One of the things that strikes me about this letter is that the apostle Paul is much more comfortable talking about his weaknesses than his strengths. He speaks openly about his tears and anxieties, but reluctantly about his special spiritual experiences.
So, what about you?
How do you want people to see you?
Do you want people to think that you have it all together? Do you hide your doubts and anxieties? Do you pretend your marriage is perfect and
your children sorted, or can you admit that you are a little messed up just
like the rest of us? Can you accept that
you are a broken person living in a broken world?
The theme that runs through this whole letter is that
God’s strength works through our weakness, and this morning we will see that it
is broken people who make the best comforters.
How
could he be a strong Christian if he suffers so much?
Corinth, which is now in southern Greece, was, at that
time, the third most important city in the Roman Empire—after Rome and
Alexandria. It had a population of
around eighty thousand. It had been
destroyed by the Romans in 146 B.C. and it had remained uninhabited for a
hundred years, but Julius Caesar had rebuilt it in 44 B.C. This letter is being written in 56 A.D., so
new Corinth is about ninety years old.
One preacher even called this letter ‘Second
Californians’, because Corinth was so like modern western culture. It was a city of sport and entertainment. There was a theatre that could hold eighteen
thousand and a concert hall that could hold three thousand. It was the home of the Isthmian games—second
only to the Olympics. In both religion and sex, it was anything goes. It was a place that worshipped self-made
wealth and power.
A few years earlier Paul had spent a year-and-a-half
planting this church along with Priscilla and Aquilla, and Timothy and
Silas. Things had not gone well after he
had left. One of the things that was
causing trouble was the arrival of some self-styled apostles. These false-teachers resonated with
Corinthians culture. They were
impressive to look at and listen to.
They boasted comfortably of supposed spiritual experiences. They had a message of health and wealth. They were just like so many of the
tele-evangelists on Christian TV.
One of their criticisms of the apostle Paul was that
he suffered so much. ‘How could he be a
strong Christian if life is so difficult for him?’ That didn’t look like God’s favour! So, Paul opens his letter by reminding them
of his unique call to be an apostle. He
was called by the risen Jesus by the will of God.
Notice that he calls this messed-up and difficult
church at Corinth ‘the church of God in Corinth’, and that he reminds them that
they are, together with all God’s people, saints (a term that he uses for all
God’s people and refers to the fact that Jesus has made us holy. If you are looking for a perfect church, you
won’t find it here. In fact, if you find
a perfect church don’t join it because you will ruin its perfection. All of the churches in the New Testament had
problems.
As was his tradition, the apostle Paul alters to Greek
for ‘hello’ so that it reads ‘grace’.
Grace is God’s undeserved and unearned favour. It is the only reason any of us can call
ourselves Christians. It begins and ends
this letter. He then adds the word
‘peace’—our peace is found in experiencing the loving favour of God. But peace does not mean that life will be
easy.
Only
those who suffer grow
The false-teachers were saying, ‘If you are on God’s
side then bad things won’t happen to you.
It’s never God’s will for you to suffer.’ The apostle Paul sees suffering as essential
to our growth as Christians.
‘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’ (3-4). Who do
you want to go to when you are going through a hard time—do you want to go to
the person whose life seems perfect or those who have travelled through their
own journey of pain? Suffering presents
us with a fork in the road—we will either become kinder and more compassionate
or bitter and resentful. Choose wisely!
He then talks about the suffering we experience as
followers of Christ. He talks of the
sufferings of Christ that flow into our lives.
This is not a reference to the cross, for that suffering has ended. Rather it is a reference to the fact that Jesus
feels the pain of His people as we suffer for His sake. As we suffer for our faith we experience a
pain that He knows all too well. We
suffer as we hold out the message of salvation to a world that is often hostile
to it.
How painful it is to have parents or children reject
you because of your faith. Jesus knows
that pain. How hard it can be to honour
God with our time, our money and our homes.
Jesus won’t let these things go unrewarded.
‘And our hope in you is firm, because we know that
just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort’
(7). How does God comfort us? Every morning Granny Jean recites Psalm 23,
‘even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I fear no evil,
for you are with me. Your rod and your
staff they comfort me.’ The various Greek gods worshipped in Corinth, who did
not care about human suffering, our God cares about our suffering. He promises to be with us in our suffering. He uses his people to care for us in the
pain. He reminds us of His fatherhood
through the Holy Spirit and, as we will see in the last few verses of our
reading he will continue to deliver us as he has delivered us before.
At
least God won’t give us more than we can handle, or will He?
‘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’ (8-9).
Do you see that, it is not true to say
that God won’t give us more than we can handle, the apostle Paul was under more
pressure than he could endure? Why would
God do that? So that we might not rely
on ourselves but on God!
Do you think
that serving God demands too much from you?
Do you fear that you won’t have the courage to stand apart for
Jesus? Good! That’s exactly what we need. We need to be in a place where our only hope
is in Jesus. Notice the role that
prayers played in helping God’s people get through times of despair. He mentions their prayers and the gracious
favour granted us in response to the prayers of many (11b). Do not underestimate the importance of
praying for those Christians who are under pressure, particularly those who are
under pressure for their faith.
‘He has
delivered us from the deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will
continue to deliver us’ (10). That
doesn’t mean that they would not die for their faith. The apostle Paul was later martyred. But as he walked through the valley of the
shadow of death the Good Shepherd was with him, and death was the means through
which he was welcomed home.
Conclusion—
I began this
talk by saying that broken people make the best comforters. That is certainly what these verses
teach. ‘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’ (3-4).
Let me
illustrate this from the life of Helen Roseveare.
‘Helen
Roseveare was for many years a missionary in the Congo. And she stayed when
many left there during the rebel uprising during the nineteen sixties. For a
while she and her colleagues were kept safe, but one day they were captured and
brutally treated for several weeks. One night, Helen herself was horrifically beaten
and raped by the leader of the gang. Now for years, Helen had rarely spoken of
that event. Understandably it was an
horrific ordeal to endure. Could God
ever use such an event for his good? Years
later, Helen was giving a talk in America. She had spoken briefly about her terrible
experiences in the Congo. And at the end
of the talk, a girl came up to her in tears. She too had been raped just a few weeks
before. And Helen was able to comfort
her in a unique way because she’d had a similar experience. Listen to how Helen reflected on that
experience. She says: "When God could have saved me from the horror, he
actually trusted me to go through the ordeal with him so that he could use the
experience later to help others ... Later that evening I thanked God again for
letting me know at least in some small measure the why of that long-ago night
in the Congo. God didn’t have to show me why he allowed the ordeal; I had
accepted it all from his hands unquestionably. But now I knew that at least one young girl
had been helped to come to terms with the shock because I was enabled to share
from my own experience. Thank you,
God." (Told by Nathan Buttery).
I am not saying that you have to go
through exactly the same ordeal as someone else in order to be of help to them,
I remember during a time of depression being helped by a guy who admitted that
he knew nothing of what it was like to be depressed. But I am sure that his compassion will have
been shaped by other difficulties that he had passed through. What I am saying when people look for people
to share with they will only feel comfortable with people who know what it is
to be broken. So, don’t worry that you
are not sorted and you have not got it together and you don’t know what to do,
God will use that to make a great comfort to others.
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