Affliction and Healing

Scripture Reading: Mark 2:17, Mark 1:40-42, 2 Corinthians 12:5-10, Psalm 34:19, Psalm 147:3, Matthew 14:14, 1 Peter 2:24, 2 Corinthians 4:7-18

Our cancer lists are too long.
Too many kids are out with the flu.
Too many among us are on the schedule for knee and hip replacements this week.

The cells of the saints, it seems, are broken. It’s reasonable to wonder: Has our Great physician allowed His medical license to expire?

I imagine that for you the question is more personal.

Your child has ear infections that never seem to clear up.
Your back hurts no matter how much you stretch.
Your hormones have strapped you in for an emotional rollercoaster you don’t want to keep riding.

No greens powder or vitamin regimen or leg day can change the finitude of our flesh. We are jars of clay, not iron women. Following Jesus does not inoculate us against the effect of the fall on our bodies. “One who is righteous has many adversaries,” the psalmist wrote (Psalm 34:19). This includes perimenopause, aging, and plantar fasciitis.

The apostle Paul understood this reality. Most scholars agree it was likely a physical frustration that he described as his “thorn in the flesh” (2Corinthians 12:7). He also wrote, “So I take pleasure in weakness, insults, hardships, persecutions, and in difficulties, for the sake of Christ. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (v.10).

Paul wasn’t a sadist. He didn’t embrace physical pain because it’s easy or enjoyable, but the Spirit gave him eyes to see the usefulness of his physical suffering. Primarily, that it stripped him of his self-sufficiency and flung him toward the only One who can heal our deepest need.

Just a few chapters earlier he wrote, “Now we have this treasure in clay jars, so that this extraordinary power may be from God and not from us” (2Corinthians 4:7). The limitations in your body are working for you, not against you. God desires to use them to produce a glory in you that far outweighs the aches and pains of this clay jar life. Physical limitations become gift thorns when we let the Lord use them to strip us of our self-sufficiency and learn deeper levels of trust in Him.

Jesus made you.
Jesus loves you.
When He thinks about the brokenness in your body, He feels compassion toward you (Matthew 14:14).
And Jesus has a plan to heal you.

Right this very moment, He is busy architecting a place for you where “pain will be no more” (Revelation 21:4). Tylenol and operating rooms won’t be needed in the new heaven and new earth. The brokenness of our bodies will be a former thing. We will live fully healed and fully free. Thanks be to God!

Until then, consider Paul’s words one more time:

Therefore we do not give up. Even though our outer person is being destroyed, our inner person is being renewed day by day. For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory. So we do not focus on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
—2 Corinthians 4:16–18

Written by Erin Davis