Strength in Weakness
Part 1
Pastor Charles Price
Now let me read to you from 2 Corinthians and Chapter 1. And if you have your Bible with you, you might like to read along with me. Or there is a Bible in the seats there, the back of the seats.
And I want to read 2 Corinthians 1:3-11. I want to talk about what Paul writes about in these verses. And over several weeks I want to look at the development of the theme I will introduce this morning that lies as the backbone of 2 Corinthians.
And it is a theme which I have no doubt will be relevant in all of our lives. It is not a comfortable theme. It is not a nice theme. But it is a very realistic theme in the fallen world in which we live.
So in Verse 3 of 2 Corinthians Chapter 1, Paul says this:
“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 have received from God.
“For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.
“If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer.
“And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort.
“We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life.
“Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead.
“He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us, as you help us by your prayers. Then many will give thanks on our behalf for the gracious favor granted us in answer to the prayers of many.”
Keep your Bible open there.
Some years ago a Jewish rabbi by the name of Harold Kushner wrote what became a bestselling book. It was called “Why Bad Things Happen to Good People”. I have no doubt many of you read it.
Kushner dedicated his book on the first page to the memory of his son Aaron, who had died at the age of 14 of an incurable genetic disease called progeria, where it leads to premature aging and normally a person with progeria dies in their teenage years, as his son Aaron did.
This book was written, therefore, out of real life pain and suffering and grief.
But the book is not really taken up with the question “why do bad things happen to good people?” Most of us have observed that it is true of course. All the time bad things happen to good people.
But he deals with a deeper issue than that. He deals with the issue of where do we find the resources to cope when bad things do happen?
He writes this:
“All we can do is try to rise beyond the question “why did it happen?” and begin to ask the question “what do I do now that these bad things have happened?”
And no doubt that there are many of us here this morning and we are living with issues, maybe of health – maybe they are long term, maybe they are temporary. We are living with difficult circumstances, we’re living in a broken marriage or a broken family, or we’re not living in that marriage anymore. We have been badly treated, unjustly treated. We lack resources to live the way that we want to live and this is a constant frustration to us.
And all of this, of course, is part and parcel of our broken world.
As I was preparing this message a couple of days ago, an e-mail came in – that little sign that says e-mails come in, but this one came in and I opened it as I was preparing this message.
And it was a note sent to me about a 3-½ year old boy who died in Sick Kids Hospital on Thursday. His parents are Christian believers. He has relatives in this congregation.
What grief to have to deal with the death of a little child like that. Why is there disease? Why is there pain? Why are there addictions that people are locked into and cannot break out of? Why are we gripped by besetting sins and areas of failure that we go back to again and again? Why do we grieve?
I don’t pretend for one moment that we know the answers to that or we can address answers to that this morning.
But I do want to talk about what Paul talks about here where he really responds as Harold Kushner was responding. Not why do these happen? But how do we cope when they do happen? Because they do happen.
And I want to explain from the verses we read in 2 Corinthians Chapter 1, but let me first just put it into context and explain why Paul wrote this letter. Paul didn’t write his letters because he had a bit of spare time on his hands and decided to sit and write something. There is always a reason why he wrote his letters.
And in Corinth, Paul, in his absence from there, had come under personal attack from some Christians. Paul had founded the church there, but these other Christians had begun to challenge his authority. They had suspected his motives; they had questioned whether his ministry was valid and genuine. In fact they said he was not a real apostle at all.
And one of the reasons why they were saying that was because they said an apostle should not need to suffer. If you are an apostle of Jesus Christ, it is an embarrassment if you are suffering and going through all the hurts and pain and grief and sicknesses that many people in the world go through.
Their idea was that part of godliness is that we transcend suffering. Now there was a reason for that kind of thinking in Corinth. It is because it was part of the culture to which they belonged.
Corinth was in Greece and in ancient Greek culture they developed a huge admiration for success, for being on top of things, for never being defeated. If you were an athlete or an orator or a soldier or an actor, then the important thing was to be seen as being successful. And so you learned how to project a high-powered image of confidence, of eloquence, of achievement, of success.
According to Roy Clements who writes a commentary on 2 Corinthians, he says there were teachers that went around this part of Greece called sophists and they held classes, mainly for young men, to teach them how to project this sense of self-confidence and to be strong and to be successful (much like you can buy DVD’s and books on the subject today, by the way, but this was a little cottage industry in those days), because the Greeks loved the idea of the hero, of idols, of celebrities, of people who are a cut above the rest of us.
They had devised the Olympic games. We are in the modern era, of course, but the original era, the Olympic games began a few years B.C. went into the 4th Century A.D. and that was one place where you could demonstrate success and accomplishment and confidence.
Nothing wrong in that in itself - if that’s the way you are successful, that’s great.
But this spirit had crept into the Corinthian church from the Corinthian culture and had created this idea that if you are going to be a leader within Christendom, you are going to be an apostle, you are going to be a pastor, you are going to be a minister, you are going to be a leader there, then you too have to portray this idea of being successful, of being confident.
And the problem with Paul was that he was not impressive. He writes about that in 2 Corinthians. He didn’t come across as forceful. He says in Chapter 10 Verse 10, he writes this: he says,
“Some say,”
(This is what some say about him.)
“Some say, ‘His letters are weighty and forceful, but in person he is unimpressive and his speaking amounts to nothing.’”
Now we know Paul’s letters so we know they were right – he was weighty and forceful in his letters. But they said, “but when you meet him in the flesh, this man is a huge anticlimax. He is unimpressive. He doesn’t speak very well. He is not the image that the church needs to be portraying.”
That was the message that was coming through.
These people that Paul calls pseudo-apostles later in this letter; they were the true professionals, as they saw it. They were strong and confident and they rose above suffering and presumably when they did suffer they dropped out of the pack because you are supposed to be above all of that.
They were also successful enough to feel they could charge good fees for their ministry. And Paul contrasts himself with that in Chapter 11 Verse 7 when he says,
“Was it a sin for me to lower myself in order to elevate you by preaching the gospel of God to you free of charge? I robbed other churches by receiving support from them so as to serve you.”
So he says, “Look, did I lower myself, humiliate myself by not charging you for preaching the gospel of God? Other churches paid me to come and preach to you. I didn’t take anything from you.”
But you see, they had their sliding scale of who gets paid what because of your expertise, and these others had become the worst type of professional Christian.
But Paul’s model was not, of course, the Greek culture or even the Corinthian culture. Paul’s model was Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ similarly was rejected by the religious hierarchy because He didn’t conform to what they perceived to be the marks of a good leader. He wasn’t educated either. They mocked Him several times.
They said to Him, (This is the Pharisees), “We are not illegitimate children.” (The implication being “but we know about the fact that Your mother Mary was not married to Joseph when you were born. We know about that. We’re not like that. No, no, we’re respectable.”)
They said of Him that He mixed with all the wrong people, tax collectors and sinners. He should be befriending the influential people and He’s not. He’s out in the backstreets with people.
When He went home with Zacchaeus – he was a tax collector – stolen from people. And they said, “If He knew who this man was, He would never have gone to his home.”
Truth was: it is because He knew who he was that He went to his home.
It was the prostitutes – it tells us that – that are going to be first in the kingdom. They followed Jesus. Not the religious hierarchy.
And Paul alludes to that in these verses. He speaks of the sufferings of Christ flowing into our lives. He says, “I have aligned myself with a man of sorrows who was rejected by others.”
But that’s okay - out in the world you can do that. It’s pretty tough in the church, and a church that he himself had founded. His ministry on his second missionary journey, he had come to Corinth. The church had grown out of that.
It was a messy church. We know that because 1 Corinthians is about a lot of the mess that was in the church in Corinth.
But now he is writing 2 Corinthians, almost on the defensive against these accusations that are being made against him. And rather than saying, “Well, you know, it is okay to suffer once in a while” – he doesn’t just come mildly like that. He affirms troubles and sufferings as not only part and parcel of life, but as a means by which we come to know God in a deeper way. That’s his message.
You see in these verses I read, in Verse 4 for instance, he talks about our troubles. He comforts us in our troubles but – that’s the word he uses – we have troubles.
In Verse 5 he says, “As the sufferings of Christ flow into our lives”.
And he talks about, uses the word sufferings again in Verse 6 and again in Verse 7.
He talks about distress in Verse 6. If we are distressed, he says there. He talks about endurance in Verse 6, gritting and bearing it.
He talks about hardship in Verse 8, about pressures in Verse 8, about despair also in Verse 8.
He talks in Verse 9 about “we felt the sentence of death”. “I was going to die in Asia” is what he means “was my expectation.”
He talks about a deadly peril in Verse 10.
You know this is a discouraging list of adjectives, isn’t it? When he says, “I want you to know and I want to affirm to you that in my own life and my own experience as an apostle of Jesus Christ, I experienced troubles, sufferings, distress, endurance, hardship, pressure, despair. I feel the sentence of death and I experienced deadly peril.”
He says, “I affirm all of these things but I want to affirm something else. It’s in these areas that I have met with God in ways I would never meet with God when the sky is blue and the grass is green and everything in the garden is beautiful.”
In fact in Chapter 11, which we will look at in a few weeks’ time, he says there that these sufferings, far from being disqualification, are actually his credentials as a real apostle, because his message there is, if you belong to Jesus Christ, you are not exempt from difficulty; you are actually equipped to go into difficulty, if you know how to bring God into those difficulties with you.
And it wasn’t just the external things. He said in Chapter 7 Verse 5, he says,
“When we came into Macedonia, this body of ours had no rest, but we were harassed at every turn – conflicts on the outside, fears on the inside.”
So we have these outward battles against us, but we have these inward struggles – fear on the inside.
He doesn’t say these were errors. (“I shouldn’t have been afraid.”) No, this is life.
And he says, “This is life - these conflicts on the outside and these fears on the inside.”
But rather than be embarrassed about them or apologetic about them, he does the exact opposite and in Chapter 12 and Verse 9 he says,
“I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses.”
Then he tells us why and we will look at that on another occasion, but “boast about my weaknesses.”
And in Verse 10 (Chapter 12) he says,
“That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties.”
What an incredible thing! “I delight in these things that you see as enemies,” he says “but I have actually discovered that weakness, insults, hardships, persecutions and difficulties have actually, with hindsight, been my friends because those are the very things which have enabled me to experience God in ways I never did when everything was easy and comfortable.
Paul then explains how he deals with this. And I want to look at two words that he uses three times. I am just going to look at the first one with you this morning. And the two words he uses are “so that”. He says, “Here’s the situation, da, da, da, da, so that…(Here’s the result) da, de da de da de da,” whatever it is.
And he does it three times.
The first one is in Verse 4, though I will read Verse 3 again because it is one sentence. He says,
“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 our troubles…”
Listen to this:
“…so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.”
He says, “We have experienced God comforting us in our troubles so that these things have become a means whereby I can minister and encourage others.
Now that involves a reorienting of our lives from the question, “what is best for me?” to the question “how does this equip me to benefit others?”
Now we instinctively live with the sense “what’s best for me?” because we have an instinct of self-preservation, which is natural and good. When Jesus said about the greatest command and the next one like unto it, the next one is love your neighbor as yourself, the command to “Love your neighbor” is on the assumption that you will already be loving yourself. You will look after yourself – we do that anyway.
Even in marriage, Paul said in Ephesians 5:33, speaking to husbands,
“Each one of you should love his wife as he loves himself.”
Because I know fine well you will love yourself, you will be looking after yourself; well look after your wife in the same way.
So that’s not a wrong thing. The instinct of self-preservation is a natural one and a good one and it keeps us alive and keeps us healthy because we look after ourselves.
But, what Paul talks about here is that this is not just about me. And if my life is just about me, I won’t understand the role of suffering in my life.
Because when I do suffer, whatever it is, whether I have been hurt in some way, emotionally, psychologically, whether I have been physically hurt, whether I have been into some kind of trouble, whether I feel captivated by something that is controlling my life; if it is all about me, my instinct will be to fight my way out - if you are a Christian, to pray your way out or to believe your way out.
But when your understanding is that my loving my neighbor overrides simply looking after myself, that in our troubles, God comforts us so that we can comfort others with the comfort we have received from God, then you begin to see it completely differently and as you deal with the struggles, it also equips us to be a source of blessing to other people.
One of the great privileges of life is to enrich other people. And looking after me first has nothing to do with the Christian life in the New Testament.
There is a verse in Romans 5:3, and again I have underlined two words in my Bible. This is what it says – it says,
“We rejoice in our sufferings…”
Now that sounds a bit masochistic doesn’t it, rejoicing in your sufferings? But he says,
“We rejoice in our sufferings, because …”
This is the reason:
“…we know that suffering produces…”
Those are the two words I have underlined: “suffering produces”
“…perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”
He is not being masochistic; he is saying, “The sufferings that come into my life are creative and productive. They create perseverance and perseverance creates character and character creates hope.”
That’s why God puts us into tough times and tough situations.
Jeremiah wrote in the book of Lamentations 3:27 – he said,
“It is good for a man to bear the yoke while he is young.”
It is good for a man to have it tough when he is young. And we parents have to let our kids have it tough. It’s good. That’s how we develop character.
When I was 16 I had a summer job from school and I didn’t like some of what I had to do in this job. And when I was given this bit I didn’t like and I was doing it and the guy who was my boss, he said to me, “You don’t like doing this, do you?”
And I said, “No.”
And he said, “Well actually that’s good for you.” He said, “Doing what you don’t like will build character.”
Well he probably forgot that ten minutes later but I have remembered it decades later.
Doing what you don’t like is good for character. Suffering produces – those are the two words. Suffering is actually productive.
Our instinct is to think suffering destroys, and of course it can and it does. But when we adopt the disposition towards our troubles and suffering that Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians, that destructive force can become a creative force, and suffering produces character and hope.
Now what Paul says here is – and I will read from the middle of Verse 3:
“The Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, comforts us in our troubles so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves received from God.”
He talks there about God as being a comforter. That is a beautiful word – comfort.
How does He comfort us?
Well let me read what David said about this in Psalm 119 and Verse 50. He said there,
“My comfort in my suffering is this: You preserve my life.”
And the next verse [52]:
“I remember your ancient laws, O LORD, and I find comfort in them.”
How does God comfort me? One of the ways is he says, “I turn to His Word and I find that in my suffering, in my trouble, in my pain, I take my direction from the Word of God. I allow the Word of God to feed my soul and to comfort me.”
Because you see, an alternative is that we allow a root of bitterness (I am just trying to see where that verse is and I can’t – I have forgotten where it is now – Hebrews 13 I think it is) He says, “Don’t allow any root of bitterness to grow up and defile many.” [Hebrews 12:15]
If we respond to bad circumstances with anger and bitterness, it will create a poison. And that poison will not just poison us; instead of the comfort flowing out, there will be poison that will flow out from that thing to other people.
And I sadly know some people who are poisonous to be around because deep in their hearts they have never accepted something, however they might justify the wrongness of it.
But instead you allow the Comforter. The Comforter is a name given to the Holy Spirit as well. Jesus, three times called the Holy Spirit the Comforter, the one who comes alongside, which is the meaning of that. And He comforts us and He makes His presence in us the reference point.
Another very practical way God comforted Paul is in 2 Corinthians 7:6, a little bit later. He said,
“But God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus, and not only by his coming but also by the comfort you had given him.”
So he says, “God comforted me not just through His Word and through His presence, but God comforted me by sending a fellow Christian to me – Titus. And Titus came along and encouraged me and comforted me,” says Paul.
That’s why, you know, our relationship with God functions in the body of Christ, which is the church.
That’s why we need the fellowship that we can input into each other’s lives - the friendships that enable people to bring alongside the comfort, the encouragement that Paul experienced from this.
But when we turn to Him in those dark times, in those difficult times, and we simply open our hearts to Him and open that area of our lives to Him, we experience Him as our comfort.
Many of you have found that in your own experience.
A few years ago when I had a heart attack, which I was not expecting and hadn’t planned for, and thought I was too young anyway, but walking along I was actually speaking at a conference. And I was taking time after the morning session to take some exercise walking up a hill. And I began to feel this sense in my chest I had never felt before as though there was a clamp either side that was being slowly tightened.
And I remember sitting on a rock, sat down, I thought you know, it was about a half a mile from the conference centre and it was down a hill. I thought, “If I run down that hill, I will probably damage my heart and die on the way. If I walk down that hill, I will probably still damage it.”
And I hadn’t got a cell phone. I didn’t know what I should do. But I remember praying and I actually wrote down a little while afterwards what I had prayed and I just checked it up a couple of days ago.
And I remember praying and saying, “Lord, if this is a heart attack, I have nothing to ask You for and no requests to make.” (I didn’t know what to ask Him for.) “I only want to thank You, this doesn’t take You by surprise and You know exactly what it happening and You are sufficient for any emergency. So thank You.”
Whether it was those exact words I don’t know, but I prayed that gist and I remember feeling an overwhelming sense of peace. I wasn’t thinking of Paul’s verse in Philippians 4 where he says,
“Don’t be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which passes understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
But I did experience the peace of God in a very deep way.
And I remember sitting there feeling a peace. And although it was dirt track where no vehicle normally travelled, a truck came down. They said maybe twice a week somebody used that track.
I put my hand out and he stopped. And I said, “I think I am having a heart attack. Can you take me down to this place, etc.” and eventually off to the hospital.
But I remember experiencing that peace in that moment of anxiety when my wife was contacted and she was told I may not live 24 hours and she needed to get to me as quickly as she could. But I did.
But nevertheless, through all of that, I experienced in that moment a sense of peace in a context I had never had to experience before, but which taught me again Jesus Christ is true. His Word is true.
And I can testify in other areas, as many of you can, to a deeper consciousness of the presence of God. When you are in trouble, when you are in hardship, when you are under attack, all these things Paul talks about, than at any other time provided you will give it to Him and bring Him into it.
You know we talk as Christians a lot about a relationship with God, but it is possible to be a Christian and not have a relationship with God. We don’t actually commune with Him and talk to Him and listen to Him and bring Him in and He is centered in our lives.
You can have a marriage where there is no real relationship, where you have become two individuals who just happen to share the same address and eventually maybe one of you will quit that. There is no relationship.
And you know your relationship and actually you strengthen your relationship best when you are in trouble. (That’s true in marriage too actually, if you allow it to be. It’s in the hard times that you come closest together.) But it’s true in your walk with God.
You see, Paul turns instinctively – “the comfort we have received from God in our troubles enables us to comfort you others with the comfort we received from God, that what God has done in me now enables me to bless you as well.”
We read earlier from the screen Romans 8:35. It’s a great passage. We will put it on the screen again. Let me remind you of it.
“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?”
Then Paul lists some possibilities:
“Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?”
Elsewhere Paul tells us he had been through all those things.
“No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”
Notice the language. Not over these things we are conquerors – in these things. In the hardship, in the persecution, in the famine, in the nakedness, in the danger, facing the sword – in that situation we are more than conquerors.
Because though all hell seems to break loose around us, within me I am locked into Jesus Christ, I am locked into God and there is the love of Christ he speaks of there, the comfort of Christ he speaks of here, the peace of God he speaks of in Philippians. These are different expressions of the presence of God within us.
And the next verse that we also read in Romans 8 – it says,
“I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
And the thing is this: we often – I don’t want to be superficial about this – we often best know His love when we are in those situations because that is all we have got, it’s all we are left with.
And no doubt Paul is writing this letter not easily, but with a broken heart over the way in which he has been sidelined in Corinth, over the way in which the foundation on which he had laid – he had built that church. But he says, “I want you to know that these hardships from you and these hardships from all around me from other areas of life are God’s tools in my life.”
You know sometimes God uses them to discipline us, to put us back on track. Hebrews 12:5 - let me read you that. He says,
“And you have forgotten that word of encouragement that addresses you as sons: ‘My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son.’”
And then he says this:
“Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons.”
In other words, He loves you and He is allowing hardships in your life because He loves you. They will discipline you.
And Verse 10:
“Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness.”
That is the end result.
“No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.”
This is the end result that we share His holiness. And he says, “endure hardship as discipline.”
Now the hardships may just be circumstantial – it’s not because of something bad in our lives, but we need disciplining even when things are going well because it perfects us.
We will look another time in this series where I want to talk about how Jesus Himself learned obedience by the things He suffered. He was made, and having been made perfect – it doesn’t mean He wasn’t perfect; it just means that there are things developed in us and created in us through hardship that otherwise are never placed in our lives.
And it is what we experience of God in our suffering that then flows out, or enables us to flow out in blessing to other people.
We have Stephen Ministers that Warwick Cooper leads, who come alongside people, walk with them through hard times and difficult times. And the people who can best walk with somebody in need is somebody who knows what that is like because “I have been there and in that I have experienced the comfort of God and can come alongside you.”
You know some of the things that God brings into our lives are to equip us for people we have not yet met who we are one day going to walk with and be a blessing to, be an encouragement to.
As Titus came in to comfort Paul – that was the human comfort – God also comforts, but Titus, the human agent, God the Spirit at work in him as well.
And that gives us a different perspective on things, that often the wounds of our lives have become the ministry of our lives. Pain, suffering has often brought us to Christ and made us effective.
When I was in Columbia ten days ago I met a couple called Julio and Vicki. A few years ago when Julio was 23 they were recently married, he became ill. They had difficulty diagnosing the illness. He was admitted to hospital and after 5 days he slipped into a coma.
He stayed in that coma for 2 months and 27 days. They were not Christians. Vicki, his wife, had heard a colleague at work talking to another colleague about God. Just, that’s all she had. The only thing was she heard this colleague talking about God.
And she said, “God, I don’t know who You are, but same my husband. Bring him out of this coma.”
Nothing seemed to happen. And then eventually she said, “God, if You will save my husband, he will serve You for all the days of His life.”
(I don’t know if you are allowed to do that on behalf of somebody else, but she did.)
After 2 months and 27 days he woke up and thought it was 5 days later. He has absolutely no awareness of those almost 3 months. And she told him that she had bargained with God that if He would save him, he would serve God for the rest of his life.
He said, “What do you mean serve God?”
They had a kind of nominal Catholic environment. “I can’t become a priest; I am married to you.”
But actually they began to pursue God. They got converted, both of them; they came to know Christ. They started a church. Their first service had 5 people – those two, their daughter and two other people.
When it says “where two or three are gathered together” that’s where 5 is okay too.
And they began to minister in their community – quite a tough community – I have been there – I was there 10 days ago.
The church grew. They had a little room that they used for their service and they grew to 170 people – there was no way they could fit 170 people. They had to have 3 services.
Then they bought a piece of land on which they wanted to build a church and they haven’t yet had planning permission for that. Plan permission will be given or denied later this month - actually in the next week now.
But they put up a tent, a bit of a makeshift tent, and they have met there for two years under this tent. Often people will stone them. They are right next to a bar that is busy on Sunday mornings and when they finish the service they go out and they pick up the drunks and help them home.
But what brought them to Christ and what gave them this compassion was that they suffered. And God has used it in their lives in a wonderful way that has now blessed many other people.
Let me finish with this. Some of you have heard of an event in England called the Keswick Convention – a Christian event. Many thousands of people come every year in July for a week – now it’s three weeks. And it’s been running for over 100 years. And I have had some involvement at Keswick over the years.
And they publish every year a yearbook in which they give some of the main talks and comment on what went on. And I picked up – I have got many of these yearbooks – and I picked up the one just the other day in my home – it’s in my study – I just picked up – from 1938.
I began to read parts of it. On the Friday morning they had a great missionary meeting. And they had a missionary from China. And in the 30’s China had been invaded by Japan. They had occupied the province of Manchuria in 1931. (This is 1938.) In 1937 they had taken Shanghai and Nanking, which was then the capital.
And a lot of atrocities were taking place and many Christians in particular were being persecuted through that time. And these missionaries – I think it was one or perhaps it was two – who reported, talked about this.
And when he had finished, the chairman invited a young Chinaman who was visiting England at the time, completely unknown at the time (though now his name is well known because his name was Watchman Nee – and I recommend any of Watchman Nee’s books – he had not written any books then).
And they invited Watchman Nee to come and pray for China. And as the yearbook says, “to pray for deliverance from the unspeakable sufferings of China.”
And Watchman Nee came to pray and the yearbook says, and I quote,
“Who present will ever forget those moments? For the very Spirit of the Lord Jesus breathed through that prayer.”
And what Watchman Nee prayed was this:
“We do not pray for China and we do not pray for Japan, but we pray for the interests of Jesus Christ in China and the interests of Jesus Christ in Japan. We don’t blame any men, for they are agents of the evil one. But the Lord reigns and the Lord is at work.”
What a perspective.
In your sufferings, my sufferings, do not pray for me, for my comfort; we pray for the interests of Jesus Christ in me. What is He doing?
The Japanese were defeated in 1945, the end of World War II. They left China, as they had to withdraw from the whole of the Far East where they had occupied territory.
Within four years Mao Tse - Tung’s revolution had taken over China, driven the existing government across to Taiwan and the revolution of 1949 brought great persecution again against the church in China.
Watchman Nee himself was imprisoned. There are stories – whether they are verified, it is difficult to know – well they are not verified, but they are stories Watchman Nee had his tongue cut out because he wouldn’t stop speaking of Christ. Eventually he died in the 70’s in prison.
If you go to China today it is hard to be accurate about how many Christians there are in China. There were about a million in 1949, but those who observe China will put the figure will put the figure anything from 70, 80 to 100 million today.
Where has the church grown 70 times or 100 times in 70 years but in the very place where some of the most severe persecution was brought against it.
It doesn’t mean that persecution always leads to revival – no. Often persecution is destructive. But Watchman Nee’s prayer – we are not praying for the comfort of China, but the interests of Jesus Christ in China. And if that involves suffering, if that involves trouble, then let the interests of Jesus be fulfilled, His agenda fulfilled.
Hindsight is a great thing. I can look back over things in my life that I wish would never have happened at the time, but you can see even when I am totally responsible, even when they are bad things, sinful things, I can see how God, in His incredible mercy, has made it something good. Not just for me because Paul’s emphasis is that the comfort I have received from God can flow out in comfort to you that we can be a blessing and enrichment to others.
I don’t know what pains are here this morning, what anxieties are here this morning, what bad experiences are here this morning, what troubles, what fears, what hurts, I don’t know.
But I do know this: nothing separates us from the love of God and nothing need separate us from the comfort of God, as we bring it to Him and say, “Lord, in this situation I ask that You will be my comfort, that Your presence in me will not only give me a security and a peace, but this very thing will become a means of blessing other people.
And that’s God’s business. And that, says Paul, is the virtue of suffering. Not, as these false apostles were saying, Christians should never suffer, Christians should be free of all these ailments. No, these are virtues that God brings to make us a blessing to other people.
Well, let’s pray together. And I want to pray for those of us here, and as I have been speaking, for many of you, there are things that have come to mind that represent your pain, represent your anxieties, difficulties, sufferings. Would you, in a moment of silence, just bring it afresh to God and say, “Lord, here it is. Here is my pain. I invite You into this, that Your presence, Your comfort, Your peace may turn this into something that enables me to bless others.
Would you give it to him?
Lord, I pray for every person here this morning. You know everything about us. You know what is occupying our minds at this moment. You know the fears within and the conflicts without that we are going out of this building to face yet again.
But we pray, Lord Jesus Christ, that Your presence, Your comfort, our ability to refer it to You, to give it to You, will be rich and deep in our own hearts, so that having comforted us, we might then be a comfort to others as You open our eyes and see how You have uniquely equipped us to walk alongside others with understanding and empathy and tenderness. We pray this in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Part 1
Pastor Charles Price
Now let me read to you from 2 Corinthians and Chapter 1. And if you have your Bible with you, you might like to read along with me. Or there is a Bible in the seats there, the back of the seats.
And I want to read 2 Corinthians 1:3-11. I want to talk about what Paul writes about in these verses. And over several weeks I want to look at the development of the theme I will introduce this morning that lies as the backbone of 2 Corinthians.
And it is a theme which I have no doubt will be relevant in all of our lives. It is not a comfortable theme. It is not a nice theme. But it is a very realistic theme in the fallen world in which we live.
So in Verse 3 of 2 Corinthians Chapter 1, Paul says this:
“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 have received from God.
“For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.
“If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer.
“And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort.
“We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life.
“Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead.
“He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us, as you help us by your prayers. Then many will give thanks on our behalf for the gracious favor granted us in answer to the prayers of many.”
Keep your Bible open there.
Some years ago a Jewish rabbi by the name of Harold Kushner wrote what became a bestselling book. It was called “Why Bad Things Happen to Good People”. I have no doubt many of you read it.
Kushner dedicated his book on the first page to the memory of his son Aaron, who had died at the age of 14 of an incurable genetic disease called progeria, where it leads to premature aging and normally a person with progeria dies in their teenage years, as his son Aaron did.
This book was written, therefore, out of real life pain and suffering and grief.
But the book is not really taken up with the question “why do bad things happen to good people?” Most of us have observed that it is true of course. All the time bad things happen to good people.
But he deals with a deeper issue than that. He deals with the issue of where do we find the resources to cope when bad things do happen?
He writes this:
“All we can do is try to rise beyond the question “why did it happen?” and begin to ask the question “what do I do now that these bad things have happened?”
And no doubt that there are many of us here this morning and we are living with issues, maybe of health – maybe they are long term, maybe they are temporary. We are living with difficult circumstances, we’re living in a broken marriage or a broken family, or we’re not living in that marriage anymore. We have been badly treated, unjustly treated. We lack resources to live the way that we want to live and this is a constant frustration to us.
And all of this, of course, is part and parcel of our broken world.
As I was preparing this message a couple of days ago, an e-mail came in – that little sign that says e-mails come in, but this one came in and I opened it as I was preparing this message.
And it was a note sent to me about a 3-½ year old boy who died in Sick Kids Hospital on Thursday. His parents are Christian believers. He has relatives in this congregation.
What grief to have to deal with the death of a little child like that. Why is there disease? Why is there pain? Why are there addictions that people are locked into and cannot break out of? Why are we gripped by besetting sins and areas of failure that we go back to again and again? Why do we grieve?
I don’t pretend for one moment that we know the answers to that or we can address answers to that this morning.
But I do want to talk about what Paul talks about here where he really responds as Harold Kushner was responding. Not why do these happen? But how do we cope when they do happen? Because they do happen.
And I want to explain from the verses we read in 2 Corinthians Chapter 1, but let me first just put it into context and explain why Paul wrote this letter. Paul didn’t write his letters because he had a bit of spare time on his hands and decided to sit and write something. There is always a reason why he wrote his letters.
And in Corinth, Paul, in his absence from there, had come under personal attack from some Christians. Paul had founded the church there, but these other Christians had begun to challenge his authority. They had suspected his motives; they had questioned whether his ministry was valid and genuine. In fact they said he was not a real apostle at all.
And one of the reasons why they were saying that was because they said an apostle should not need to suffer. If you are an apostle of Jesus Christ, it is an embarrassment if you are suffering and going through all the hurts and pain and grief and sicknesses that many people in the world go through.
Their idea was that part of godliness is that we transcend suffering. Now there was a reason for that kind of thinking in Corinth. It is because it was part of the culture to which they belonged.
Corinth was in Greece and in ancient Greek culture they developed a huge admiration for success, for being on top of things, for never being defeated. If you were an athlete or an orator or a soldier or an actor, then the important thing was to be seen as being successful. And so you learned how to project a high-powered image of confidence, of eloquence, of achievement, of success.
According to Roy Clements who writes a commentary on 2 Corinthians, he says there were teachers that went around this part of Greece called sophists and they held classes, mainly for young men, to teach them how to project this sense of self-confidence and to be strong and to be successful (much like you can buy DVD’s and books on the subject today, by the way, but this was a little cottage industry in those days), because the Greeks loved the idea of the hero, of idols, of celebrities, of people who are a cut above the rest of us.
They had devised the Olympic games. We are in the modern era, of course, but the original era, the Olympic games began a few years B.C. went into the 4th Century A.D. and that was one place where you could demonstrate success and accomplishment and confidence.
Nothing wrong in that in itself - if that’s the way you are successful, that’s great.
But this spirit had crept into the Corinthian church from the Corinthian culture and had created this idea that if you are going to be a leader within Christendom, you are going to be an apostle, you are going to be a pastor, you are going to be a minister, you are going to be a leader there, then you too have to portray this idea of being successful, of being confident.
And the problem with Paul was that he was not impressive. He writes about that in 2 Corinthians. He didn’t come across as forceful. He says in Chapter 10 Verse 10, he writes this: he says,
“Some say,”
(This is what some say about him.)
“Some say, ‘His letters are weighty and forceful, but in person he is unimpressive and his speaking amounts to nothing.’”
Now we know Paul’s letters so we know they were right – he was weighty and forceful in his letters. But they said, “but when you meet him in the flesh, this man is a huge anticlimax. He is unimpressive. He doesn’t speak very well. He is not the image that the church needs to be portraying.”
That was the message that was coming through.
These people that Paul calls pseudo-apostles later in this letter; they were the true professionals, as they saw it. They were strong and confident and they rose above suffering and presumably when they did suffer they dropped out of the pack because you are supposed to be above all of that.
They were also successful enough to feel they could charge good fees for their ministry. And Paul contrasts himself with that in Chapter 11 Verse 7 when he says,
“Was it a sin for me to lower myself in order to elevate you by preaching the gospel of God to you free of charge? I robbed other churches by receiving support from them so as to serve you.”
So he says, “Look, did I lower myself, humiliate myself by not charging you for preaching the gospel of God? Other churches paid me to come and preach to you. I didn’t take anything from you.”
But you see, they had their sliding scale of who gets paid what because of your expertise, and these others had become the worst type of professional Christian.
But Paul’s model was not, of course, the Greek culture or even the Corinthian culture. Paul’s model was Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ similarly was rejected by the religious hierarchy because He didn’t conform to what they perceived to be the marks of a good leader. He wasn’t educated either. They mocked Him several times.
They said to Him, (This is the Pharisees), “We are not illegitimate children.” (The implication being “but we know about the fact that Your mother Mary was not married to Joseph when you were born. We know about that. We’re not like that. No, no, we’re respectable.”)
They said of Him that He mixed with all the wrong people, tax collectors and sinners. He should be befriending the influential people and He’s not. He’s out in the backstreets with people.
When He went home with Zacchaeus – he was a tax collector – stolen from people. And they said, “If He knew who this man was, He would never have gone to his home.”
Truth was: it is because He knew who he was that He went to his home.
It was the prostitutes – it tells us that – that are going to be first in the kingdom. They followed Jesus. Not the religious hierarchy.
And Paul alludes to that in these verses. He speaks of the sufferings of Christ flowing into our lives. He says, “I have aligned myself with a man of sorrows who was rejected by others.”
But that’s okay - out in the world you can do that. It’s pretty tough in the church, and a church that he himself had founded. His ministry on his second missionary journey, he had come to Corinth. The church had grown out of that.
It was a messy church. We know that because 1 Corinthians is about a lot of the mess that was in the church in Corinth.
But now he is writing 2 Corinthians, almost on the defensive against these accusations that are being made against him. And rather than saying, “Well, you know, it is okay to suffer once in a while” – he doesn’t just come mildly like that. He affirms troubles and sufferings as not only part and parcel of life, but as a means by which we come to know God in a deeper way. That’s his message.
You see in these verses I read, in Verse 4 for instance, he talks about our troubles. He comforts us in our troubles but – that’s the word he uses – we have troubles.
In Verse 5 he says, “As the sufferings of Christ flow into our lives”.
And he talks about, uses the word sufferings again in Verse 6 and again in Verse 7.
He talks about distress in Verse 6. If we are distressed, he says there. He talks about endurance in Verse 6, gritting and bearing it.
He talks about hardship in Verse 8, about pressures in Verse 8, about despair also in Verse 8.
He talks in Verse 9 about “we felt the sentence of death”. “I was going to die in Asia” is what he means “was my expectation.”
He talks about a deadly peril in Verse 10.
You know this is a discouraging list of adjectives, isn’t it? When he says, “I want you to know and I want to affirm to you that in my own life and my own experience as an apostle of Jesus Christ, I experienced troubles, sufferings, distress, endurance, hardship, pressure, despair. I feel the sentence of death and I experienced deadly peril.”
He says, “I affirm all of these things but I want to affirm something else. It’s in these areas that I have met with God in ways I would never meet with God when the sky is blue and the grass is green and everything in the garden is beautiful.”
In fact in Chapter 11, which we will look at in a few weeks’ time, he says there that these sufferings, far from being disqualification, are actually his credentials as a real apostle, because his message there is, if you belong to Jesus Christ, you are not exempt from difficulty; you are actually equipped to go into difficulty, if you know how to bring God into those difficulties with you.
And it wasn’t just the external things. He said in Chapter 7 Verse 5, he says,
“When we came into Macedonia, this body of ours had no rest, but we were harassed at every turn – conflicts on the outside, fears on the inside.”
So we have these outward battles against us, but we have these inward struggles – fear on the inside.
He doesn’t say these were errors. (“I shouldn’t have been afraid.”) No, this is life.
And he says, “This is life - these conflicts on the outside and these fears on the inside.”
But rather than be embarrassed about them or apologetic about them, he does the exact opposite and in Chapter 12 and Verse 9 he says,
“I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses.”
Then he tells us why and we will look at that on another occasion, but “boast about my weaknesses.”
And in Verse 10 (Chapter 12) he says,
“That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties.”
What an incredible thing! “I delight in these things that you see as enemies,” he says “but I have actually discovered that weakness, insults, hardships, persecutions and difficulties have actually, with hindsight, been my friends because those are the very things which have enabled me to experience God in ways I never did when everything was easy and comfortable.
Paul then explains how he deals with this. And I want to look at two words that he uses three times. I am just going to look at the first one with you this morning. And the two words he uses are “so that”. He says, “Here’s the situation, da, da, da, da, so that…(Here’s the result) da, de da de da de da,” whatever it is.
And he does it three times.
The first one is in Verse 4, though I will read Verse 3 again because it is one sentence. He says,
“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 our troubles…”
Listen to this:
“…so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.”
He says, “We have experienced God comforting us in our troubles so that these things have become a means whereby I can minister and encourage others.
Now that involves a reorienting of our lives from the question, “what is best for me?” to the question “how does this equip me to benefit others?”
Now we instinctively live with the sense “what’s best for me?” because we have an instinct of self-preservation, which is natural and good. When Jesus said about the greatest command and the next one like unto it, the next one is love your neighbor as yourself, the command to “Love your neighbor” is on the assumption that you will already be loving yourself. You will look after yourself – we do that anyway.
Even in marriage, Paul said in Ephesians 5:33, speaking to husbands,
“Each one of you should love his wife as he loves himself.”
Because I know fine well you will love yourself, you will be looking after yourself; well look after your wife in the same way.
So that’s not a wrong thing. The instinct of self-preservation is a natural one and a good one and it keeps us alive and keeps us healthy because we look after ourselves.
But, what Paul talks about here is that this is not just about me. And if my life is just about me, I won’t understand the role of suffering in my life.
Because when I do suffer, whatever it is, whether I have been hurt in some way, emotionally, psychologically, whether I have been physically hurt, whether I have been into some kind of trouble, whether I feel captivated by something that is controlling my life; if it is all about me, my instinct will be to fight my way out - if you are a Christian, to pray your way out or to believe your way out.
But when your understanding is that my loving my neighbor overrides simply looking after myself, that in our troubles, God comforts us so that we can comfort others with the comfort we have received from God, then you begin to see it completely differently and as you deal with the struggles, it also equips us to be a source of blessing to other people.
One of the great privileges of life is to enrich other people. And looking after me first has nothing to do with the Christian life in the New Testament.
There is a verse in Romans 5:3, and again I have underlined two words in my Bible. This is what it says – it says,
“We rejoice in our sufferings…”
Now that sounds a bit masochistic doesn’t it, rejoicing in your sufferings? But he says,
“We rejoice in our sufferings, because …”
This is the reason:
“…we know that suffering produces…”
Those are the two words I have underlined: “suffering produces”
“…perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”
He is not being masochistic; he is saying, “The sufferings that come into my life are creative and productive. They create perseverance and perseverance creates character and character creates hope.”
That’s why God puts us into tough times and tough situations.
Jeremiah wrote in the book of Lamentations 3:27 – he said,
“It is good for a man to bear the yoke while he is young.”
It is good for a man to have it tough when he is young. And we parents have to let our kids have it tough. It’s good. That’s how we develop character.
When I was 16 I had a summer job from school and I didn’t like some of what I had to do in this job. And when I was given this bit I didn’t like and I was doing it and the guy who was my boss, he said to me, “You don’t like doing this, do you?”
And I said, “No.”
And he said, “Well actually that’s good for you.” He said, “Doing what you don’t like will build character.”
Well he probably forgot that ten minutes later but I have remembered it decades later.
Doing what you don’t like is good for character. Suffering produces – those are the two words. Suffering is actually productive.
Our instinct is to think suffering destroys, and of course it can and it does. But when we adopt the disposition towards our troubles and suffering that Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians, that destructive force can become a creative force, and suffering produces character and hope.
Now what Paul says here is – and I will read from the middle of Verse 3:
“The Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, comforts us in our troubles so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves received from God.”
He talks there about God as being a comforter. That is a beautiful word – comfort.
How does He comfort us?
Well let me read what David said about this in Psalm 119 and Verse 50. He said there,
“My comfort in my suffering is this: You preserve my life.”
And the next verse [52]:
“I remember your ancient laws, O LORD, and I find comfort in them.”
How does God comfort me? One of the ways is he says, “I turn to His Word and I find that in my suffering, in my trouble, in my pain, I take my direction from the Word of God. I allow the Word of God to feed my soul and to comfort me.”
Because you see, an alternative is that we allow a root of bitterness (I am just trying to see where that verse is and I can’t – I have forgotten where it is now – Hebrews 13 I think it is) He says, “Don’t allow any root of bitterness to grow up and defile many.” [Hebrews 12:15]
If we respond to bad circumstances with anger and bitterness, it will create a poison. And that poison will not just poison us; instead of the comfort flowing out, there will be poison that will flow out from that thing to other people.
And I sadly know some people who are poisonous to be around because deep in their hearts they have never accepted something, however they might justify the wrongness of it.
But instead you allow the Comforter. The Comforter is a name given to the Holy Spirit as well. Jesus, three times called the Holy Spirit the Comforter, the one who comes alongside, which is the meaning of that. And He comforts us and He makes His presence in us the reference point.
Another very practical way God comforted Paul is in 2 Corinthians 7:6, a little bit later. He said,
“But God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus, and not only by his coming but also by the comfort you had given him.”
So he says, “God comforted me not just through His Word and through His presence, but God comforted me by sending a fellow Christian to me – Titus. And Titus came along and encouraged me and comforted me,” says Paul.
That’s why, you know, our relationship with God functions in the body of Christ, which is the church.
That’s why we need the fellowship that we can input into each other’s lives - the friendships that enable people to bring alongside the comfort, the encouragement that Paul experienced from this.
But when we turn to Him in those dark times, in those difficult times, and we simply open our hearts to Him and open that area of our lives to Him, we experience Him as our comfort.
Many of you have found that in your own experience.
A few years ago when I had a heart attack, which I was not expecting and hadn’t planned for, and thought I was too young anyway, but walking along I was actually speaking at a conference. And I was taking time after the morning session to take some exercise walking up a hill. And I began to feel this sense in my chest I had never felt before as though there was a clamp either side that was being slowly tightened.
And I remember sitting on a rock, sat down, I thought you know, it was about a half a mile from the conference centre and it was down a hill. I thought, “If I run down that hill, I will probably damage my heart and die on the way. If I walk down that hill, I will probably still damage it.”
And I hadn’t got a cell phone. I didn’t know what I should do. But I remember praying and I actually wrote down a little while afterwards what I had prayed and I just checked it up a couple of days ago.
And I remember praying and saying, “Lord, if this is a heart attack, I have nothing to ask You for and no requests to make.” (I didn’t know what to ask Him for.) “I only want to thank You, this doesn’t take You by surprise and You know exactly what it happening and You are sufficient for any emergency. So thank You.”
Whether it was those exact words I don’t know, but I prayed that gist and I remember feeling an overwhelming sense of peace. I wasn’t thinking of Paul’s verse in Philippians 4 where he says,
“Don’t be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which passes understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
But I did experience the peace of God in a very deep way.
And I remember sitting there feeling a peace. And although it was dirt track where no vehicle normally travelled, a truck came down. They said maybe twice a week somebody used that track.
I put my hand out and he stopped. And I said, “I think I am having a heart attack. Can you take me down to this place, etc.” and eventually off to the hospital.
But I remember experiencing that peace in that moment of anxiety when my wife was contacted and she was told I may not live 24 hours and she needed to get to me as quickly as she could. But I did.
But nevertheless, through all of that, I experienced in that moment a sense of peace in a context I had never had to experience before, but which taught me again Jesus Christ is true. His Word is true.
And I can testify in other areas, as many of you can, to a deeper consciousness of the presence of God. When you are in trouble, when you are in hardship, when you are under attack, all these things Paul talks about, than at any other time provided you will give it to Him and bring Him into it.
You know we talk as Christians a lot about a relationship with God, but it is possible to be a Christian and not have a relationship with God. We don’t actually commune with Him and talk to Him and listen to Him and bring Him in and He is centered in our lives.
You can have a marriage where there is no real relationship, where you have become two individuals who just happen to share the same address and eventually maybe one of you will quit that. There is no relationship.
And you know your relationship and actually you strengthen your relationship best when you are in trouble. (That’s true in marriage too actually, if you allow it to be. It’s in the hard times that you come closest together.) But it’s true in your walk with God.
You see, Paul turns instinctively – “the comfort we have received from God in our troubles enables us to comfort you others with the comfort we received from God, that what God has done in me now enables me to bless you as well.”
We read earlier from the screen Romans 8:35. It’s a great passage. We will put it on the screen again. Let me remind you of it.
“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?”
Then Paul lists some possibilities:
“Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?”
Elsewhere Paul tells us he had been through all those things.
“No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”
Notice the language. Not over these things we are conquerors – in these things. In the hardship, in the persecution, in the famine, in the nakedness, in the danger, facing the sword – in that situation we are more than conquerors.
Because though all hell seems to break loose around us, within me I am locked into Jesus Christ, I am locked into God and there is the love of Christ he speaks of there, the comfort of Christ he speaks of here, the peace of God he speaks of in Philippians. These are different expressions of the presence of God within us.
And the next verse that we also read in Romans 8 – it says,
“I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
And the thing is this: we often – I don’t want to be superficial about this – we often best know His love when we are in those situations because that is all we have got, it’s all we are left with.
And no doubt Paul is writing this letter not easily, but with a broken heart over the way in which he has been sidelined in Corinth, over the way in which the foundation on which he had laid – he had built that church. But he says, “I want you to know that these hardships from you and these hardships from all around me from other areas of life are God’s tools in my life.”
You know sometimes God uses them to discipline us, to put us back on track. Hebrews 12:5 - let me read you that. He says,
“And you have forgotten that word of encouragement that addresses you as sons: ‘My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son.’”
And then he says this:
“Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons.”
In other words, He loves you and He is allowing hardships in your life because He loves you. They will discipline you.
And Verse 10:
“Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness.”
That is the end result.
“No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.”
This is the end result that we share His holiness. And he says, “endure hardship as discipline.”
Now the hardships may just be circumstantial – it’s not because of something bad in our lives, but we need disciplining even when things are going well because it perfects us.
We will look another time in this series where I want to talk about how Jesus Himself learned obedience by the things He suffered. He was made, and having been made perfect – it doesn’t mean He wasn’t perfect; it just means that there are things developed in us and created in us through hardship that otherwise are never placed in our lives.
And it is what we experience of God in our suffering that then flows out, or enables us to flow out in blessing to other people.
We have Stephen Ministers that Warwick Cooper leads, who come alongside people, walk with them through hard times and difficult times. And the people who can best walk with somebody in need is somebody who knows what that is like because “I have been there and in that I have experienced the comfort of God and can come alongside you.”
You know some of the things that God brings into our lives are to equip us for people we have not yet met who we are one day going to walk with and be a blessing to, be an encouragement to.
As Titus came in to comfort Paul – that was the human comfort – God also comforts, but Titus, the human agent, God the Spirit at work in him as well.
And that gives us a different perspective on things, that often the wounds of our lives have become the ministry of our lives. Pain, suffering has often brought us to Christ and made us effective.
When I was in Columbia ten days ago I met a couple called Julio and Vicki. A few years ago when Julio was 23 they were recently married, he became ill. They had difficulty diagnosing the illness. He was admitted to hospital and after 5 days he slipped into a coma.
He stayed in that coma for 2 months and 27 days. They were not Christians. Vicki, his wife, had heard a colleague at work talking to another colleague about God. Just, that’s all she had. The only thing was she heard this colleague talking about God.
And she said, “God, I don’t know who You are, but same my husband. Bring him out of this coma.”
Nothing seemed to happen. And then eventually she said, “God, if You will save my husband, he will serve You for all the days of His life.”
(I don’t know if you are allowed to do that on behalf of somebody else, but she did.)
After 2 months and 27 days he woke up and thought it was 5 days later. He has absolutely no awareness of those almost 3 months. And she told him that she had bargained with God that if He would save him, he would serve God for the rest of his life.
He said, “What do you mean serve God?”
They had a kind of nominal Catholic environment. “I can’t become a priest; I am married to you.”
But actually they began to pursue God. They got converted, both of them; they came to know Christ. They started a church. Their first service had 5 people – those two, their daughter and two other people.
When it says “where two or three are gathered together” that’s where 5 is okay too.
And they began to minister in their community – quite a tough community – I have been there – I was there 10 days ago.
The church grew. They had a little room that they used for their service and they grew to 170 people – there was no way they could fit 170 people. They had to have 3 services.
Then they bought a piece of land on which they wanted to build a church and they haven’t yet had planning permission for that. Plan permission will be given or denied later this month - actually in the next week now.
But they put up a tent, a bit of a makeshift tent, and they have met there for two years under this tent. Often people will stone them. They are right next to a bar that is busy on Sunday mornings and when they finish the service they go out and they pick up the drunks and help them home.
But what brought them to Christ and what gave them this compassion was that they suffered. And God has used it in their lives in a wonderful way that has now blessed many other people.
Let me finish with this. Some of you have heard of an event in England called the Keswick Convention – a Christian event. Many thousands of people come every year in July for a week – now it’s three weeks. And it’s been running for over 100 years. And I have had some involvement at Keswick over the years.
And they publish every year a yearbook in which they give some of the main talks and comment on what went on. And I picked up – I have got many of these yearbooks – and I picked up the one just the other day in my home – it’s in my study – I just picked up – from 1938.
I began to read parts of it. On the Friday morning they had a great missionary meeting. And they had a missionary from China. And in the 30’s China had been invaded by Japan. They had occupied the province of Manchuria in 1931. (This is 1938.) In 1937 they had taken Shanghai and Nanking, which was then the capital.
And a lot of atrocities were taking place and many Christians in particular were being persecuted through that time. And these missionaries – I think it was one or perhaps it was two – who reported, talked about this.
And when he had finished, the chairman invited a young Chinaman who was visiting England at the time, completely unknown at the time (though now his name is well known because his name was Watchman Nee – and I recommend any of Watchman Nee’s books – he had not written any books then).
And they invited Watchman Nee to come and pray for China. And as the yearbook says, “to pray for deliverance from the unspeakable sufferings of China.”
And Watchman Nee came to pray and the yearbook says, and I quote,
“Who present will ever forget those moments? For the very Spirit of the Lord Jesus breathed through that prayer.”
And what Watchman Nee prayed was this:
“We do not pray for China and we do not pray for Japan, but we pray for the interests of Jesus Christ in China and the interests of Jesus Christ in Japan. We don’t blame any men, for they are agents of the evil one. But the Lord reigns and the Lord is at work.”
What a perspective.
In your sufferings, my sufferings, do not pray for me, for my comfort; we pray for the interests of Jesus Christ in me. What is He doing?
The Japanese were defeated in 1945, the end of World War II. They left China, as they had to withdraw from the whole of the Far East where they had occupied territory.
Within four years Mao Tse - Tung’s revolution had taken over China, driven the existing government across to Taiwan and the revolution of 1949 brought great persecution again against the church in China.
Watchman Nee himself was imprisoned. There are stories – whether they are verified, it is difficult to know – well they are not verified, but they are stories Watchman Nee had his tongue cut out because he wouldn’t stop speaking of Christ. Eventually he died in the 70’s in prison.
If you go to China today it is hard to be accurate about how many Christians there are in China. There were about a million in 1949, but those who observe China will put the figure will put the figure anything from 70, 80 to 100 million today.
Where has the church grown 70 times or 100 times in 70 years but in the very place where some of the most severe persecution was brought against it.
It doesn’t mean that persecution always leads to revival – no. Often persecution is destructive. But Watchman Nee’s prayer – we are not praying for the comfort of China, but the interests of Jesus Christ in China. And if that involves suffering, if that involves trouble, then let the interests of Jesus be fulfilled, His agenda fulfilled.
Hindsight is a great thing. I can look back over things in my life that I wish would never have happened at the time, but you can see even when I am totally responsible, even when they are bad things, sinful things, I can see how God, in His incredible mercy, has made it something good. Not just for me because Paul’s emphasis is that the comfort I have received from God can flow out in comfort to you that we can be a blessing and enrichment to others.
I don’t know what pains are here this morning, what anxieties are here this morning, what bad experiences are here this morning, what troubles, what fears, what hurts, I don’t know.
But I do know this: nothing separates us from the love of God and nothing need separate us from the comfort of God, as we bring it to Him and say, “Lord, in this situation I ask that You will be my comfort, that Your presence in me will not only give me a security and a peace, but this very thing will become a means of blessing other people.
And that’s God’s business. And that, says Paul, is the virtue of suffering. Not, as these false apostles were saying, Christians should never suffer, Christians should be free of all these ailments. No, these are virtues that God brings to make us a blessing to other people.
Well, let’s pray together. And I want to pray for those of us here, and as I have been speaking, for many of you, there are things that have come to mind that represent your pain, represent your anxieties, difficulties, sufferings. Would you, in a moment of silence, just bring it afresh to God and say, “Lord, here it is. Here is my pain. I invite You into this, that Your presence, Your comfort, Your peace may turn this into something that enables me to bless others.
Would you give it to him?
Lord, I pray for every person here this morning. You know everything about us. You know what is occupying our minds at this moment. You know the fears within and the conflicts without that we are going out of this building to face yet again.
But we pray, Lord Jesus Christ, that Your presence, Your comfort, our ability to refer it to You, to give it to You, will be rich and deep in our own hearts, so that having comforted us, we might then be a comfort to others as You open our eyes and see how You have uniquely equipped us to walk alongside others with understanding and empathy and tenderness. We pray this in Jesus’ name, Amen.