Comfort in suffering: 2 Corinthians

Going through suffering is never easy. I've found it so helpful to find books to navigate my way through it: what to think, what to pray, what to sing. Matt and Beth Redman's 'Blessed be your name' (the song and the book) have been very helpful but today I'm going to focus on one of my favourite Bible books: 2 Corinthians.

I've been reading a book of daily devotionals called 'Contentment' by Lydia Brownback. Again, this is an amazingly concise but incisive book that has really challenged me. She wrote today's devotion on Paul's experience of 'the thorn in the flesh' as recorded in 2 Corinthians 12. We don't know what it was, but Paul was experiencing some form of suffering and asked God three times to take it away. Instead, the words Christ spoke to him were:

'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' (v9)

That verse really kicks against what we want to believe. Surely not, God? Surely I'm more useful to you when I'm 'sorted', when I've got it together? But that's not what Jesus says.

Brownback puts it this way: 'Our thorns are opportunities to cling to Christ... There are things about our union with Christ that we just cannot know apart from the thorns that spear our lives. You'll never know Christ's sufficiency if you spend all your energy seeking to pull the thorn out of your flesh.'

This really ties in with the whole letter of 2 Corinthians. Paul's message to the church is that suffering isn't some inconvenient truth which just has to be avoided so we can look like 'real' Christians. Actually, God uses suffering in our lives: to comfort us Himself in a way that no one else can, and to equip us to comfort others (see chapter 1 v4).

Suffering makes us see ourselves for what we really are: jars of clay (chapter 4 v7), so we trust in God not ourselves (chapter 1 v9).

We know God's salvation as a present reality, but also as a future one too:

'we trust that He will yet deliver us' (chapter 1 v10)

We hang on to the physical historical reality of Christ's resurrection as the source of our hope in our own eternal future:

'knowing that He which raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise up us also by Jesus... we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen.' (chapter 4 v14,18)

Suffering reminds me that I haven't got it all together. I haven't figured out answers to all of life's questions. But what I do know, and what I have come to know more in suffering, is that God's promises of comfort are true. May you know His comfort today whatever your suffering is.