Category: Devotion of the Day

BY PARADISE AND THORN TO CHRIST

Caught up into paradise…a thorn in the flesh… My grace is sufficient.
II Corinthians 12:4, 7, 9

Paul’s paradise experience and the thorn given to offset it lest he be exalted above measure – from height to depth – were necessary to bring him to life’s richest experience, the daily sufficiency of Christ. We may need a crisis to precipitate the matter, bring it to a head, but trips to the third heaven and thorns in the flesh are incidental to life’s greatest lesson, to find in Christ Himself everything and draw from Him His resurrection life for body, mind, and spirit.

To stop short of that is to have an immature and inadequate experience. Occasional high days, answers to prayer now and then, temporary blessings, make an uneven and spasmodic Christian life. But to live day in and out, all kinds of days, in simple dependence on Christ as the branch on the vine, constantly abiding, that is the supreme experience. Not always glamorous and exciting but always sure, it is far better than an erratic, up-and-down, paradise-and-thorn existence. “A man in Christ” – that is it!

I will even make a way in the wilderness.
Isaiah 43:19

When I tread an unknown maze and can discern no path I find myself humming a little chorus:

“My Lord knows the way through the wilderness;
All I have to do is to follow.
Strength for the day,
Is mine all the way,
And all that I need for tomorrow.
My Lord knows the way through the wilderness;
All I have to do is to follow.”

“Thou knewest my path.” “I being in the way the Lord led me.” “He leadeth me…” “Commit thy way…” Oh, the Book is full of it – My Lord knows the way!

Better still, He is the way. It was an African guide who said, “There is no way…I am the way.” My Lord offers me no road map to figure out alone. He Himself is the Way, and He goes along. That is so much better. I might get lost on a path, I need a Person. He is my Way and …

“All I have to do is to follow.”