2 Corinthians 1:3-4 Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort;… The desire for comfort may be a noble or a most ignoble wish. The nobleness of actions depends more upon the reasons why we do them than on the acts themselves. Paul gave to the comfort which God had given him its deepest and most unselfish reason, and so the fact of God's comforting him became the exaltation and the strengthening of his life. It does not matter what the special trouble was; the point is this — that Paul thanked God because the comfort which had come to him gave him the power to comfort other people. Now try to recall the joy and peace and thankfulness that have ever filled your heart when you became thoroughly sure that God had relieved or blessed you. But ask yourself, at the same time, "Did any such thought as Paul's come up first and foremost to my mind?" I. THE POWER OF PAUL OR OF ANY MAN TO REALISE THIS HIGH IDEA — 1. Shows a clear understanding that it is really God who sends the help. If the recovery of your health or the saving of your fortune seems to you a piece of luck, then you may be meanly and miserably selfish about it. It is a light which you have struck out for yourself, and may burn in your own lantern. But if the light came down from God it is too big for you to keep to yourself. 2. Evinces genuine unselfishness and a true humility. Put these together into a nature, and you clear away those obstructions which, in so many men, stop God's mercies short, and absorb, as personal privileges, what they were meant to radiate as blessings to mankind. Who is the man whom we rejoice to see possessing wealth? It is the man who says, "God sent this," and, "I am not worthy of this; where are my brethren?" Who is the man who, receiving comfort from God, radiates it? It is the reverent, unselfish, humble man. The sunlight falls upon a clod, but lies as black as ever; but the sun touches a diamond, and the diamond almost chills itself as it sends out in radiance on every side the light that has fallen on it. So God helps one man bear his pain, and nobody but that one man is a whir the richer. God comes to another sufferer, and all around are comforted by the radiated comfort of that happy soul. 3. Will always be easier and more real to us in proportion as we dwell habitually upon the profounder and more spiritual of His mercies. If I am in the habit of thanking God mainly for food and clothes and house, it will not be easy for me to take them as if the final purpose of them was that I might be warm and well fed. But if what I thank Him for most is not that He gives me His gifts, but that He gives me Himself, then I cannot resist the tendency of that mercy to outgrow my life. A stream may leave its deposits in the pool it flows through, but the stream itself hurries on to other pools; and so God's gifts a soul may selfishly appropriate, but God Himself, the more truly a soul possesses Him, the more truly it will long and try to share Him. Thus I have tried to picture the man who in the profoundest way accepts and values God's mercies. You see how clear his superiority is. The Pharisee says, "I thank Thee that I am not as other men are," and evidently it is his difference from other men that he values most, and he means to keep himself different from other men as long as possible. The Christian says, "I thank Thee that Thou hast made me this, because it is a sign and may be made a means of bringing other men to the same help and joy." II. NOTE A FEW OF THE SPECIAL HELPS WHICH GOD GIVES TO MEN, and see how what I have been saying applies to each of them. 1. Take the comfort which God sends a man when he is in religious doubt. And that does not by any means always mean the filling of every darkness with perfect light. No doubt God does answer our questions for us sometimes if we will "walk in His ways." But he has had little experience of God who has not often felt how sometimes, with a deep doubt in the soul unsolved, the Father will fold about His doubting child a sense of Himself so self-witnessing that the child is content to carry his unanswered question, because of the unanswerable assurance of his Father which he has received. You are comforting your child just in that way every day. But, tell me, is it the gain of that one doubter only? Is no other questioner helped? Few men are aided by arguments compared with those to whom religion becomes a clear reality from the sight of some fellow-man who carries the life of God wherever he goes. 2. Take the way God proves to us that the soul is more than the body. In the breakage or decay of physical power He brings out spiritual richness and strength. This was something that St. Paul knew well (2 Corinthians 4:16). A man who has been in the full whirl of prosperous business fails, and then for the first time he learns the joy of conscious integrity preserved through all temptations, and of daily trust in God for daily bread. A man who never knew an ache comes to a break in health, and then the soul within him stands strong in the midst of weakness, calm in the very centre of the turmoil and panic of the aching body. The temper of the fickle people changes, and the favourite of .yesterday becomes the victim of to-day; but in his martyrdom for the first time he sees the full value of the truth he dies for, and thanks the flames that have lighted up its preciousness. Now, in all these cases, must it not be an element in the comfort which fills the sick room, or gathers about the martyr's stake, that by this revelation of the spiritual through the broken physical life other men may learn its value? 3. Take the comfort which God gives a man who has found out his sin and repented of it — forgiveness. We take too low a ground in pleading with the man living in sin. We tell him of his danger. We go higher than that: we tell him of the happiness of the life with God. But suppose we took a higher strain, and said, "Every time any man humbly takes God's forgiveness, that man becomes a new witness to men of how strong and good the Saviour is. And look, how they need Him! Not for yourself now, but for them, for Him, take His forgiveness and give up yourself inwardly and outwardly to Him." So used one grows to find men respond to the noblest motives who are deaf to a motive which is less noble. Be a new man in Christ for these men's sake. (Bishop Phillips Brooks.) Parallel Verses KJV: Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; |
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