“Bible promises: My grace is all you need”
II Corinthians 12:9
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus.
Born in August of 1942, Max Cleland grew up in a little town called Lithonia, just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. Not only was he named the most outstanding senior of his high school class, he went on to earn a Bachelor’s Degree, and then a Master’s Degree from Emory University. When duty called in 1965, he served in the Vietnam War.
Three years later, in April of 1968, with just a month left in his tour, he was ordered to set up a radio relay station. A helicopter flew him and two other soldiers to the top of a treeless hill.
But as he jumped out of the helicopter, he saw a grenade lying at his feet. Thinking it had fallen out of his flak jacket, he reached down to pick it up. And that’s when it exploded slamming him backwards, shredding one of his arms and both of his legs.
He should have been dead. Shrapnel pierced his windpipe. His right arm and both legs were gone. For the next eighteen months, he was in and out of hospitals. Doctors told him he’d never walk again.
His worst moment, he said, happened when a former girlfriend came to visit him. And as they were crossing a street, his wheelchair hit a crack in the pavement. He fell out and landed in a gutter.
He said, “I flailed helplessly like a fish out of water, lying in the dirt and cigarette butts. Two men rushed up and lifted me back into the wheelchair. My companion was almost hysterical, crying over and over, ‘I’m sorry, Max! I’m sorry!’ The shame and embarrassment of the spill seared me like a burn that continued to throb.”
He said, “I couldn’t forget the first time I met her. I was twenty-four and stood six-foot two inches tall. Now I was in a wheelchair. I thought, ‘Is this all that’s left for me--to be hauled around like a sack of potatoes for the rest of my life? No! I’m not always going to be helpless. I’ll need a lot of help from God, and from my family and friends, but I’m going to make a difference in this world.’”
And so he did! After first serving in the Georgia Senate and as the head of the Veterans Administration, he went on to serve in the United States Senate, representing the State of Georgia.
You can read more about him in his book, Strong at the Broken Places.
So it was for the apostle Paul. As he wrote: “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’” (II Corinthians 12:7-9).
So far in our time together, we’ve looked at quite a lot of Bible promises. In Genesis chapter 3, just as soon as Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree, God promised He would send His Son. He said, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel” (Genesis 3:15).
In Genesis chapter 18, He said to a man named Abraham, “Is anything too hard for the Lord? At the appointed time I will return to you about this time next year, and Sarah shall have a son” (Genesis 18:14).
Joshua said, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).
And Jesus said in Matthew chapter 11, “Come to Me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).
In the words of Everek R. Storms, “The Scriptures contain a grand total of 8,810 promises. How do I know? Because I counted them!”
He said, “And of those 8,810 promises, 7,487 are promises that God made to man, 290 are promises man made to God, twenty-eight are made by angels, and eleven are made by demons.” And he said, “And the most outstanding chapter, as far as promises are concerned, is Psalm 37, for practically every verse is a promise!” For it’s there that we find words like these…“Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4)...and “The enemies of the Lord are like the glory of the pastures; they vanish--like smoke they vanish away” (Psalm 37:20)…and ”The righteous will inherit the land and dwell in it forever” (Psalm 37:29).
In the words of nineteenth century missionary William Carey, “The future is as bright as the promises of God.”
So it is in the words of II Corinthians chapter 12. As Paul wrote, “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’” (II Corinthians 12:8-9).
Before we go any farther, let’s first talk about the city of Corinth and its people, the Corinthians.
In Bible times, Corinth was one of the largest and most influential cities in all of the Roman empire. With a population somewhere between seven hundred and nine hundred thousand people, it connected two major bodies of water--the Aegean Sea to the east and the Adriatic Sea to the west--which as you can imagine, made it very rich and very powerful. But along with all that wealth and power came the worst that man could do. In fact, as one commentator wrote, it became a “hotbed of immorality and vice.”
And if you wanted to worship a god, any god, Corinth was the place to go. Of course, there was Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, of passion and desire. Since she was their patron god, her temple was the biggest and most beautiful of all.
But that’s nothing to say of Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, Hera, the goddess of marriage and childbirth, and Persephone, the queen of the underworld. And let’s not forget about Apollo, the god of music and dance, Poseidon, the god of the sea, and Askeplios, the god of health and healing.
And as it so often goes, in such a rich and powerful place, if anything could go wrong, it did go wrong, so wrong that later the apostle Paul couldn’t help but write, “I could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, mere infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are still not ready” (I Corinthians 3:1-2).
Now here in chapter 12, Paul is feeling the deepest pain and greatest attack in all of his ministry. He was unloved, unappreciated, and untrusted. His ministry was maligned. As one author wrote, “His integrity was questioned, his fruitfulness denied, his honesty regaled, his sacrificial service rejected, his credentials scoffed at, and his authority disregarded. And all of this was being led by false teachers who had done everything they could to destroy people’s confidence in him.”
They mocked him, this dear, sacrificial, humble, selfless apostle, who had already been battered and beaten physically and emotionally, not to mention who had given almost two years of his life to that very church.
So what did he do? What would you do? In the time of his greatest need, his deepest pain, and his most severe trial, he didn’t go to his good friends and fellow ministers Timothy or Titus or Peter or Apollos, as good as they would have been for him. Instead, he went directly to God. As he wrote, “Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me” (II Corinthians 12:8).
And what did the Lord say? He said, “My grace is sufficient for you” (II Corinthians 12:9). “My grace is enough for you.” Or to put it another way, “My grace is all you need.”
So if God’s grace is all that Paul needed, then it’s all that we need too.
And if grace is all that we need, what’s grace?
Grace is different from mercy. Mercy is not getting what we deserve. Out of His rich mercy, God forgave our sin.
But grace is different. Grace is getting what we could never deserve. Through God’s grace, He saved us, He adopted us, and He made us co-heirs with Jesus.
If you think about it, the word “grace” is the single most important word in all of the New Testament, not to mention the entire Bible!
It’s only by grace that we repent, that we believe, and that we’re saved. And by that grace so freely given that we can endure suffering, disappointment, and pain.
Paul wrote to the Romans, “Sin has no dominion over you, since you are not under law, but under grace” (Romans 6:14). He wrote to the Ephesians, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). He wrote to Timothy, “Be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus” (II Timothy 2:1). And he wrote to the Corinthians, “By the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain” (I Corinthians 15:10).
God’s grace is all we need.
So what does all this mean for us? It means the church isn’t a club for winners. It’s a fellowship of failures, for, as one author wrote, “It’s only through suffering that God’s grace is made clear.”
And nowhere was that made more clear than in the cross. For what was despised, rejected, and counted the least worthy of all, what was stricken, smitten, and afflicted, became our only hope and salvation, “foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (I Corinthians 1:18).
In an article entitled, He’s Making Me Strong, author Brenda Ransom tells of a time when she and a friend were walking along when, all of a sudden, her legs felt heavy, as if they didn’t want to move. No big deal. She just assumed her back was acting up again.
But after several trips and falls, she went to see her doctor, who referred her to a specialist, who referred her to another specialist. Finally, she was sent to see a neurologist who specialized in MS. After extensive tests and MRIs, she was diagnosed with something called Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis, or PPMS for short. And he suggested that she might have already been suffering from it for the past seven to nine years.
And as the months passed, her symptoms grew only worse. After all, there was no cure. So she went from a cane to keep her from falling, and then a walker. She left her job and had to quit driving. She lost any sense of independence.
And though she knew that God still heals, she also knew that God doesn’t heal everyone. Instead, He gives His inexplicable peace, strength, and contentment in His unfailing love. Like Paul, she asked God to take it from her, but God said, “No.”
So what could she do? She said, “And so I choose every day--sometimes moment by moment--to find that my Savior’s grace is enough, and that in my weakness He is making me strong.”
As Paul once wrote to the Corinthians, “Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But He said to me, ‘My grace is all you need’” (II Corinthians 12:8-9).
Dear Father, when we sought out the great things, the powerful things, and the strong things, You showed Your glory in the cross. Help us to follow in the footsteps of our Lord Jesus, as we rest in You and You alone, for His sake. Amen