Do you know that the thing is driving you crazy is being constructed to produce something that is an incredible value?

Dr. Tony Evans talks about the Apostle Paul's thorn and the flesh and why God sometimes refuses to remove our affliction.

God allows us to have thorns because of his purpose for using us.

This is the alternative with Dr. Tony Evans, author, speaker, senior pastor of Oaklef Bible Fellowship in Dallas, Texas and president of the Urban Alternative.

When something hurts, we want to make it stop, but sometimes that's a mistake.

Let's join Dr. Evans as he explains why things that seem to wear us down can really be building us up.

Most of the ladies have pearls. Those pearls that go around your neck or your wrist were born out of affliction.

They were born out of affliction.

They look nice now, but if you could have seen them when they were being constructed, they were constructed in affliction.

You see, the oyster or the clam in which that pearl was formed had something far and enter into its world.

Something unplanned, unanticipated and uninvited that made its way inside of its shell creating an irritation.

It may have been a grain of sand or some foreign insect of some kind that abides in the sea.

Some particle, what an unexpected, what an anticipated, what an asshole, what an desired, it was just there.

And it created an irritation.

And the irritation would not go away. It would not remove itself. It lodged itself in this shell creature.

Because the oyster and the clam was not able to remove the problem, it had to come up with a way to cope with it.

It coped with it, was to secrete naked. Naked is a substance, sort of white, creamy, milky substance that is lodged in the membrane of the shell creatures.

And it began to cope the foreign object, began to code it.

The purpose of the coding was to deal with the irritation.

It secreded something to try to help it to live with what it couldn't get rid of.

It said, well, it wasn't able to get rid of it. So it had to find a way to live with it because it wouldn't go away.

And so it was coded, encoded, encoded, encoded, over and over again.

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