Broken And Mended
In The Seams #7
How Chronic Illness Makes Us Even More Useful to God (script before episode recording)

Welcome:

It has been a little while since our last broadcast, so I want to welcome you back to In The Seams, or if you are a first-time listener, I hope you will go back and listen to the first six episodes. Four of those episodes are interviews with authors and fellow chronic illness sufferers. But I will likely be flying solo until after the summer, and then I will try to round up another spate of interesting interviews. 

Our first four were all with women. Though I am a man who talks about chronic illness regularly, I find, in general, that men are more uncomfortable discussing it than women. But there’s no reason to try to “tough guy” it by yourself through chronic illness and pain. Many days it may seem manageable, but it gets to everyone eventually. So, I look forward to having some men on here in the future, and hopefully we can help make men speaking about health struggles the norm. 

Today, I want to talk with you about a metaphor Paul used to demonstrate weakness as something that God uses for his glory. This was a common theme for Paul, and in 2 Cor. 4, he uses the illustration of clay jars to describe what he and his companions were, ordinary and fragile containers for holding the treasure of the gospel. He wasn’t talking about chronic illness, but he was talking about suffering. And here we find an answer to how we are still useful to God despite our illness. In fact, we could say we that we are even more useful to God because of our illness. 

Theme: “Becoming Great Clay Jars Through Chronic Illness” 

Paul was a man who boasted in weakness. 2 Cor. 12:9-10 (NIV):  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. 10 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.”

So, men, let’s dispense with the idea that real men don’t talk about weakness, unless you are prepared to say the apostle Paul was not a real man. And, women, I know you are not immune to this issue either. We all like to look like we have it together. But Paul phrases the scenario as a choice. If we—putting ourselves in Paul’s position—want to be able to say, “Christ’s power rests on me,” then we need to be prepared to “boast all the more gladly about [our] weaknesses.” A person who trusts and boasts in their own strength denies the space necessary for the power of God to work in their lives. 

Backing up to 2 Cor. 4, we find Paul’s famous “jars of clay passage.” In the first six verses of that chapter, Paul is explaining that there’s nothing wrong with his ministry just because some respond negatively to the proclamation of the gospel. He uses the term for veiled to tie into his previous discussion about Moses. Moses’ face was so bright when he received the law at Mt. Sinai that he had to cover his face with a veil for others to look at him. There is a sense in which the gospel is veiled too, but that’s only because Satan veils the minds of unbelievers. 

But not so for Paul and his companions, “But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.” The treasure is the gospel. And the following verses make clear that the jars of clay are our bodies. He gives examples of all kinds of suffering that have happened to them, but how, in every case…well let me use Paul’s words, “We always carry around in our bodies the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus might be revealed in our bodies” (2 Cor. 4:10, NIV). 

If you talk about death, that’s okay with Paul because death is inextricably tied to resurrection in Christ. I might be oversimplifying, but you can’t defeat Paul because he makes his life and death all about Jesus. And Jesus has already conquered death.

I love v. 13, which in the NIV is translated, “It is written: “I believed; therefore I have spoken.” Since we have that same spirit of faith, we also believe and therefore speak…” It is hard to bring out the emphasis in English, but the final “we also believe and therefore speak” is emphatic. That pronoun “we” is not needed to just restate the quoted scripture (because it is already present in the verb). It is added to say, “WE also believe and therefore speak.” You can notice even in the English, the verb tenses change. From “believed and spoken” in the quoted passage in Ps. 115 to Paul’s restatement “believe and speak” for his present ministry. Paul can’t stop speaking about what he believes, and we shouldn’t stop either. 

If you purchase a treasure contained in a clay jar, the latter is completely unremarkable and with its only value in the virtue that it holds the treasure. Our contemporary equivalent might be cardboard boxes. You don’t buy a valuable product for the box! 

But some of you may be thinking that if my body is a jar of clay, it has been broken and can’t hold the treasure anymore. But that isn’t what Paul was teaching. He was saying that everything between normal life all the way through death is what makes us jars of clay. If it isn’t chronic illness, human frailty is still present. The most dangerous frailty is to be unaware of it. It is a terrible deception for people to think that God needs them. It is spiritual malpractice to think we are speaking on God’s behalf, when we are actually speaking on our own. 

Chronic illness and pain do not reduce our witness to the gospel even a little bit. Now we may allow it to so discourage us that we close our mouths about Jesus, but it wasn’t the chronic illness that robbed us of our voice. Yes, I know some of you have chronic illnesses that literally affect your voice. But voice of testimony is not constrained to sound waves emitted from our vocal cords. We are his witnesses and his jars of clay when we simply remain his in the midst of the storm. The more broken we are, the more we will show this surpassing glory of God is from him and not from us. 

It is possible in the early days of my chronic illness that I was too eager to speak, not about God’s faithfulness, but about my suffering. Please don’t misunderstand me. I believe we need to speak about our suffering, and sometimes we need to do this for our benefit and sanity. My point is that it took me a while to find my voice for God in this struggle. I had to learn how to be a better jar of clay. The more I deflected attention back to God’s glory and faithfulness, the more I refused credit for myself, the less I clamored for the pity from others, the more I let go of slights from people who were inconsiderate of my illness, the better jar of clay I became. And I’m still learning how to do this more and more, to be like Paul, and just make my life and my death and everything in between about Jesus. 

Conclusion:

That’s all for this episode of “In The Seams.” Thank you for listening, and I look forward to meeting back together in this wonderful space called a podcast!