Devotional for Thursday March 3rd

Good Morning Everyone,

 

Our theme for this month: “Perseverance”

 

Our Bible verse for today: “Concerning this, I pleaded with the Lord three times to take it away from me. But He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.” 1 Corinthians 12:8-9 (HCSB)

 

Our thought for today: “Persevere in times of sickness.”

 

The Apostle Paul was a man with a mission. He had been tasked by God to help establish and spread the Christian faith in the Middle East and Europe. It was a huge undertaking. It would require him to travel constantly, to eat strange foods, sleep in borrowed beds, and endure bad weather, bad roads, and bad people. It would be a hard life and he needed his health.

 

But Paul was not healthy. He had some sort of sickness or disability which hindered him. We don’t know exactly what it was, Paul never said. Bible scholars believe it was very poor eyesight, almost to the point of being legally blind. What we do know is that Paul pleaded with God to please take the sickness away. But God said “no”. God decided that Paul would need to learn how to live with it, and even to thrive and succeed despite whatever that physical limitation was.

 

The apparent reason, according to 1 Corinthians 12:8-9, was so that it would be clear to everyone that the great things that were happening in and through the life of Paul were due to the power of the Holy Spirit, and not because of any greatness on Paul’s part. “Power is perfected in weakness”. God got the glory, Paul didn’t.

 

Over the years I’ve seen examples of this more numerous than I can count. There was Bob, a man who was dying a terrible and painful death from emphysema. It was a great struggle just to get his decimated body out of bed. But he was in church every Sunday, wheelchair, oxygen bottles, adult diapers – in church right up until just a couple of weeks before he died and happy to be there. What an inspiring example for the rest of us!

 

There was the Christian woman, a friend of mine, who suffered through a terrible and excruciatingly painful form of cancer – the treatment for which was more uncomfortable and painful than the disease itself. But she never complained, she never whined, there was no “Woe is me!” or “Why me?” She got the treatment she needed and she got on with life.

 

Losing your health is one of the scariest and most difficult circumstances any of us will ever face. When it happens it’s natural to want to give-up and shut down. We want to just curl-up in bed, pull the covers over our heads, and do what we can to minimize the pain and discomfort. But if we allow it to, sickness can quickly come to define our lives.

 

A better response is to do whatever you can to push through it and to continue to live the fullest life you are capable of under the circumstances. Like Bob, that could be little more than just showing up at church for an hour on a Sunday morning. But that’s ok. You do what you can, but you do all that you can.

 

Being sick stinks, but we have to persevere through the sickness. Don’t give-in and don’t give-up. Live life as fully and as completely as you can under the prevailing circumstances.

 

God Bless,

Pastor Jim