HOW GOD COMFORTS

When we define comfort the way Paul did, we soon begin to realize that God does more for us than assuage our feelings when he comforts. Within the text, Paul mentioned several somewhat unorthodox avenues of comfort.

He comforts through distress.

Verse 6, "If we are distressed, it is for our comfort and our salvation." I don't know what you're definition of comfort might be, but I would doubt that you ever thought of distress as an avenue comfort. Yet, that is exactly what Paul says. That's hard for me to accept because I'm asked to affirm the very opposite of what I have always believed to be true. How does distress spawn comfort? It seems to me that the very opposite is true. To begin with Paul would say there is a benefit to be obtained because the "sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives." (v. 5) At the very end of the chapter, he wrote some things about the benefits that come from being identified with Christ. He said in verse 21-22, "Now it is God who makes both us and you stand firm in Christ. He anointed us set his seal of ownership on us and put his Spirit into our hearts as a deposit guaranteeing what is to come." That's all good.

• It's one of the ways we know that God owns us.
  
• We know His Spirit is in our hearts
  
• The presence of the Spirit guarantees our ultimate blessing from God.

We tend to hold the view that trouble is always bad for us and that the absence of trouble is always good for us. The early Christians didn't share that point of view. Do you recall the time in Acts 5 when the apostles were jailed for preaching the gospel? Upon their release, Acts 5:41 says, "The apostles left the Sanhedrin, rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering and disgrace for the Name."

Patient endurance

There's another unorthodox avenue of comfort we need to consider in verse 6. He said that God's comfort "produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer." When Paul says "patient endurance," he was not thinking about passive acceptance of grim reality. In the part of the country where I was raised, when someone got in trouble, we sometime said to them, "You made your own bed; now lie in it." That's not what Paul has in mind.

Patient endurance is the kind of rigorous training that an athlete experiences to get in shame for a significant event. To stay on top an athlete has to keep his muscle tone, his mental attitude and his ability honed to a razor's edge. In effect Paul is saying that a Christian is a spiritual athlete and trouble is part of the training program. Many years ago I read an article in a sports magazine about the training regiment of John Landy, the famous Australian runner, who once held the world record for the one-mile run. He trained by the seacoast. His training forced him to run in the water, run through sand dunes, run up and down rugged hills. Every distance runners knows the experience of meeting the "wall" which represents the limits of one's endurance. Landy's coach kept pushing the wall back just a little further and the result was a world record. When we face adversity, may reach our limit the first time we deal with the problem, but the second time, we can push the wall back a little further. In that way suffering produces patient endurance.

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