The God of All Comfort

We live in a world of great beauty, and God has designed us to recognize it and to follow its direction to himself.

But we also live in a world of great evil, misery, and suffering, and each generation is called to struggle with the balance we must find between the beauty and the good, the evil and the ugliness.

As Christians, we live in the now and the not yet, redeemed but looking toward redemption, adopted as sons and daughters yet looking forward to the fulfillment of that adoption.

And we live as redeemed creatures indwelt amazingly by the very same spirit that raised

Jesus from the dead. We live a spiritual life in this physical world, and how we understand the world around us should be determined by our consistent, spirit -actuated application of divine truths mined from the pages of Scripture.

Christians suffer in this world just as everyone else, but our suffering has a different purpose and end.

God has ordained that we are to be changed throughout the course of our lives, conformed to the image of Christ, our

Lord, our Savior, and our example. As he suffered, so we suffer. As he patiently bore that suffering in doing the will of the

Father, so we are called to walk in his footsteps, empowered by his

Spirit. Scripture put it this way, For just as the sufferings of Christ are ours in abundance, so also our comfort is abundant through Christ.

But if we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation. Or if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which is effective in the patient enduring of the same sufferings which we also suffer.

And our hope for you is firmly grounded, knowing that as you are sharers of our sufferings, so also you are sharers of our comfort.

These words were first speaking of the sufferings of the apostles, but clearly tell us that in the coming generations, this would be the pattern.

When we suffer, we look to the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort. God is the ultimate source of our comfort, for he is merciful even in the process of trying us and purging us of our impurities.

But his purpose is even greater than this, for we then are used by the Spirit in the

Father's plan to then be used by him to comfort others who are likewise suffering in the body.

This means that many times, part of the reason of our suffering, our trials, our deep hurts, is to be found in the promise of God, that he will use us to comfort someone in the future who is enduring the same trial.

Of course, this requires a foundational understanding of the reality that God is accomplishing his decree, his purpose in this creation, and that it is right and proper for him to cause us to walk through deep valleys of darkness so as to make us more like Jesus in the end.

We must trust that he is in fact the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, and in that trust we come to appreciate his blessing us with our part in the body, our part in the fulfillment of his eternal purposes.

Our sufferings glorify him, make us like Jesus, and cause us to be a blessing to our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ.

We can rejoice, even in the midst of the deepest sorrows, when we have come to understand through patient endurance, through a life of service and faith, for just as the sufferings of Christ are ours in abundance, so also our comfort is abundant through Christ.