I'm just going to start reading in verse 3. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Mercies.
And the God of all comfort. Who comforts us in all of our tribulations. That we may be able to comfort those.
Who are in any trouble. With the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.
I was thinking about comfort as I was saying and I was thinking about Why does Paul talk about comfort. What?
Like, why do we need to be comforted? And as I was thinking about this My eye was drawn to through these first 11 verses.
And Verse 4. Tribulation. And inverse for trouble. And in verse 5 sufferings.
And in verse 6, afflicted. And in verse 6 sufferings. And in verse 7. Sufferings and in verse 8 burden beyond measure.
Despaired. Verse 9, sentence of death.
Also in verse 9, dead. And in verse 10, death. And in I think that's it.
I think that's enough. Sufferings and trouble and death and despair. These are the contexts that we live in.
This is the reality that when we woke up this morning, we weren't in heaven. I don't know if you were aware of this or not.
We're not there yet and until we're there This is what, this is the form that our lives seem to, are, they take so often and this is the This we might say is the canvas that our life is painted on is trouble.
It's trying times. It's it's Its moments of weakness and failure.
And this is all of us. We can put on our best face and we can try to sort of.
Keep people out of those intimate moments of our lives but we have all failed. We have all come up short.
We have trials. We all. Even when I say that My mind goes immediately to all the ways that I've failed.
Maybe you can find yourselves going similarly like, oh yeah, that's me too.
We've all done it, every one of us. And, and, If we were really great people we wouldn't need a savior.
If we had everything going perfectly well for us Why would we need Jesus?
But, We need him because this is our circumstance. We're in tribulations. We're in sufferings.
And so this is the context. That we find ourselves in life and God doesn't just leave us there.
But he comforts us in them. He comes to us and he comforts us. So we need to be comforted because life is hard.
Life, we struggle. We come up short. And so because God is the father of mercies, The God of all comfort, this is just what he does.
This is how he meets our needs. He doesn't just say, oh, that. I'm sure that stinks for you.
And I wish that there was something that I could do, but. My hands are clean and I don't want to get messy, I'm sorry.
He does something about it. And he comes to us in our weakness, in our failure, in our trials, in our sufferings, and he meets us where we are and he comforts us.
So what is comfort? What does this mean? My, my Bible has a little note here that I wanted to share with you.
Paul uses a form of the Greek word for comfort. Periclesus 10 times in the small section. So we pointed out all of the sufferings and the trials and the trouble and the death and the sentence of death and despair.
We saw that, but we can also see in verse 3 comfort. In verse 4, comfort. I squared them in my Bible, comfort, comfort, comfort, consolation.
Is the new King James, but it's the same word, it's comfort. 10 times.
The God of all comfort, he comforts us. 10 times in this small section, this comfort is far more than a passing relief.
Or a sympathy. It pictures one who stands beside us in the midst of struggle to encourage and support.
The same root is used of the Holy Spirit, our heavenly comforter. And Divine Pericles.
So here we have. A group of people. Who find themselves in trying times. And the God of Mercy.
The father of comfort, he comes to us in those trying times and he comforts us. So how does he do this?
How does God comfort us? I was thinking about his abiding presence in our life. I will never leave you nor forsake you.
I was thinking about the Word of God that we have that tells us all the promises. That he has made about us.
All the things that he's done for us, all the ways in which he has just very explicitly said this is who you are.
You all are sinners. You all have wicked hearts. You all are your righteousness is filthy rags, like this is your condition.
Yet I love you and I love you so much that I gave you the very very best thing that I had.
My son, and this is what he did for you. He died on the cross for you since. No, like we didn't deceive God.
It wasn't like, ha, we tricked you. You thought we were better. He knew exactly what he was getting himself into.
And he did it anyway because he loves us. Because he wants us to be comforted. So he gives us the Holy Spirit, this abiding presence that cannot be taken away from us.
We have the Word of God that we can open to. At any moment of the day. It doesn't matter what the circumstances are.
We can open up the Bible and hear from God. We can hear what he has to say for us today.
We can read about his promises. We can read about what he's done, what he is doing, what he's going to do.
We have
Nate and I have a thing at work where it's how many days until you've, or like how many days since your last accident.
So he just said we're back to 0. So. Yeah, I fail That wasn't planned.
So, God comforts us. He meets us where we're at and the ways in which he does this is extensive and various and his abiding presence he provides for our greatest spiritual needs that we have.
He provides for our physical needs that we have. We have hope and we have peace and we have joy in tumultuous situations of life.
We have light and darkness. The list Just goes on and on and on. How has God met you.
And comforted you in the circumstances in which you've lived.
I can think of the trials, but I can also see so clearly the ways in which Just time after time after time.
He's met those needs that I've had and I've been comforted by that. I loved what the the Psalm 107 that Craig read this morning about you know, there's the 4 distinct sections of that.
That song that talk about, there is these people and these were their troubles and these were their problems, but then God came to them and he rescued them or he came to them and he set them free or he came to them and he met their specific need.
In a way that that it was exactly what the moment required. It was exactly what the need was. That's exactly what he did.
He didn't come to somebody who was thirsty and say, here's a new car.
He said, here's a new car. He said, here's a new car. He said, here's a glass of water, he said, here's a glass of water, right?
He met the specific need in the moment. And it was comforting to them. That was a very timely example of what we're talking about here.
So he comforts us, he does this, he meets our specific needs and This is how he does it.
But I also wanted to think about some of the psychology of, of comfort. I wanted to think about some compare and contrast.
Victims versus victors. So in the midst of suffering, we kind of have a choice on how we're going to proceed forward.
We have the option to either Take those things that happen to us. And we can become victims like these bad things happen to me and kind of like What was me?
Or We have the ability to sort of. Look at these negative circumstances and see the victory that Christ provides.
Right? We can. We can choose to sort of focus on ourselves and our failings. Or we can say, Jesus Christ is better even than the worst things that I've done.
I was trying to think of some examples of this in in scripture and I was thinking about I was thinking about the
The man who had been lying by the pool. For 40 years or whatever it was. And when Jesus came to him, he said, do you want to be well?
And the man's like, yeah, every time I try to get down there. I, you know, somebody beats me to the water and they're healed.
And so he heals them and then he meets him later and he tells him, stop living and you stop living in your sin.
And the guy goes and tells on Jesus, I'm not so sure that I think I don't know.
I think he wanted to be sick. I think he was happy to be sick. He, he was a victim, right?
I'm okay with being sick. And may that never be our attitude. May we never be content to be victims of circumstances in life and may we never be satisfied.
Just complaining and kind of grumbling about all these bad things that have happened to us. Because Christ has given us victory.
And we can We can live in the good of that. If we, if our, if our minds are fixed on him.
But if we're content to just be victims, then we're not going to experience that. Does that make sense?
I was thinking about victims and victors. I was thinking about commiserating and comforting.
I think of commiserating as sort of people kind of coming together and having a pity party. We're just going to kind of feel bad for each other because we've all had the same experiences.
And, Your team lost my team loss. Oh, like it's this, we're just happy to kind of relish.
In the fact that we're miserable.
But comforting isn't like that. We're not coming alongside somebody to say, oh, you've had these same failures and you have these same weaknesses, so do I.
Comforting is the idea of we're going to come alongside somebody and we're going to help lift them up.
I was thinking about whenever I was a senior in high school, no, I was a junior in high school.
And we were in the regional championship for basketball. And I got fouled with like 1 s left.
We are down by 3, I got filed shooting at 3, so I had 3 free throws. And I made the first 2 and I missed the last one.
And we lost. And I just kind of like sat down on the court like Darn. And my 2 best friends came up and they Each one grab one of my arms and they picked me up.
As I was thinking about this this morning, I was thinking about that. There it is. That's what comfort is.
You don't just let your teammate sit on the floor. Self-pity you lift them up you help them along we went to a baseball game on
Friday and One of the boys on the team The team was doing pretty well. It was Samuel was playing in the game and then Elijah got asked to play because he was there and they needed players.
And so they they were playing in the game and the team was doing pretty well, but one of the boys, you could just tell he wanted to get a hit so badly and he kept striking out and the third time in a row that it happened.
He went into like the dugout area and he was just, he was upset. He was a mess.
And, He's dry in his eyes and running back out on the field. And I think it was Henry Pielski.
It might not have been, but went up beside him and was just like, kind of put his arm around and was like, come on, like, where, you know, like the team mentality of like, come on, we're, keep going, we're gonna keep going, we're not going to give up
now. And like you could tell that that uplifted that boy's spirit. There it is.
It's I wish that I could have like paused that and then brought us all there. This morning and just been like, look, this is what I'm talking about.
This is it. This is what we're talking about here. A comfort and action were coming alongside each other.
We're not letting each other just sit down and wallow in self-pity. We're not allowing each other to sit down and to become to allow each other to become victims or not allowing each other to just sort of be content to get stuck.
We're coming and we're helping each other up. Come on, we can do this together.
I was thinking about
In verse 4. Where it says who comforts us. And all of our tribulations.
That, which is a sticky word. Because the onus then is that it requires us to do something, right?
He didn't comfort us so that we could. To sit on our hands for the rest of our lives and just be tickled pink that we've been comforted.
He's comforted us in our tribulations that we may be able to comfort those. Who are in any trouble, any trouble.
With the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.
We have Each of us individually experienced comfort. Different tumultuous trials and sufferings in our lives.
And in a way, this That's God's investment into us. And he's expecting a return.
Right? He doesn't just, give us things so that we can enjoy them, but he gives them so that we can liberally give them out because It was given to us.
We didn't earn it. He gave it to us. And so he's expecting that we're going to turn around and give it even more generously.
Whenever I started at ECS About a year ago, part of my welcome package was a backpack.
That was empty. And over the last year I've gone out on jobs. And I've needed things that I haven't had.
I went to a truck terminal in Indiana. And. I walked in and it was dark and smelly and There was drug paraphernalia and people had obviously been like.
Like squatting there and I every door I went through I was expecting to either find somebody or find somebody dead.
And I went into this really dark room. And my cell phone has a flashlight like everybody else's, but my battery was so hot that the flashlight wouldn't turn on.
And I thought, Flashlight. I could really use a flashlight in my bag because I didn't have one.
I carry a flashlight in my bag now. There's been times where I've needed different tools, pens, markers, equipment, whatever it is.
I don't realize I needed it until I get there and I don't have it and then the next time I go out, I have it.
Nate and I were on a roof a couple weeks ago. And he's like, oh, I needed to get a tape measure.
And I had a tape measure in my bag. I was like, I've got one. So How wicked would it have been for me to be like, sorry man.
Got to find your own tape measure. And here I had one that he could have used. You understand what I'm saying?
Like, I don't think I would have been pleased by that. I don't think they would have been pleased by that either.
But I had the tool that he needed. And he was able to use it. So the parallel that I'm drawing here is God has invested comfort into us in trials.
God doesn't waste pain. You understand that? He doesn't allow us to suffer. So that we can Just have these circumstances.
That we get through, but he invests. In us in our trials, he comforts us because he expects us to then turn around and with the same comfort that we have received comfort each other.
What have you been through that somebody could benefit from?
Jamie and I have had foreclosures. We've had, we've lived in places that we haven't want to live.
We've done jobs that we didn't want to do. When we were in Raleigh.
I was I was Essentially accused of, I don't say, I wouldn't say that they accuse me of killing somebody, but they certainly insinuated that I didn't do much to help.
And We've been through all kinds of tumultuous things, having little kids, sleepless nights, sicknesses, all these things.
And in that situation in Raleigh, It was so encouraging to have different people from the church come up alongside us and been like, yeah.
I've been there. Put the arm around me. I've been there. We've been there too.
But guess what? God is faithful. The only reason why I'm here today is because God saw me through this.
With the comfort that they had received. They comforted me. What are you going through today that you need to be comforted?
What are you going through today that you are, this is God's investment into you? So that you can then turn around and comfort somebody else.
To live this way though, we have to have an awareness of What we've been through and we have to be somewhat aware of what the people around us are going through. We're living in community.
We're a body. One part of the body can't suffer, and then the rest of the body doesn't know about it.
It's not like pain is isolated in my hand. My brain recognizes that pain is isolated in my hand.
And it changes the way that I live because if this is crippled, I can't use this hand anymore.
Does that make sense? So if my left hand doesn't function, then the rest of my body has to compensate until my left hand starts functioning again.
But we don't want to live crippled lives. We don't want to have a crippled body.
We don't want to be content to let the hand fall off and let the knees go to pot.
And our backs don't work and nobody cares. We don't want to live like that.
I don't want to live like that. I can't imagine you would be content to allow our body to suffer and just not care.
Right before the meeting started, Ruth was talking to me and she was talking about our son and just saying We're here for you and we're praying for you and we're in this together.
You know how encouraging that is when somebody comes alongside you and says you're not alone, we're praying for you, we're in this together.
That's, that's why we do this. We don't come here to congratulate ourselves because we're so good.
We do this because we need each other. We've got to come together on a weekly basis because if we don't, we suffer.
We need each other and we need to be having the experiences that we've had. Because God wants to use them to encourage each other.
Does that make sense? God wants us. Like the things that he's put you through weren't random and they weren't accidental.
They were intentional things that he allowed you to go through because he had a plan for how he wanted to use that in someone else's life.
The comfort with which you have been comforted. That is the comfort with which we are to comfort other people.
When we hide our failure. When we hide our weakness, when we hide our sufferings, We damage ourselves.
Because we don't allow other people to speak God's comfort into our lives. But we damaged the body because we don't allow ourselves to then turn around and comfort other people.
That make sense? We. When we hide our failure, we rob each other. I'm stealing from you if I am not transparent.
And say, you know what? I've been there. But let me tell you something. God is good and he brought me through.
It's not much of a body if we live individual isolated lives. It's not a body at all.
It's just. Pieces that are ineffective, they can't do anything. If you were to chop all the pieces of my body up and spread them around the room.
I couldn't do anything.
When we're cohesive, when we're living together when we're unified.
We can accomplish a great deal.
Hmm.
The tools that God has given us. At our disposal. Are for the benefit of other people. I was trying to think of some biblical examples of this.
People who went through some really bad times. And what they did with those bad times. I was thinking about King David.
Psalm 51 is the result. Of meditations. On David's adulterous relationship with Bathsheba.
And I just want to. Just take a look at a couple verses there. Psalm 51.
This is the result of adultery. How can adultery be hused to the glory of God?
It seems like it shouldn't be able to and yet because of God's great mercy. It can be.
The little section. Before verse one to the chief musician the Psalm of David when Nathan the prophet went to him after he had gone into Bathsheba.
So here it is. Plain as day. Adulterous relationship. Can be used for the glory of God.
Doesn't make sense. Have mercy on me, oh God, and then he goes into it, but then in Verse 12, restore to me the joy of your salvation.
And uphold me by your generous spirit. Then I will teach transgressors your way. And sinners shall be converted to you.
He wants to use these self-inflicted Terrible dark circumstances. He wants to use the mercy that God has given to him.
He wants to use that. To then Teach transgressors, transgressors about the goodness of God.
So that centres will be converted to you. Somebody who wasn't normally in our fellowship were to walk in today and we were to say to them The reason why we're here is because we're all really good people.
We have always been really good people and we're always going to be really good people. They would probably leave.
Why are they coming to church is probably because they have a perceived need. And they are trying to find it, find what the answer is and if we just have an illusion of self-righteousness or whatever it is, we're not going to be able to meet somebody's need.
On the I was talking with Sarah on the night of the Sailor Kids Club thing. Kayden had brought a friend and, He had a bunch of questions and she was just sitting there talking to him for the longest time.
And I was just, I was just telling her I really appreciate that she's willing to do that and she was saying how she's just seeing how good God has been in her own life and she just wants to tell other people about that and see the transforming power.
And there it is, right? It's, it's not. We're so good and and We have so much to celebrate because of us, it's because We've seen it.
We know what the truth is. God has been real to us in the trials and the circumstances of our lives.
The ones that we can't help from happening and the ones that we brought on ourselves, it doesn't matter.
God's mercy isn't like, OK, I will be merciful to things that you couldn't really control, but the things that you could control, there's no mercy, that you couldn't really control, but the things that you could control, there's no mercy there, friend.
It's a super abundant mercy that reaches us in our need. Exactly where we are.
You made a mistake. His mercy covers that too. You intentionally send, I was talking with Mark about this last week.
There's the times where we know exactly what we're doing. We go out of our way to sin and his mercy covers that too.
He meets us where we are and his comfort is exactly what we need. And, and, and David, David's talking about that here.
David knew what he was doing. And yet the mercy of God reaches him there. I was thinking about ASAP, Psalm 73.
Asf is looking out a wicked world that seems to be It seems to be going well for them.
There's these evil people who are getting fatter, who are getting wealthier, who have no health, who have no no health concerns, they have no problems.
It's going good for them. And he looks at himself and he says, I'm troubled all day.
What's the point? Why are we doing this? When I'm trying to do good I get punished.
And when these wicked people who don't care a lick about doing good. They just going on and it's Fat City.
And then he realizes that when he comes into the sanctuary of God that he understood. What the situation was.
But in verse 22 he says, I was so foolish and ignorant. I was like a beast before you, God.
Nevertheless I'm continually with you. You uphold me by my right hand. You will guide me with your counsel and afterward receive me to glory.
The comfort that he had received. He writes down and and he comforts us. You see that? He received comfort and then he passes it along.
That's essentially what the book of Psalms is. It's people who had received comfort from God, writing it down to comfort somebody else.
Over and over and over. That's what our lives should be, right? We shouldn't live lives that are isolated from each other and insulated from each other.
What are you going through today?
God is meeting you there. And he expects that the comfort that he gives you You're going to then use it to bless somebody else.
We don't want to be. Hearers of the word and not doers. If our lives If our understanding of the Bible doesn't cause us to do something, then we need to reevaluate the way that we're understanding the Bible.
Because it's It doesn't have a lot to do with. Head knowledge only, but these are marching orders.
This is how you are to live. And so our understanding has to motivate our movement.
The last person I was thinking of was Paul. In and second Corinthians later on in the chapter he goes into a great deal of the things that he's experienced.
Both the negative and the positive things. And he is very content to tell them. The things that have that have happened to me.
The the exultation things that have happened to me. I'm content to boast in my infirmities.
I'm content to boast in my weaknesses because then God's strength is magnified and glorified.
And that's what this is about. We don't want to be victim mentality. We don't want to think, oh woe is me, I'm suffering because I've gone through all these bad things.
We want to go through it with the victor's mentality of This is what God has brought me through.
This is a tool that's in my backpack now that I can pull out and benefit somebody else with.
We don't want to commiserate with each other. We don't want to just have pity parties, but we want to comfort each other.
We want to lift each other up when we fall down. We don't focus on the negative. We focus on the Lord who is able to redeem even the worst situations, things that that seem totally totally lost, totally broken.
Ezekiel. Is in the valley of the dry bones and God asks and can these bones live Ezekiel?
He says, only you know Lord. God is able to resurrect these dry, dead bones and create something.
And he's talking about the the people of Israel, the nation of Israel. But it's true.
Hopeless situations are not hopeless with God.
The comfort which we have received, we are expected. To comfort each other with. And that's my challenge to you this week.
That if you're stuck in the victim's mentality. Focus on the victory that Christ has given you.
If he's given you victory. It's because he wants you to use it in somebody else's life as well.
Find somebody to encourage and comfort this week.
Find somebody seek them out because that's what God did to us. He didn't wait for us to come to him He came to us and comforted us.
And so that's how we then ought to be living as well. Our Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word.
Thank you that you have. Comforted us in your word, you've comforted us. Through the Lord Jesus Christ that you've met all of our spiritual needs.
You repeatedly meet all of our physical needs that we have. And you don't just stop at the need you super abundantly give beyond anything that we could imagine, anything that we could ask for.
Lord, our lives are yours. Take them. Let them be ever only all for the and we pray that even the negative things that might reflect poorly on us, the painful circumstances that you've brought us through that.
We would use those for the benefit of other people because we recognize that these things that you have brought us through, you want us to use them for other people as well.
In Jesus name that we pray. Name it.