March 12, 2015
With the Comfort We Receive
I have a friend who is going
through some difficult times and even though I’ve had some similar experiences,
she rejects the idea that I know what she is going through. It’s as though no
one understands, no one has suffered in the same way, and no one cares. I’ve
come to the conclusion that she needs to be comforted, but in this instance I’m
obviously not the one best suited for that role. “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” (2 Cor 1:3-4 NIV).
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Gail;
-----I sat down on the edge of my bed in August, 1977 and placed the barrel of a .323 rifle between my eyes. I got the feel of what it was like to push the trigger with my thumb, clicking the firing pin into an empty chamber several times before I loaded the live round. One was all I needed. With a live round chambered, one good reason not to press the trigger was all I required. Thank God, one I found. Our comfort is in God.
-----Actually, I soon learned there were many, thousands even, millions. God is a God of relationships. Everything we do relates to everyone and everything of our surroundings it directly effects, and it relates to everything else indirectly through the knowledge God has about what we do and why.
-----So, nobody is meaningless. Everyone in his own niche in life has a purpose in the knowledge that niche is to God. We are born into sin simply because the niche we are born into is out of its proper place within God’s perfect relationships. But for now, that’s OK, because God has chosen a short time remaining to be for His forbearance towards man's being out of place and grace towards His Son’s church trying to get back into place.
-----Simply being in our own niche is the first and minimally sufficient purpose we have in God. Its relationship to all things is the depth of God’s love towards us who are in it, His burning desire to restore it to its right place by restoring us. The rightness of that restored place will bond it into God’s eternal existence of perfectly correlating relationships. What a kick that will be!
-----Within our out-of-place-today niches we can have comfort in knowing our situations will be perfected with ourselves on that Great Day. So it is a mistake to tie our emotions to our situations, to count ourselves comfortless because our situations are meeting some kind of mortal destruction. That destruction can be of the worst kind, torture, torture of a loved one, bankruptcy, embarrassment, or even the inability to produce a signed OF109 Form after assuring the nation you followed the letter of the law. No situation is uncorrectable because anyone can be reborn into Christ, even if the situation still calls for punishment by man’s law. With God, you become right in Christ, your situation becomes valued by Him, and that sets it and you to always be getting better.
-----When I meet someone who is sure no-one understands or cares, I think I have met someone who does not want anyone to understand or care. They think if someone did, it would relieve them of their right to be completely absorbed in self-attention. If they were honest, they could name several who would care if they knew. But most importantly, most comfortably, most securely, God cares and understands whether or not their situation gets immediately fixed, so, “…let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider Him who endured from sinners such hostility against Himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted.” (Heb 12:1b-3)
-----We can place all our emotional eggs safely in that one basket of God’s caring. Or we can spread them out into the many baskets of His people caring, too. Moreover, the hitching post for our comfort is the eventual perfecting of our situations through the perfecting of us in Christ Jesus. Everything else might be hard work or even torture till then, but all of that fecklessly passes with our comfort and joy being in the Lord. That is victory. That is testimony. That is treasured by God.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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