Three Times

Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me.

We do not know what it was.

That is not an oversight. Paul is writing at length about his own life in this letter, and he is willing to list beatings, shipwrecks, hunger, sleeplessness and a night spent in the open sea. He is not a man protecting his privacy. He simply declines to name this one thing, and the church has been guessing ever since: an illness, failing eyesight, a recurring temptation, a person who would not stop opposing him.

The guessing is understandable and none of it is decidable. What matters is that the silence has an effect. Because he never names it, the passage does not belong only to people with his particular affliction. It sits over whatever you would name if you were asked.

The two descriptions

Verse 7 says two things about the same thing, and they do not sit comfortably together.

It is a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, sent to torment him. And it was given to him, in a construction that assumes someone did the giving, for a stated purpose: so that he would not become conceited.

Paul does not resolve the tension. He does not explain how something can be an instrument of the enemy and a gift with a purpose at the same time. He puts both in one sentence and moves on.

That refusal to tidy it up is worth noticing. A great deal of unhelpful teaching about suffering comes from picking one of those two halves and dropping the other. Say only that it comes from the enemy, and every affliction becomes a fight you are losing. Say only that it was given, and God starts to sound like the author of cruelty. Paul holds both, and does not offer a mechanism.

He asked three times

The number is small enough to be exact and large enough to mean something. This was not a passing thought. He raised it, and raised it again, and raised it a third time.

Anyone who has prayed about the same thing repeatedly knows the particular self-consciousness of the third time. You begin to wonder whether asking again is faith or nagging, and whether the silence so far has already been the answer.

For Paul it had not been. The answer came, and it was a refusal.

“My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is perfected in weakness.”

What kind of no it is

Notice that Paul stops asking. The text moves directly from the answer to his conclusion, with no fourth attempt and no argument. He treats what he received as a genuine reply rather than as a door still open.

That tells you something about what he heard. It was not silence, and it was not a rebuke for asking. It was an answer that gave him something other than what he requested and that he judged to be enough.

Then the sentence that is easy to quote and hard to live. Therefore I will boast all the more gladly in my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest on me.

He does not say the thorn became pleasant. Verse 10 lists insults, hardships, persecutions and difficulties, and none of those words are soft. He says he found something in the middle of them that he would not have found otherwise, and that he would rather have that than the removal he asked for.

For today

If you are three prayers into something and nothing has changed, this passage does not promise that the fourth prayer works. It does something narrower and more useful.

It tells you that a no can be an answer rather than an absence, that Paul could not always tell which kind of trouble he was in, and that the thing he was finally given was not an explanation but a sufficiency.

He never did say what the thorn was. He said what happened to him while he still had it.