When I was a young Christian and asked to speak, I ran toward the convicting verses in the Bible. I wanted people to be catapulted into repentance. Tears of regret were my favorite sign of God’s “anointing.” While there is certainly a place for conviction–and any church that never preaches sermons of conviction isn’t fulfilling its call to proclaim the full Gospel–I now also look forward to preaching sermons of comfort. People feel beaten up. Especially parents. I’m running more excerpts from my book for hurting parents the next three weeks on the paid side, but even if you’re a happy parent whose kids celebrate you from morning to night, there is something in your life that needs the application of God’s comfort. We all need comfort in this world. So I hope that even if the main subject doesn’t reach you, God’s message of comfort will.
This chapter will follow a previous excerpt we ran entitled “God’s Comfort for Parents of Prodigals.”
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God” (2 Corinthians 1:3-4).
The best night of sleep Janice and Larry had in years came the night they notified the sheriff’s department about their son’s whereabouts and had him arrested. It was one of the hardest things they’d ever done, but they still slept well that night for one reason, and one reason only:
“We knew where he was. We knew he was safe.”[i]
Parents face excruciating decisions. Having to choose between your son’s life and his incarceration is, let’s face it, horrific. It’s the stuff of nightmares.
It’s also the price of parenting for far too many people.
It’s a price the technically childless apostle Paul also faced. Though he lived without physical children, he ached for his spiritual children. In today’s language, people would call the author of 2 Corinthians “traumatized.” My parents’ generation would say he bore the bruises of recent persecution. By anyone’s description, the author is reeling from frequent and intense brutal treatment. But in Paul’s recent sorrow, we find our hope. I don’t know if Paul is embracing the call from Isaiah to comfort God’s people or if his own dramatic events just inspired him to use the word comfort so often (nine times in verses 3-7!), but his paean to the “God of all comfort” is nothing short of astonishing. So many people are so bitter about what they’ve faced—from their parents, society, government, the church, and even God himself.
But not Paul.
What’s the big difference?
Paul knew where to find comfort. He found comfort rather than bitterness in his struggles, and he sought to spread that comfort to others, as it had meant so much to him. Deriving comfort from a life where there has been no discomfort is artificial; learning to derive comfort during adversity creates an entirely different dynamic. Life had gotten so bad for Paul that he needed comfort desperately or he would snap—and, praise be to his God, he found that God’s comfort was more than he needed.
Continue reading this blog on Substack HERE.