What Can We Learn From Paul the Apostle? — Owen on Paul’s Sufferings
⏱ 14 min read
You have prayed about it. You have prayed about it three times, or thirty, depending on how long it has been going on. The thing — the chronic thing, the body thing or the marriage thing or the financial thing or the long thing in the family — has not moved. It is still here. And the part that is hardest is not the thing itself; it is the slow accumulated suspicion that perhaps you have not prayed correctly, perhaps your faith is not the right size, perhaps if you were a different kind of Christian woman the thing would have lifted by now. The question what can we learn from Paul the apostle arrives, for you, with this background hum behind it — the hum of a woman whose own thorn has not left and who would like, gently, to know what the man whose thorn also did not leave learned to do with the not-leaving.
This is the slow walk. Not the heroic missionary version. The actual figure — read through John Owen’s Communion with God, the seventeenth-century Puritan book that took the inner life of the New Testament more seriously than almost any book written before or since — held next to the question your soul actually came in carrying. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries this kind of slow reading into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice. For now — read slowly. (The companion essays in this contemplative series sit at how to meditate on scripture — Owen’s method for slow reading, what is my identity in Christ — Owen on the indwelling Christ, and what does the Bible say about resurrection — Owen on the risen Christ.)
Paul, before he was Paul, was Saul of Tarsus — a Pharisee of the Pharisees, a student of Gamaliel, a man whose religious certainty had been laid down in his bones from boyhood. He was educated. He was zealous. He was, by his own later admission, the kind of certain that produces violence — and his early life had produced violence, against the very people he would later spend his strength building churches for. The road to Damascus did not just convert him. It broke the structure of certainty he had built his whole self on, and the rest of his life was the slow assembly of a different kind of self around a different kind of centre. The honest answer to what can we learn from Paul the apostle is not a list of doctrines. It is a man, watched closely, in the interior weather of a life that had to be remade after the certainty he had been carrying turned out to be against the One he had been certain about.
The first episode: the boast and the breaking
“To give a poor sinful soul a comfortable persuasion, affecting it throughout, in all its faculties and affections, that God in Jesus Christ loves him, delights in him, is well pleased with him, hath thoughts of tenderness and kindness towards him; to give, I say, a soul an overflowing sense hereof, is an inexpressible mercy.”
— John Owen, Communion with God
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Owen is naming a particular kind of mercy — the mercy of a comfortable persuasion that one is loved by God. The phrase is exact. Owen does not say the mercy of being loved by God; he says the mercy of being persuaded that one is loved by God. The two are not the same. The being-loved is a fixed fact. The being-persuaded of it is what changes a life from the inside. Paul, after Damascus, spent fourteen years before his first missionary journey learning the second one — not adding to the doctrine, but slowly receiving, in his own faculties and affections, that the One he had been persecuting was, in fact, in love with him.
This is the first thing the figure has to say to you. The pre-Damascus Saul had been certain about God. He had not been persuaded by God of God’s love for him. The two are not the same kind of religion. The first kind produces violence — toward outsiders, toward yourself, toward anyone whose obedience falls below the certainty you are carrying. The second kind produces what Owen calls communion. The pre-Damascus Saul was a man of religious certainty without communion. The post-Damascus Paul was a man whose communion had survived the wreckage of the certainty.
What we can learn from Paul the apostle, at the level of the first episode, is that the religion that has to be broken in you may not be the religion of unbelief. It may be the religion of certainty about God without persuasion of His love. The breaking of that religion can feel, while it is happening, like a loss of faith. It is not. It is the slow exposure of the difference between knowing the right things and being persuaded — throughout, in all your faculties and affections — that you are loved by the One the right things are about. Paul’s breaking was the gift. The certainty he lost was the certainty that had been making him dangerous, to others and to himself. What replaced it was the slow comfortable persuasion Owen names — the kind that does not require zealous defending because the soul that has it does not feel under threat.
For you, this is the part to sit with. If the prayers about the chronic thing have not been answered, it may be that the chronic thing is doing the slow work the road to Damascus did in Paul. Not the lifting of the affliction. The exposure of the religion underneath the affliction. The breaking of the certainty that if I do the right things, the things will go right. The slow surfacing of a deeper question — am I persuaded that I am loved by Him even now, even with the thing still here — that the easier years had never required of you. The thorn is not the failure of your prayer life. The thorn may be the slow chisel of the persuasion Owen is describing.
The second episode: the thorn that would not leave
You know the passage. 2 Corinthians 12. Paul writing, in his old age, about a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me. He has prayed about it three times. The Lord has answered — not by removing it, but by saying my grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Paul, in the same paragraph, writes one of the most surprising sentences in the New Testament. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.
The honest answer to what can we learn from Paul the apostle has to pass through this chapter, because anything less is the strong-faith version, and the strong-faith version is not strong enough to hold what you brought to the article. Paul prayed three times. The thing did not lift. He did not pray a fourth time. He did not switch to a different translation of the prayer. He did not fast harder, declare bolder, or fight off the thorn with louder affirmations. He let the answer he had been given stand. My grace is sufficient for thee. And he wrote down, for the church he was pastoring at Corinth, that he was now glad of the thorn — not because the thorn was good, but because the thorn was the precise mechanism by which the power of Christ was resting on him.
“When the soul sees God, in his dispensation of love, to be love, to be infinitely lovely and loving, rests upon and delights in him as such, then hath it communion with him in love.”
— John Owen, Communion with God
Read this one slowly. Owen is naming what Paul learned in the years after the third prayer. The soul, in the dispensation of love — meaning, the actual unfolding circumstances of an actual life — sees God to be love. Not just to love. To be love. The dispensation is the thorn-keeping dispensation. The dispensation is the financial-thing-not-lifting dispensation. The dispensation is the marriage-not-easing dispensation. The dispensation, whatever it is, is the medium through which the soul comes to see — slowly, over years — that the One sustaining it through the unlifted thing is Himself love. The unlifted thing is what is teaching it.
This is what Paul learned. Not that the thorn was a gift, in the sentimental sense, but that the thorn was the condition under which a particular knowing of God was being given to him that the unburdened years could not have given. The not-lifting was the teaching. The teaching was the persuasion. The persuasion was the communion. The communion was what every other apostle had less of, because most of them had been spared the chronic affliction Paul had been given.
What we can learn from Paul the apostle, here, is the slow turning that happens after the third prayer. Not the giving up. Not the bitter resignation. The turning toward the One whose answer was the grace is sufficient sentence — and the long living inside that sentence until, by the end of the life, it has become the most gladly will I rather glory sentence. The turning takes years. The turning is the work the thorn is doing. The turning is not optional and not avoidable; it will happen either bitterly or sweetly, and Paul shows you that the sweet version exists.
(If the long unanswered prayer has been the texture of the last season, what does the Bible say about resurrection — Owen on the risen Christ sits underneath this article as the slower companion piece.)
The somatic that goes with the unlifted thing
Pause here. The teaching has a body to it, and the body is where Owen’s vocabulary becomes most translatable to a modern week.
Sit somewhere quiet. Let both hands rest, palms-up, on your lap — the simplest posture of receiving. The hands that have been gripping the chronic thing — gripping the thing you have been asking God to lift — are now open. Notice, if you can, the small ache in the fingers and the back of the hands that comes with how much they have been clenched. Let the ache be there. Let the palms stay open. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the shoulders soften by an inch — not because the thing has lifted, but because the gripping is no longer your job. Take a second slow inhale. Stay with three slow breaths under the open palms.
Then close the hands gently and continue reading.
The hands you have just opened are the hands of the post-third-prayer Paul. The body of the soul still asking for the thing to lift is a clenched body. The body of the soul that has heard my grace is sufficient is the body whose hands are, at last, allowed to be open. The opening is not the proof that the thing has lifted; the thing has not lifted. The opening is the body’s small obedience to the answer that was given — the answer that says the grace is enough, and the asking is over, and the holding-on is no longer the work. The work is the receiving. The palms-up is the body of Paul’s late letters.
A daily companion for the slow turning
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women walks the kind of slow reading this article is the long form of — one short passage each evening, with room for the honest sentence, a place to bring the day’s unlifted thing to the page without performing wellness. Built for the woman whose questions about Paul are not academic. The 140-day form gives the practice a shape, so the page you sit down at tomorrow already has a structure and you do not have to invent one.
The third episode: the apostle in the cell
“Assure thyself, then, there is nothing more acceptable unto the Father, than for us to keep up our hearts unto him as the eternal fountain of all that rich grace which flows out to sinners in the blood of Jesus. … This will be exceeding effectual to endear thy soul unto God, to cause thee to delight in him, and to make thy abode with him. Many saints have no greater burden in their lives, than that their hearts do not come clearly and fully up, constantly to delight and rejoice in God, — that there is still an indisposedness of spirit unto close walking with him. What is at the bottom of this distemper?”
— John Owen, Communion with God
This is the third passage. Read it once at speed, then read it again, slowly.
Owen is naming the long unfinished work of the praying soul — the indisposedness of spirit unto close walking with him — and asking the question that the last decade of Paul’s life was the answer to. What is at the bottom of this distemper? The distemper is the not-quite-able-to-come-fully-up that you recognise in your own evenings of prayer. You sit down. You try to delight in Him. You find your heart half-present, half-distracted, half-tired, half-worried about the chronic thing that has not lifted. The half-presence is what Owen calls the distemper, and Paul, in his Roman cell at the end of his life, is the figure showing you what its slow undoing looks like.
Paul wrote four letters from the cell — Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Philemon. He was awaiting execution. He had no agency, no travel, no audience but the soldier chained to his wrist. The thorn had not lifted. The Roman world had not become safer. The young man he had baptised as his son in the faith was about to inherit a movement that would face decades of persecution after Paul was gone. And from that cell, the man wrote rejoice in the Lord always: and again I say, Rejoice. He wrote I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. He wrote for me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. The letters from the cell are the most luminous of his correspondence, and they were written from the smallest of his circumstances.
This is what what can we learn from Paul the apostle finally has to say. The apostle in the cell is not the apostle whose situation had improved. He is the apostle whose interior had been so slowly remade by the unlifted thing that the cell could not touch what mattered. The communion Owen describes — the heart kept up to the Father as the eternal fountain — had become, over decades, the steady state of Paul’s interior, regardless of what the exterior was doing. The distemper had not vanished; even in Philippians 3 he writes not as though I had already attained. But the bottom of the distemper had been reached by a long slow drinking from the fountain, and the cell could not undo what the fountain had built.
For you, this is the part to sit with. The chronic thing in your life is not the obstacle to the communion Owen and Paul are describing. It is the medium through which it gets built. The cell, for Paul, was where the years of communion finally showed what they had been quietly assembling. Your cell — whatever shape it takes — is the same kind of room. The interior that the long unlifted thing is teaching you to build is not given to people whose lives have been easier. It is being given to you, slowly, by the thorn that has not left.
(The sibling essays in this Bible-figure series sit at what can we learn from King David — Spurgeon on the man after God’s heart and what can we learn from Moses — Spurgeon on the reluctant leader.)
What can we learn from Paul the apostle
Three things, at the speed of the road, the thorn, and the cell.
The first is that the religion that has to be broken in you may be the religion of certainty without persuasion. The pre-Damascus Saul knew the right things. He had not been persuaded, in his faculties and affections, that he was loved. The breaking of the certainty is not the loss of faith. It is the opening of the door to the deeper kind. The breaking can feel like collapse. It is the foundation being relaid by hands that knew, all along, what they were doing.
The second is that the prayer about the chronic thing reaches a point where the answer has been given, and the work shifts from asking-it-to-lift to learning-to-live-inside-the-grace-that-is-sufficient. Paul prayed three times. The Lord answered once. Paul did not pray a fourth. The not-praying-a-fourth was not unbelief. It was reception. The thing not lifting is, sometimes, the precise condition under which the deeper knowing of God is being given.
The third is that the apostle in the cell is the apostle whose interior has been so slowly remade by the unlifted thing that the cell cannot touch what matters. The years of small daily communion build a steady state that the exterior cannot undo. The cell becomes the place from which the most luminous letters get written. Your own cell — the chronic thing, the long not-lifting — is the room in which the same interior is being built, page by page, year by year, with the One whose grace is sufficient and whose strength is made perfect in weakness.
This is what we can learn from Paul the apostle. Not a hero. A man, watched closely, in the interior weather of a life that had to be remade — and a God whose love was the deeper thing the whole way through.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor that holds the soul in proximity to the eternal fountain Owen describes, until the proximity becomes the rest.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Owen’s slow vocabulary — communion, comfortable persuasion, the eternal fountain — into a daily companion built for the woman whose questions about Paul are not academic, but personal.
