P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

GOD’S LOVING THORNS

There’s a certain radio personality who comes on the air every day – and who knows, maybe on this same radio station. And I don’t want to point fingers at others, because I’m sure there are arenas in my own spiritual journey where I deserve to have them pointed at me. But let me take just a paragraph from a good Christian book entitled What Jesus Would Say . . . to . . . this or that person. And this well-known commentator is high on author Lee Strobel’s list. He gives us a sample opening monologue, and just to be fair, I’ll hide the man’s identity as I go along. Here it is:

“Greetings, conversationalists across the fruited plain, this is – Mr. X, the most dangerous man in America, serving humanity simply by opening my mouth, destined for my own wing in the Museum of Broadcasting, executing everything I do flawlessly with zero mistakes, doing this show with half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair, because I have talent on loan from God.” Then he says his name again: Mr. X. “A man. A legend. A way of life.”

And there it is. Again, I don’t want to reveal to you who we’re talking about. If you’re in a rush to figure it out, be my guest, but I’m not going to go out on a limb and tell you.

The rub is this. And it’s true for this extremely popular radio host, it’s true for me, and friend, it’s true for you. But Pride – that “great sin,” that deadliest of Satan’s tools – is simply a killer when it comes to our Christian witness. It keeps us from being effective ambassadors for Jesus. It gets in the way of the work we want to do for God. The presence of Pride in our lives is sand in the gearbox; there simply are no two ways about it.

In II Corinthians 12, the Apostle Paul makes a startling confession. He admits to being prone to pride. And God in His infinite wisdom gave His beloved servant a curse of some kind, what Paul calls “a thorn in my flesh.” Eugene Peterson describes it in his Message paraphrase as “the gift of a handicap” – and he wasn’t swinging a golf club when he wrote it. Now, scholars have conjectured for 2000 years what this mysterious thorn might have been, but Paul doesn’t say. Obviously, such an ambitious, hardworking preacher didn’t like it. It was in the way; it was frustrating.

Now, you would think that this ailment, whether it was physical or emotional, would have hindered his work for God. Wouldn’t God Himself want to clear out the runway and give Paul smoother takeoffs and landings? Did God want to sabotage His own campaigns? And so Paul tells us that three times in a row He begged God to take this curse away. Notice how heaven answers:

“But [the Lord] said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.’”

And the Bible truth right here, friend, is that God can do more when we are humble – and wearing bifocals – than He can when we are 20/20, but proud of it. Our limitations, coupled with humility and trust in divine power, are more effective than when we go it alone, selfishly using the talents we claim are on loan from God.

Maybe you’ve sung the campfire song before: “Humble me, humble me, O Lord.” And the last line: “Humble me SO I CAN DO YOUR WILL.” Because when we’re proud, when we’re making things happen under our own steam, we don’t tend to want to do God’s will; we’d rather keep on doing our own.

It’s been a central theme for two weeks now that Pride actually blinds us to what our relationship with God ought to be. When we have Pride, we’re not willing to let God be Lord over us, to have Him be the Serv-EE and us the serVANTS. It says in Proverbs 11:2:

“When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.”

It would be ironic if Paul’s hidden malady maybe had to do with being cross-eyed and needing laser surgery . . . but that humility gave him the divine wisdom and insight to see the truths of the kingdom more clearly.

We’ve been getting some wonderful literary tidbits from a book chapter entitled “The Great Sin,” from C. S. Lewis’ bestseller, Mere Christianity. But today I’m not going to use a single one of his lines. Instead, let me give you an inside glimpse into the busy, hectic, harried life of this Oxford scholar and professor, who taught classes, and wrote radio messages, and counseled students, and graded term papers just as busy teachers do today. And yes, he wrote towering masterpieces that have gripped the Christian world for half a century.

But on top of that, Jack Lewis often sat down and wrote simple, pastoral letters to struggling believers . . . one at a time. No fanfare. No royalties. No glory. (And, by the way, no typewriters or laptops.) He simply corresponded with people. Sometimes someone who had read one of his Narnia books wrote in with a question, and a back-and-forth exchange of ideas, in longhand, sprang into existence.

One of these connections ran for many years and was later released under the title: Letters to an American Lady. Over one hundred of his letters to a struggling, sometimes petty woman living in the U.S. She was a nobody. She offered little or nothing to the exchange. And I must tell you that Jack Lewis was a busy, struggling, often arthritic writer of letters. He hated doing it. He sometimes did gently complain if a correspondent “upped the pace.” And he once admitted that it was almost sheer agony to drag his tired hand across the page, trying to uplift and serve this or that petty, complaining dullard.

Well, why did he do it? In a preface to the compilation I just mentioned, Clyde S. Kilbey has this to say about the recently deceased professor:

“Lewis believed taking time out to advise or encourage another Christian was both a humbling of one’s talents before the Lord and also as much the work of the Holy Spirit as producing a book.”

Isn’t that something? The great Clive Staples Lewis wrote to these simple believers over in “the colonies” because it kept him humble. It kept him a servant. Instead of just autographing books and reading his clever essays on the BBC, he got right down into the trenches, or into the kitchen, let’s say, of this lowly woman in America. He wrote long letters, short notes, bits of humor, quotes of Scripture, pockets of advice. Why? To help one person – ONE PERSON – get closer to the throne room of heaven. For Lewis to remind himself that one person counts, that this world wasn’t just filled with the millions who read his books, but the one person who painfully grappled with his pastoral bits of wisdom and “Go thou and do likewise’s” . . . well, that kept him humble.

Maybe, friend, we should all pray this prayer: “Jesus, knock me down as much as You need to . . . so that You can use me to build up Your kingdom.” Would it be hard to pray that and mean it? Certainly. And would we be thankful if God didn’t have to slap glasses on us, or take away our fan clubs, or strip us of our ministry influence in order to make us useful to Him? That would be great too, if we could learn His lessons by the simplest route. But we should always say to Him: “Whatever it takes, Lord. Whatever it takes.” Jesus had to let Peter get wet in the waves, and then weepy in the garden of denials before He could really make of him the powerful apostle heaven intended all along.

Let’s get back to Paul, who finishes his odyssey of self-revelation this way:

“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 weakness, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

If you think back through the Christian ages, many of the incredible saints – those who did so much for God’s cause – have been the ones who just fell on their faces before Him and confessed their own frailty. In his book Kingdoms in Conflict, former Watergate inmate Chuck Colson quotes this verse by Paul, and then observes:

“Throughout Scripture God reveals a special compassion for the powerless: widows, orphans, prisoners, and aliens. Though the message of the Kingdom of God offers salvation for all who repent and believe, God does not conceal His disdain for those so enamored of their OWN power that they refuse to worship Him or to acknowledge His delight in the humble.” But now this: “Strong individuals rely on their own resources – which will never, ultimately speaking, be enough – but the so-called weak person knows his or her own limits and needs, and thus depends WHOLLY on God. Perhaps this is why God so often confounds the wisdom of the world by accomplishing His purposes through the powerless and His most powerful work through human weakness.”

Colson goes on to admit to his readers that he didn’t really get all this until he was sent to the slammer himself, along with John Dean and the other Watergate sinners.

Isn’t humility something? Blindness helps you see better, and someone goes to prison and discovers true freedom.