Comfort

2 Corinthians 1:3-5 (NIV)
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4 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.”
Comfort. In our day and age, we are constantly looking for ways to make ourselves more comfortable. We take long ‘comforting’ vacations on cruise ships, pay extra for the more ‘comfortable’ furniture, strive to get the most ‘comfortable’ loan rates, save money each paycheck for a more ‘comfortable’ retirement, and are constantly looking for a company that will help us feel more ‘comfortable’ as an employee.

I remember selling shoes part-time at Bible college, and the best sales technique I learned was to allow the customer to try on the shoes to see how ‘comfortable’ they were. As Americans, we trust our military and law enforcement to keep us ‘comfortable’ and safe from harm. Even in our relationships, we find the need to be ‘comfortable’. We surround ourselves with those who make us ‘feel’ good, and rarely allow anyone close enough to upset our delicate personal lives! We like calm waters, not rough seas!

But God’s comfort transcends the materialistic and physical comforts I’ve just mentioned. God is known in this passage as ‘the God of all comfort’. The word ‘comfort’ means to call to one’s side, and is the same word that Jesus used to describe the Holy Spirit in John 14:16, “And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever”. The Holy Spirit of God is our Comforter, the One who God has sent to come alongside us and help us in our times of pain, suffering, loss, doubting, fear, and anger.

The comfort that God gives isn’t based on circumstances. It’s based on a Person. When King Nebuchadnezzar was about to throw those three young men into the fiery furnace, they looked confidently into his eyes and said, “The God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand…But even if He does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods” (Daniel 3:17-18, emphasis mine). And with that incredible faith, they were thrown into the furnace, the fire, the trial, where everyone around would expect them to be burned.

But when the king looked into the furnace, he said, “Weren’t there three men that we threw into the fire? Look! I see four men walking around in the fire, unbound and unharmed, and the fourth looks like the Son of God”(verses 24 and 25). You see, they weren’t delivered FROM their trial, but they were delivered IN their trial. It wasn’t based on the circumstances changing; it was based on a Person being there to comfort them in the midst.

And so you and I will walk into fiery trials that will test our faith. The enemy would want us to be tied up and bound, thinking we were facing certain destruction. Yet in the midst of the fire, though the heat is consuming and the flames are pressing in around us, God’s Spirit is there to bring comfort to us. By trusting in Him, we will be as these three young men were: unbound, unharmed, and in the presence of the Son!

After we have been saved through the fire, we can then go and be a blessing to others. We can comfort others with the same comfort the Holy Spirit gave us. With the fiery furnace, their deliverance so radically affected the king that he began to praise God! When Jesus and His disciples walked near a blind man, the disciples asked, "Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" "Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus, "but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life” (John 9:2-3). Jesus went on to deliver that man from blindness. Perhaps we are facing our trial simply because God wants to display His work in our lives. May our lives be such that when we withstand the fire, others will see God’s work being displayed, and they will give glory and praise to Him.
Pressed but not crushed,

Pilgrim

Forgiven

For+ giv+ en

-to be granted relief from payment of a debt

I told her to write down her passwords.
My wife insisted that her online accounts all had the same user id and password so she didn’t need to write them down, but that theory came crashing back to cyberreality one rainy Monday night. She couldn’t login, so she checked her email for the original confirmation message and then to her ehorror, she realized it had been put in her Trash folder and deleted.

In many ways, this is like God’s assessment of our sin. The files have been gathered together, placed in the Recycle Bin, and emptied. We call it forgiveness.

Peter on one occasion asked Jesus how many times he should forgive a friend. It was right after Jesus explained how to deal with someone who sins against us. Peter probably had a friend in mind, perhaps a fellow fisherman who was always laying out the bait and Peter was always the naïve one to bite.

Now he wants payback.

It might have been seven times this man had sinned against Peter, and his magic number seems justifiably high to withhold forgiveness. But Jesus shatters his wishful thinking and declares, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven” (Matthew 18:22).

This is the heart of God for you and I. He has forgiven us in Christ (Ephesians 4:32) for all of our past sins, and continues to empty the Recycle Bin of sin for our present and future (1 John 1:9). We can’t drudge it back up any more than we can undelete a trashed email.

Allow the forgiveness of God to breathe life into your spiritual walk today, and rest assured your file has been moved to the “Forgiven” account!