, sometimes you think, what I'm saying is not working. I'm saying biblical, true things, and it's not working. And I want to encourage you, sometimes you don't need a brand new thing to say. Sometimes your friend just needs to hear you say the same thing, the truth from God's Word, over and over again. She would find me at meals and between classes and do just that for me. I was suffering because I was sinfully afraid of failing, which is unbelief, and because I was devastated by my own obvious weaknesses. It's kind of a following what I shared some last night. That's pride. And because I was afraid of being ashamed in front of my classmates and professors, which is fear of man. But she was so compassionate. She knew her own heart and had wrestled with these same desires herself, and she knew how God had helped her to repent and to trust Him. She also ministered to me in a really practical way. She was a nurse, and she was just helping me understand how my body was responding to what was going on emotionally. So I was crying out to the Lord and repenting. constantly, but my body was still on high alert. I was still having trouble sleeping and eating, and she told me that it would take time for my body to stop responding to the lies that I had been telling it. And that was really an eye-opening statement, that my body can calm down when I persistently cling to God and His promises. She also knew God's power. She wasn't baffled or horrified by my situation or by my sin. God was making her sufficient to help me. And she was confident that God would give me all the grace that I needed for those three weeks, and he did. Her dependence on the Lord meant the difference between a condemning, judgmental, impatient response, like, why are you still struggling? I told you the truth yesterday, and now you should be all better. She didn't act like that at all. She was so tender and compassionate and long-suffering. So by ministering to me, my friend gave me a model I will never forget of how to help others who are suffering. So last night we talked about my troubled heart. This morning we're talking about the helping heart. So this is who we need to be when we disciple others. We are seeking to help others, and this is some about how God makes the helping heart sufficient to do that. So this is exactly what Paul was talking about in 2 Corinthians chapter 1. We're going to dig a little bit deeper into our text and look at these three areas, God's presence, promises, and power. I realized, even as I was thinking about my friend's example, that she was able to fruitfully give out what she had processed for herself. And I came to see that as so key as I walked through my three years of graduate work in biblical counseling. I knew that I needed to process and own for myself what I was seeking to give out to someone else. So even if my biblical counseling training had not benefited anyone else, it would have been so good for my own soul. Okay, so let's look at God's presence. We have God's presence with us because of the new covenant. Look at 2 Corinthians 1, 21 through 22. And it is God who establishes us with you in Christ and has anointed us and who has put his seal on us and given us his spirit in our hearts as a guarantee. God has given us His Holy Spirit as a guarantee. It's a down payment that we're going to get the full payment of later. God the Holy Spirit lives in us because we have been made new. We are redeemed and reconciled through Jesus. One biblical counselor says that God's promise to be with us is the central promise of the whole Bible. And when I read that, I thought, I don't know if I agree. But then I realized that God's promise to overcome our sin through his son and give us the privilege of always being with him is the best promise that we could ever hear. The gospel gives us God himself. When we are saved, we are united with Christ, and even though we suffer in this life, we are never apart from God's comforting, guiding presence. This truth is the remedy for a thousand aches of our soul. Our dearest friend, our precious Savior, the limitless God of the universe is with us. in us, he will never abandon us or ignore us or neglect us." So what does it look like for God's Spirit, His very presence, to be with us? So here's a little sampling. I love these verses, and you can just jot them down and maybe look at them later. Romans 8, 26. The Spirit helps us in our weakness. So we hear how, again, how God responds to our weakness. He doesn't say, I can't believe you. What, again? You're needy again? No, he says the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings that are too deep for words. In Psalm 23, 4, David says, even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me. David fears no evil. Can you imagine living like that? Not fearing any evil toward you or to any of your family? That's incredible. And why does he have no fear? Because God is with him. You can think about Hebrews 13, five through six. Now this is an interesting one. It starts out talking about not loving money and being content. The motivation that the author of Hebrews gives for being content is that God is with you. Keep your life free from the love of money and be content with what you have. For he has said, I will never leave you nor forsake you. So you can confidently say, the Lord is my helper. What can man do to me? Okay, one more. This is Isaiah 41, 10. God himself says, to our hearts, and this is a promise that we take because we are members of the new covenant. Fear not, for I am with you. Be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you by my righteous right hand. It's such a comfort to know that God will strengthen us and help us and uphold us. So God's presence is a truth that we should cherish and cling to. We praise God that this comes to us from Jesus' work in the New Testament because we need to know this when we're helping someone who's suffering. So now let's talk about God's promises. This is the second part of what God uses to make us sufficient as ministers. So Paul is utterly convinced that God will keep his promises. He is a covenant-making and a covenant-keeping God. So in 2 Corinthians 1, 18 through 20, this is how God describes. This is how Paul describes God's promises. are true for us, not because of our performance, but because of Christ's work on our behalf. Because of Jesus, we receive the benefit of God's faithful promises. All God's promises come true for us because Jesus was made to be sin, even though he knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. The promise of the gospel makes all the other promises in scripture available to us. I often find I need a specific promise to hang on to for a day or for an activity. I need a specific way that God is faithfully meeting me. John Piper has a fantastic way to activate promises in our daily life. I use this myself and I share it with my counselees. It's an acronym called APTAT. A-P-T-A-T. APTAT. Okay, the first letter is A. It stands for admit that you can do nothing. And certainly the Apostle Paul would agree. God's promises become stunningly beautiful when we realize how utterly dependent we are on them, how much we desperately need them. In John 15, 5, Jesus teaches his disciples about their utter dependence on him. He says, This is a humbling reminder, but it's also a relief. I can't do anything apart from Christ. Now the next step, so that was A. The next step is P for pray. Pray for God's help. I find it helpful whenever possible to speak out loud to the Lord. Of course, he hears us when we pray silently, but praying out loud reminds me that I'm talking to a real person who really hears me. Then T. T is trust a specific promise. We are talking about how God makes us sufficient to minister to others, and this is a theme that Paul revisits over and over in 2 Corinthians. So flip over in 2 Corinthians to chapter 9, and we're going to look at verse 8. 2 Corinthians 9. So this is a really specific example of a promise you can trust. The context is Paul is encouraging the Corinthian church to be cheerful givers, to help the saints in Jerusalem who are suffering, they're very needy, and he wants them to be ready to engage in an act of giving because they are rich in Christ. They have received grace so that they can be generous. So then look at verse eight. And God is able to make all grace abound to you so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work. Paul is overflowing with descriptions of how abundant God's sufficiency is when we seek to minister to others. I count five times Paul is exalting in God's comprehensive grace to us. This is a precious promise to cling to as we think about pouring ourselves and our resources out to others when we feel weak and tired. So once we find a specific promise, like this one, this is a great one. We need to actually believe the promise. Promises don't work unless you believe them. You don't have the buoyancy of hope and the joy of the Holy Spirit if you don't actually believe what God says. one of my professors actually required us to memorize a definition by Jerry Bridges of trust. And this is particularly in relationship to trusting a promise. So here's the definition. Trust is not a passive state of mind. It is a vigorous act of the soul by which we cling to, lay hold on the promises of God and cling to them despite the adversity that seeks to overwhelm us. Trust is not a passive state of mind, it is a vigorous act of the soul by which we choose to lay hold on the promises of God and cling to them despite the adversity that seeks to overwhelm us. So we admit we can do nothing, we pray, we trust a specific promise, and then we act. That's the second A, we act. God's grace coming to us in his promises is perfectly suited and adequate to tackle the challenges of the day. We act in the strength of God's provision. Now I love 1 Peter 4, 10 and 11 when I think about the tasks that God calls me to do. especially in counseling. Here's what Peter says, whoever serves as one who serves by the strength that God supplies in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. So when you admit that you can do nothing and you pray and you trust a promise, you are serving in the strength that God supplies so that he gets the glory and you can say, this is what God did, this is not what I did. But his strengthening grace will always prove inadequate if you try to spread it across tomorrow's troubles as well. It's like buttering bread. The little bit of butter that's plenty for today's slice gets a bit thin if you try to put it on the whole loaf. So don't try to spread God's strength for today over tomorrow or next month or next year. Act with God's grace today. Listen to Jerry Bridges again. We must learn to obey God one choice at a time. We must also learn to trust God one circumstance at a time. Trusting God is not a matter of my feelings. I wish I had learned that much earlier in life. I'm still in the process. Trusting God is not a matter of my feelings, but of my will. That act of the will must be based on belief, and belief must be based on truth. So we cling to the truth of God's character and promises, and then we're going to move forward in obedience. We act. The last letter is T. It's a really simple one. We thank God. We thank God for his help and his goodness, for the energy and wisdom and comfort he provides. So this is a short acronym, A-P-T-A-T, Aptat. that can help us cling to a promise and rely on God in the midst of any day or any activity. As we do this, we are walking by faith, not by sight. So we're going to talk about some more specific promises that you can use with other women in our next talk. So, last thing, third thing, we're going to talk about God's power. This is the last thing, this is the third thing we're going to talk about that brings us God's sufficiency as we minister to others. The door that God's power arrives through is our weakness. We need God's power. God's power comes to us in our weakness, which is actually quite a mystery. It's almost a paradox. It brings two opposite things together that don't seem compatible. Look at 2 Corinthians 4, so just in the next chapter over, 2 Corinthians 4, verses 6 through 10. For God, who said, let light shine out of darkness, For God, who said, let light shine out of darkness, has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure, this treasure is the knowledge of the glory of Jesus Christ, in jars of clay to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed, always carrying in the body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. So God puts his treasure, the light of the glory of the knowledge of Jesus Christ, into everyday, very fragile containers to show that the power and the glory coming out of us don't belong to us, but come from God. A jar of clay was a very common, ordinary vessel in Old Testament, well, in this time period, in this new covenant time period. Nothing unique or special about them. Paul says that God chose to put his glorious treasure in us, common, ordinary people, so that it is clear that the extraordinary power in our lives belongs to him. So how does power actually come from knowledge? It says that this power is displayed because we see the knowledge of the glory of God. I think it's because God's glory is most fully displayed in the gospel. We see how holy and kind and just and generous our God is when we look at the life and sacrifice of Jesus. Jesus's life and death and resurrection is the power of God to reconcile us to God. We have no power to do this in ourselves. Having been reconciled to God and seeing the glory of Jesus in the gospel, we are able to endure affliction. So if you look at verses 8 and 9 in chapter 4, Paul is saying we are afflicted in every way but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken. God's power didn't prevent Paul and Titus from suffering. That's just really sobering. There's no other way around it. It's a sobering fact. But God's power gave them the ability to endure without being destroyed. Paul's weakness was not a liability to God. It didn't limit God or tie God's hands. On the contrary, Paul's weakness was the requirement for Paul to know and experience God's power, and it's the same with us. Our weakness is actually the platform for God's power to be on display. So let's turn to 2 Corinthians 12. I'm kind of taking you all over the book here. And this is gonna be a really familiar passage to you all. Paul's talking about God's power that comes to him in his weakness, and he's talking about a painful circumstance in his life that he calls a thorn in his flesh. We don't know what it was. There's lots of interesting hypotheses, but we don't know what it was. But Paul knew what his purpose was. So look at verse seven. So to keep me from becoming conceited, because of 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 becoming conceited. 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 on 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." I so want to be like that. God allowed the hardship to remain with Paul so that Paul would be humble and dependent on God. Notice that Paul calls his suffering a messenger of Satan. That's really fascinating. But Paul sees the purpose of the affliction as an antidote to pride. Satan would love for Paul to be prideful. Pride would totally undercut Paul's ministry and Satan would have been delighted. So it was God's purpose that prevailed in his suffering even though Satan was at work. And Paul doesn't rebuke Satan, he talks to God. He prays, he begs God for the thorn to be removed, but instead of removing it, God gives the power to endure. God's grace was sufficient for Paul in his weakness and suffering. God's grace came to Paul as power, the power of God to pursue God's glory despite Paul's suffering and affliction. This is such a precious truth as we follow Christ in obedience to make disciples. Our weakness does not hinder God's power. It releases it. When we acknowledge our weakness and bring it to God in submission and faith, God releases his power through us. The pressure is off. We are jars of clay. We are weak. We don't generate the power. But our weakness is the context for God's strength. We aren't sufficient in ourselves. God created us to need his presence, his promises, and his power. As we recognize our weakness and cling to God, he makes us sufficient to be ministers of his new covenant to others who are suffering. I'm going to close with a quote from Oswald Chambers that I absolutely love. God can achieve his purpose either through the absence of human power or the abandonment of reliance on them. All through history, God has chosen and used nobodies because their unusual dependence on him made possible the unique display of his power and grace. He chose and used somebodies only when they renounced dependence on their natural abilities and resources. It's pretty amazing. Let me pray for us. Father, it is so contrary to our culture and our nature as humans to think that our weakness is the way that your power is demonstrated. I pray that we would embrace this, that we would cherish the ways that you keep us weak, not because we love weakness, but because we love depending on you. I pray that we would renounce strength, our own strength, and that we would look to you for yours. Thank you that your word is so full of rich promises that make us sufficient to be ministers of your new covenant. And we are most grateful that we are actually in the new covenant, redeemed and reconciled to you through Jesus. Father, I pray that you will continue to make us sufficient ministers to those who are hurting. And Father, please give me the strength to continue to say the words that you would have me to say and give these precious women encouragement and refreshment through your word. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.