Look Up #1 - Look Up for Comfort
Message Description
Senior Pastor Dr. Kurt Bjorklund starts the Look Up message series asking Christians to look up for comfort.
Message Transcript
Well, we are starting a new series today that we're calling Look Up. let's take a moment and pray and then we'll jump into today. God, thank you for each person who's gathered here, over all the locations this weekend, and people watching online who will listen later. Lord, I pray that you will speak. I pray that whatever we're bringing, wherever we're coming from, that my words will reflect your word in content, tone, and in emphasis. And we pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Let me start by asking you this question: when you look at our culture, are you encouraged by what's going on? Now I ask that question, and I would guess that there are some of you who say, yeah, actually there's a lot of good things happening in our world, but most people, it seems today, seem to fall on the discouraged side of it. And it really doesn't matter how you see politics or the economy or whatever, there tends to be a sense of saying things are not getting better. And I'm somewhat disheartened with the direction of things in our world.
So, let me ask you this. Are you encouraged overall with what you see happening in the church? Now, I don't necessarily mean Orchard Hill. I mean the church, because sometimes at Orchard Hill, when we're adding locations and things are going well, it's hard to see the national trends. But the national trends say that there are fewer people attending church than ever before and that the church has less and less of a voice into its culture than it's had. So, many people would say, I'm pretty disheartened with the church.
So, let me ask you this. Are you encouraged with what's happening in your life or do you feel like there are some things that you wish were different or some things that you thought would be going better at this exact moment in your life? Well, we're beginning a series that we're calling Look Up, and we're studying the book of Second Corinthians over the next couple of months. And any time that we start a series, especially a long series through a book, one of the questions I ask myself is, why are we studying this book? Why now? And if you've been around Orchard Hill, you know that a couple of years ago we started First Corinthians and we worked our way through the entire book of First Corinthians. It took about a year and a half, and so you could simply answer that question by saying, well, Second Corinthians comes after First Corinthians. So, if we did First Corinthians, we should do second Corinthians. But that wouldn't be a very compelling reason to study it.
And then as I was looking at it, I realized that in all my years of teaching in church, I've never taught through the book of Second Corinthians consecutively. I don't think I've ever sat through a study where somebody else taught it. I tell you this because that makes me a little nervous, because there's usually a reason why people don't go through whole books, because they say that there's some material here that isn't necessarily helpful in terms of how we're going to live life. There's a reason that Deuteronomy isn't like the hot book to study, and there's a reason why in some ways people don't study Second Corinthians, and some of it is because there's a lot of autobiographical material here where Paul is defending himself and he's talking about his ministry. But I think when we understand what was happening, we can see that this book is really about encouragement.
Now, Corinth was a city that had a strategic location. Here's a map. This is modern day Greece. It was called Achaea at the time, and Corinth sat between two bodies of water. So, the darker brown is water, and lighter color is landmass. And you can see where Corinth is. There's a place here where ships could go through and not have to go all the way down around the bottom of that landmass and come back up and around, saving them months, and in some cases of a voyage, saving a lot of money.
And so, what that meant is that Corinth became this economically prosperous, cosmopolitan kind of city. In other words, it was full of people from different cultures. It had wealth, it had education, it had everything going for it. And the church in Corinth is who Paul wrote to. And you could say, and I'll come back to this, that the church, in a sense, was compromised in Corinth and that the culture was confused.
That's what some people would say about our world, that the culture is confused and the church is compromised. In fact, if you look at how and why he came to write Second Corinthians, here's what we see. First, he visited Corinth, and he spent about 18 months in Corinth. This is said in Acts 18:11. Then Apollos became the leader of the church in Corinth, Acts 18:29-19:1. And while Paul was on his third missionary journey, he stayed in Ephesus and he wrote a letter to Corinth, which we do not have contained in our New Testament. This is told in Acts 20, verse 31, and First Corinthians 5:9.
Then he wrote a second letter to the Church of Corinth, which is our First Corinthians. This is First Corinthians 1:11. And this was a corrective letter where he was dealing with the problems in the church. And then he visited Corinth, and he called this his painful visit, Second Corinthians, chapter two, verse one. Then on a third letter to the church, he called it his severe letter he wrote from being in Ephesus, Second Corinthians chapter two, verses three through four, chapter seven, verse eight. And then he wrote his fourth letter to the church at Corinth, Second Corinthians while he was in Macedonia, and then he visited again in Acts 20, verse three.
So, you got it? Now you may say, why did you show us that? What does that have to do with anything? Sometimes people say we want more information, more depth to what happens. But information isn't depth, by the way. Depth comes from things that help us connect dots and be transformed. It's when our thinking and our worship and our affections are changed. And sometimes information is a way that we use to hide the need to change. Because we say, if I feel like I got information, then I got enough.
But having said that, what's important about that information is this, and that is First Corinthians was written as a corrective. Here's what you're doing wrong as a church. Paul had this painful visit and now he writes this letter to encourage them. This is why I started with the encouragement question. He wrote to say, I want you to have a sense of encouragement. In fact, in First Corinthians chapter one verses 1 through 11, nine different times, he uses the word comfort from an NIV, which is what we use to teach from here.
In a sense, you could say that a lot of the people who were in Corinth were asking the question, is this worth it to do this church thing, to be a follower of Jesus? I'm not sure it's worth it. And Paul writes to say, I want you to know that even though the church has some failings and there are some problems, it is worth it. And I want to encourage you to stay engaged because it is God's way of working. In fact, the way that he starts this passage affirms this. Here's what he says, Second Corinthians, chapter one, verse one. He says, “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother.” And then he says this, “To the church of God.” In the original language, that's a genitive. And what that means is that it means that it could be translated as the church that belongs to God or the church that originated with God.
What he was doing as he starts this letter is he's saying, look, I know that you feel like your culture is winning and the church is compromised but I want you to know that the church you're part of God owns it, and God initiated it. And what that means is, even today in our culture, if you look around and you say the church is compromised, the church is full of flaws and problems and issues and everything else, it's still God's instrument in the world.
And then he says this to start. Verse three says, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort.” So, he worships. He turns, he says, I want you to praise God. And then he begins to talk about comfort. And because comfort is mentioned nine times, I don't think it's a jump to say this is what this passage is about. And so, what I'd like to do is I'd like to talk about this under three different headings. First, the need for comfort, then the resource for comfort, and then finally, the responsibility of comfort.
So first, the need for comfort. I realize I don't need to spend a long time on this because I know that in any gathering and then over the different gatherings in Orchard Hill, people watching later online, that all of us have a story and the need for comfort is that place where you say, there's something in my life that I wish were different. Here's what I know probably about almost everybody is almost nobody I know says everything in my life is exactly as I want it to be. That there is some place where we say, I wish I wasn't as alone in this season of my life. I wish that we had been able to get pregnant. I wish that I didn't have this physical challenge. I wish I hadn't experienced this loss. I wish that my economic situation was different. I wish that I had more success in my career, and I feel stuck in a place that I don't love. Or I wish that there hadn't been this relational breakdown that took place. And we could go around this room or any room, and if we all shared what we wish were different, we would be shocked in some ways by the depths of the hurt.
And what we see is that Paul was no stranger to this. The Apostle Paul, chosen by God to do the work of God, says this about his experience. Verse eight. He says, “We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself.”
There are three different descriptions of his hardship. He says that he had troubles. The ESV translates this as affliction, and it's a common Greek word that means pressure to be squeezed. It means no when things are hard and you're feeling pressure. And then he says this. He says we're under great pressure. The ESV translates a different phrase with the word pressure, which confuses it a little bit.
But the ESV says it this way. It says we were burdened beyond our strength. This means to be under something that you can't fully support the weight of. So, if you've ever tried to move a washing machine by yourself and you've lifted it up and you said, I can't hold it much longer, and then it goes down. That's the idea of this. He says I was feeling squeezed and then I'm feeling crushed. And then what does he say? He says, even to the point of despairing of life itself, the apostle Paul, chosen by God to do the work of God, says, I felt incredible pressure. I felt burdened. I even despaired of life. See, the need for comfort exists for all of us.
If you were in Wexford last weekend or watched it online, Dr. Terry Thomas gave the message. And as he was giving his message, Terry sometimes goes long. I don't know if you knew that. And so, let me let me see if I can summarize Terry's message really quickly. It was God's sovereign. There are some hard things that happen in life. We don't have an easy answer for like all the reasons that God may allow some hardship. And so, I'm going to simply say, I don't know, let's close in prayer. That was Terry's message last weekend. And so, that that was for Terry right there. Now, here's what he was saying. And it was really brilliantly done in the sense of of you kind of built up to this moment. And he said, I don't know, because there's no easy answer.
But as I was reading and preparing for this, I was reading a commentary by a man named John MacArthur, who pastors a church in California and has written a lot of books. And when he came to this passage about comfort, his first impulse was to say, let me give you nine reasons why God allows hard things, bad things to happen to his people. And he goes through, and he gives a list of nine and gives different scripture. Let me just give you a couple of these. Here's what he says.
So this is the opposite approach. Terry says, I don't know. John MacArthur says, I know. And I'm going to tell you, okay, here's what John MacArthur says. He says, God allows bad things to happen to his people, to test the validity of their faith. And he gives some scripture. God allows bad things to happen or hard things to happen to his people, to wean us from our love for the world. God allows bad things to happen to his people, to reveal what they really love. In other words, to show that you don't love God as fully as you can.
Now, I read through his list and like I said, there were nine of them. I looked up the scriptures and I thought, yeah, there's truth to that. But it left me cold. I mean, cold emotionally. And here's why. If you're in the middle of something, having somebody tell you that God's trying to reveal that you don't love him fully or that God's going to do something, it isn't necessarily helpful in the moment. What you need is what we're told that God does here. He said to be the God of comfort and the need isn't to be told a reason. It's to experience comfort.
And here's this word comfort, appears nine times in the NIV, and it's a hard word to translate. It's the word “paraclesis.“ It's the same base word that appears in John to talk about the Holy Spirit. If you've ever read through John, it talks about the comforter will come, some versions say the advocate or the helper. The reason there's so many translations of that is the word “paraclete” is because the Holy Spirit is a comforter, a helper, and advocate. All of those words are needed to translate that word, and it's the same base word that's here. But instead of being about the comforter, it's God is the God of comfort.
In fact, you could say that this word, if you were to look it up in a lexicon, could be translated as comfort. It could be translated as encouragement. It could be translated as come alongside. It could be translated as exhortation. It could be translated as practical help. Gary Millar, in his little commentary on Second Corinthians, says that this way, “That this word involves everything from an arm around the shoulder to a kick in the pants.” And Kenneth Wuest, his translation consistently translates this word consolation and encouragement.
And here's the point. The apostle Paul, feeling the pressure, I can't handle one more thing, crushed, I'm being weighed under to a point where I can't lift it anymore, and despairing of life itself says there's a God who brings paraclesis. He comes alongside me, he comforts me, and he gives me what I need. All of us have a story, a place where that's a longing of us. So that's the need.
Now, there's the resource for comfort. And this is simple. It just simply says the God of comfort. Here's how it reads. Verse three, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort.” And I would suggest this, and that is when we experience comfort that isn't divine, that doesn't come from God, it ultimately ends up being shallow.
A few years ago, there was a song that had taken a cliche and made a song of it that people would go around singing. Maybe you remember this. The song was basically this, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And you hear people sing that and you think, really? So as long as it beats death, it makes you stronger. And that's good? That's kind of a shallow take. Or how about this? Some people will say, well, you know, I got a bunch of lemons, I'm just going to make lemonade. And you say, that's not very comforting. But here, it's there's a God of compassion. Verse three, some translations say mercies. This is a unique word that means to relieve sorrow, to be empathetic. Then it's the God of comfort, paraclesis, the God who will come alongside you, who will work with you, who will encourage you, and exhorts you. And then verse ten, He's the God who delivers.
And so, we have this God who knows, who supports, and who will ultimately deliver. And if you've trusted Jesus Christ as your Savior, then you've come to a point where God has delivered you from the consequences of sin and given you eternal life. And it's this God who says, I will deliver you, I will comfort you, and I will walk with you in the midst of what you're going through.
And sometimes God uses people. Certainly, God gives His comfort. When we read Scripture, when we worship, sometimes it's a supernatural sense of his comfort. But often the way God works is through people. And we see this because he says, “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.” And then He talks about sharing in the suffering so that we can share in the comfort. And he talks about how they had prayed for him and how much that means. And what that means is that we need sometimes to experience God's goodness through community, through people.
There was a girl once I heard about who was feeling lonely. She was in school and she was sitting by herself and one of her friends came over and said, can I hang out? I just want to be alone. I feel lonely and I just want to be alone, which, by the way, that's counterproductive. And her friend said, well, that's okay. I'm just going to sit here with you and we can be alone together. And sometimes what we need is somebody who will be that presence of God and to experience God through people in our lives. So, there's this need for comfort. There's the resource of comfort.
And by the way, before we move off of this. Notice that this text does not tell us exactly how to experience it. It just tells us that God is the God of comfort. I mean, this would be a lot easier if it were here are three steps on how you can access this God of comfort. But it doesn't do that. It just says He is the God of comfort. And what that likely means is, is that the way that you and I experience comfort will be different than maybe the next person. And it will be different from season to season. And you know how this works. If you are hurting and somebody comes and does something like one day somebody can bring you a meal and feel like it's a warm hug and the next day a meal just feels like somebody else's dishes to have to clean and give back. Maybe never like that, but you know what I'm saying? Comfort is something that you find in seeking God, but there's no three-step process.
So, then we move to this last area, this responsibility of comfort, and we see this in verse four, verse nine, beginning in verse three. I'm just going to say look, for a ministry. In the book of Second Corinthians, there's a word that's used over and over. You see it in your English translation - ministry. It talks about the ministry of, several different times.
And the way ministry is used in Second Corinthians is not as ministry as in there are people who work in church and run church and run para church ministries. Ministry is for everybody. And here we see this because here's what he says. 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 all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble.”
So when I say look for a ministry, what I'm talking about here is that we come to a point where we say, when I've gone through trouble, not that I would choose trouble for myself, but as I experience the comfort of God, one of the things that I can do is I can say, who can I comfort in the midst of being comforted myself?
Now, there's an interesting little piece of Greek grammar here that I'm going to just give you from a scholar. But here's the gist of it. Sometimes what we'll do is say, well, I can't comfort somebody unless I've been through the same thing. And so, we'll feel as if we're inadequate unless we've had the exact same experience. And there's some truth to that, because if you say to somebody who's going through something, well, I know exactly how you feel and you didn't go through exactly what they are going through, they'll say, well, you actually don't, and there's some truth to that.
But Murray Harris, who's a Greek scholar, talks about verse four of Second Corinthians one, and he basically says in the grammar, there's something that shows us that we have to be careful making that our default in terms of we can offer comfort. And you see this in the words, “all” and the word “any” in verse four. So, if you look at your translation where it says “all,” it's the Greek word “pás” with an article meaning, the before it, and then in the next sentence it's the word “pás” without an article.
Okay. That I know is way technical. Let me quote him here and hopefully this will make sense. He says, “These two uses of pás are found side by side in 2 Corinthians 1:4 in reference to “distress.” Paul first describes the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ as ‘the compassionate Father and the God who always gives comfort.’ Throughout Second Corinthians, the verb “comfort,” (parakaléō) does not denote some weak sympathy but rather refers to strengthening, consolation, encouragement, and even intervention to deliver.” That's that word we've been talking about.
“Paul then proceeds to affirm that God comforts and encourages in ‘all our distress (regarded as the whole.)’” This is the article in the word pás. “But there was a special divine purpose when God dispensed His comfort - it was so that Paul might always be able to bring comfort and encouragement to those in ‘any kind of distress.’” And that's the word pás basically without the article. “Paul's own affliction was specific to him but his experience of divine comfort equipped him and obligated him to mediate God's comfort to those in any and every imaginable kind of distressing circumstance.”
Here's what this means. God has comforted his people. So, if you're a follower of Jesus, God has brought comfort into your life, in your hardest things, in part so that you can, without saying, I haven't been through this, I don't have anything to offer, can be a mediator of God's comfort in the life of somebody else. And if you look for a ministry, you'll be amazed at the opportunities. Sometimes people will say, well, what we need right now is we need more truth. We need the church to be bold and to take a stand. And I don't disagree with that but think about this personally. When do you ever argue somebody into changing their mind? When does raising your voice help people go, oh, you're making such a good point? When do people listen to us? Do you know when people listen to you? It's when you've expressed kindness, generosity, and goodness into their lives. And then you say something, and they go, oh!
And I love that this word is basically joined - comfort and exhortation and encouragement, come alongside. The idea of the Ministry of the Holy Spirit is both comfort and exhortation, and the way that you have an opportunity to be bold is when you've actually loved and brought comfort. And the reason that sometimes the church isn't heard in our day and age is because it's trying to be bold without being comforting. And if you think about it, personally, it makes sense. In fact, I sometimes think, what would happen if everybody who's part of Orchard Hill would say, in the next month I'm going to pay attention to the people in my life and see who I can extend comfort to, like how much that could change the experience of God in our region.
But I know what happens. We get busy. We have schedules we have to do. We get running and we say somebody else will bring comfort. But God's word here, this was Paul to the Corinthian church, the church in a confused culture, a compromised church. He said, listen, God has comforted you. You don't need to figure out how to do everything, just be people of comfort where you are. I love how simple it is.
Sometimes people will say, you know, the church should. And what they usually mean by that is, the church, whatever church they're part of, ought to do these things. And the perception is often this, and that is the church exists with some people in a back room somewhere who make decisions for the church and that the church, if they would do what these people think, the church should do, would be a better church.
But do you know what the church is in the New Testament? It's people. It’s us, it’s you, and it's me. Which means the church won’t fulfill its mission better if some people in a mythical back room somewhere make better decisions. The Church will fulfill its mission better when the people who are part of the church say God has given me comfort and I will bring comfort to the people in my life. I will come alongside people. The way that ministry happens is through people - loving people and pointing them to the God who loves and brings comfort into their lives.
Boldness comes with comfort. The right to be bold comes with the love that has been expressed. And beyond that, you see here, in verse 11, how much Paul appreciated their prayer. Sometimes people will say, well, all I can do is pray. You know, you can never do more than pray. Sometimes that may feel like a throwaway line. Like, hey, I'll pray for you. But if you actually pray when you pray, the power of God comes to bear in the situation and can bring about results that you and I cannot work in our own efforts. So, we look for a ministry.
And then I would say, secondly, in terms of responsibility, we listen for a message. Here's what we see. Verse nine. It says, “Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead.” Do you see what happens here? He talks about his trouble, and he says, I was comforted, not I was given trouble so, but I was comforted so that I could comfort others. And in the midst of my trouble, we learn not to rely on ourselves, but on God.
There are some messages that we all need all the time. To learn to trust God, not ourselves. Maybe these are some of the list that I referenced earlier to say that I have a tendency to love temporary things instead of eternal things. But sometimes God may have something very specific for you, for me, in the midst of our need for comfort. Or God can reveal something either about us or to us that will help us move forward in this world in a way that is for our good and for God's glory.
So, Second Corinthians is a letter in which Paul begins by saying, I want you to encounter the God of comfort, and I want you to be mediators of this comfort because our hope in a confused culture and a compromised church is people who know this God of comfort and extend that comfort to people around them. And that is how the church moves forward. And so today, my simple question is this, and that is, will you look up for comfort in whatever area of your life you're saying you don't experience it? And then will you simply say, I will look for a ministry and I'll listen for a message of what God may want to do around me through my experiences?
Father, I thank you that you are the God of comfort that you come alongside us when we feel pressure, when we feel crushed under, or when we maybe even feel a sense of despair. And I pray today that that comfort would be palpable for all of us and that in that you would give us an outward look. Whether it be to a roommate, a coworker, a colleague, a neighbor, to be a mediator of your comfort, your goodness to come alongside and point to you, who is the only real source of comfort in a world that at times can feel discouraging, knowing that you are our ultimate hope. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen. Thanks for being here. Have a great week.
