Thorn In The Flesh

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Good morning. Good morning. Welcome to Thrive. It's good to have you here this day. We're in week five of this series called Embodied. We've been discussing how God has created our body. He loves this created world, this material world. He doesn't abandon it. He doesn't want it to change into something immaterial by any means. And his plan from beginning to end is to take even this broken creation after our rebellion and renew it, fulfill it, and bring it to completion as well as you. We were made in God's image. You know what? I find there's some real irony in the Bible when it talks in Genesis chapter three where the Adam and Eve are tempted by the serpent and the serpent says, hey, if you eat from this you will be like God. Have you ever thought about that? Be like God. Weren't they? If you're made in God's image, you're reflecting his character. God has you made to be like him in the things that you need to be like him in his love, his trust, his joy, right? All the serpent was doing was for them to be unlike God, actually. That was the lie at the beginning. They were going to gain, maybe they thought, independence and power. In a sense, I think Jesus is kind of sharing kind of that story in a way with the parable of the prodigal son where the prodigal son basically tells his dad, drop dead. I want your stuff. I don't want you. Adam and Eve were saying, I want your stuff, your power. I just don't want you. I want to be in charge. And ever since, we've been elevating ourselves and promoting ourselves and centering our lives on ourselves. Your body is not the problem. Well, I mean, you've got some ailments, right? Yes, I know. We all do. But that's not really the problem. My problem is I'm curved in on myself. And I used to kind of think, I know, we're not Freudian, and I'm not going to be Freudian. But I used to think in a sense that, oh, it's just my id, the desires, my impulses. That's the problem. No, it's not just that. It's also my ego. And it's my superego, how I judge things. The whole, you know, I don't care how you split human beings up. The Bible doesn't look and say, well, this part of you is great. And this part of you is not so great anymore since the fall. We are all corrupt all the way through in one form or another. And the question is, how in the world, then, does God deal with this? What does he do, right? To deal with all of me, which has got, you know, issues all the way through. And that's the big question. One of the ways today we're going to talk about, and it's not a way I like, but boy, I have found it's necessary for me. And that is called a thorn in the flesh. That's how Paul calls it, okay? I know. You probably use that term a few times too, right? Oh, he's a thorn in my flesh. Hopefully not about your spouse. But we've used it about all sorts of things. Let's look at what the original thorn in the flesh is to understand it a little more today. He starts, I must go on boasting. Now he's been doing that for about a chapter or two because the context of this is the Corinthian church is really into themselves, okay? We'll see that. And they're into these speakers that come in that seem to be extremely high-end, powerful, super-apostles is the way Paul sarcastically calls them. They haven't really been called by God, but they've taken on that position themselves. And they are flashy and talk about all sorts of, quote, high-powered, glorious things in their lives. And so he's been boasting in comparison to them because they are full of a lot of boasting. Now he says right here, I must go on boasting. And the reason he's doing it is to display to the Corinthians the real way, not this false way that he believes these false apostles are doing now. Yeah, I won't go down that road, but you can apply it to today. There's a lot of things going on. I think in American Christianity, they go like, yeah, it's not the real thing, okay? Just say it. You can look at it. He says, I must go on boasting, though there is nothing to be gained by it. I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord. Now he's doing this in third person, but it's really him. I know a man in Christ who 14 years ago was caught up to the third heaven, whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into paradise, whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know, God knows. And he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter. On behalf of this man, I will boast, but on my own behalf, I will not boast except of my weaknesses. Though if I should wish to boast, I would not be a fool for I would be speaking the truth, but I refrain from it so that no one may think more of me than he sees in me or hears from me. So to keep me from being conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, notice how...