God’s grace applies in all circumstances

“To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”2 Corinthians 12: 1-10.
Our world boasts of its strengths and diminishes its weakness, yet Paul boasted of his weaknesses and diminished his strengths. Although favoured a lot by God, Paul was also allowed to be tormented by Satan. Whatever Paul’s thorn in the flesh was, it must have been a source of real pain in his life.

Arriving
Our successes can be our greatest threat. Success has a way of telling us we have arrived. For this reason God allowed Paul to be humbled by his weaknesses. Paul’s Jewish law and tradition and arrogance had reached extensive proportions as he hunted down Christians dragging them to prison (Acts 8:1-5). God made him humble to reveal his greatest strength.
We think success is good; failure is bad and must be avoided at all costs. God uses failure to bring about good. He uses them to drive us to Him, to prepare us for future success, to get our lives back on track, to help us see ourselves more clearly, to help us see others more compassionately. Failure gives us ‘insight and empathy’; the ability to understand the sorrows of others.

Why we need failure
Failure keeps us humble, and humility is a good thing in God’s Kingdom. Without failure, we would quickly forget who is really in control, who is really invincible and omnipotent. We would start to think of ourselves more highly than we ought. When success comes too easily and too often, we get puffed up with pride and become vulnerable to temptations aimed at our blind spots. Humility is our best defense, and humility is cultivated through failure.
It was the discipline of God’s grace that made Paul strong. God’s grace saves, but its design is such that it will not overrule God’s law of reaping and sowing. As we reap the harvest of our ways it makes us dependent upon God’s power for survival. God allowed Satan to give Paul something he could not handle to make him realize that he was dependent upon God’s strength.
Paul prayed for God to remove his thorn. God refused. Paul was like each of us. He wanted God to remove the difficult circumstance. God wants to reveal his power over the circumstances. God gives us our circumstances to make us dependent upon the One who is the master of every circumstance. Satan appears to be a tyrant who controls our circumstances, but in the hands of God Satan becomes our servant that works for us as God overrules his evil schemes to build our character. “That I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings”, says Paul in Philippians 3:10.

Our faith is victory
Faith in God allows us to go as far as we can while trusting in God’s grace to overcome the insurmountable difficulties we face. Our lives are not sustained because we can explain what God is doing; they are sustained because we can trust in what God is doing, though we will never understand his ways. As found in Luke 22:39-46, Jesus prayed for strength to complete his saving mission.