comfort in affliction... our pain anothers gain

1 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother,

To the church of God which is at Corinth with all the saints who are throughout Achaia:

² Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

³ Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, ⁴ who comforts us in all our affliction so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. ⁵ For just as the sufferings of Christ are ours in abundance, so also our comfort is abundant through Christ. ⁶ But if we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; or if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which is effective in the patient enduring of the same sufferings which we also suffer; ⁷ and our hope for you is firmly grounded, knowing that as you are sharers of our sufferings, so also you are sharers of our comfort.

⁸ For we do not want you to be unaware, brethren, of our affliction which came to us in Asia, that we were burdened excessively, beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of life; ⁹ indeed, we had the sentence of death within ourselves so that we would not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead; ¹⁰ who delivered us from so great a peril of death, and will deliver us, He on whom we have set our hope. And He will yet deliver us, ¹¹ you also joining in helping us through your prayers, so that thanks may be given by many persons on our behalf for the favor bestowed on us through the prayers of many.

As we focus today on this brief excert from the daily chronological reading in the One Year Bible(link available on links page of this site), let's look in particular at what Paul writes in verses 4 and 5.      who comforts us in all our affliction so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. ⁵ For just as the sufferings of Christ are ours in abundance, so also our comfort is abundant through Christ. This is a powerful truth that we need to understand and walk in in order to fulfill all that God desires for us. There is a natural extra measure of mercy that we may feel toward some one who is being afflicted in a way that we have previously experienced affliction. A person who has experienced grief through the loss of a loved one has more compassion for another person experiencing that grief. Some one who has experienced the struggles associated with addictions understands and has compassion toward others in that struggle. These are just examples but the list goes on and includes all of the afflictions we have experienced and overcome through God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

What Paul writes about here though goes beyond an extra measure of mercy and compassion. There is an extra level of authority we have in areas which we have experienced God's deliverence. Look at this prophetic word about Jesus the coming Messiah spoken by through Isaiah, God'd prophet. Isaiah 53:

Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
² For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, And as a root out of dry ground.
He has no form or comeliness; And when we see Him,
There is no beauty that we should desire Him.³ He is despised and rejected by men,
A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him;
He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.⁴ Surely He has borne our griefs
And carried our sorrows; Yet we esteemed Him stricken, Smitten by God, and afflicted.
⁵ But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities;
The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed.

By His stripes we are healed. This prophetic promise is that Jesus came to do more than just deliver us from sin, though that would be more than we deserve. By His stripes we are healed, means that the brutal lashes that Jesus endured have assured our healing. He was broken so we can be whole. Here is the key for us though in these verses we are looking at today. Remember what it says in Romans 8:28-29.

²⁸ And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. ²⁹ For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; 

The afflictions we experience, the grief, the struggles our physical and emotional wounds, are all part of the all things that God will cause to work together for good in our life. The begining of the good is that through these experiences, through these struggles we become "conformed to the image of His Son." Conformed to His image, more like Christ. In the same way that by His stripes we are healed, we have, more than compassion toward others who are experencing the hurts we have overcome and are overcoming through Christ. Through the power of Christ in us, through our being conformed to Him, we have authority to bring healing and deliverence to others through Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus calls and commissions His disciples to “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation... cast out demons... hands on the sick, and they will recover.”(Mark 16)

Jesus went to the cross and bore the stripes of affliction, He was broken so you could be whole. But we are called to more than wholeness. We are called to be conformed to the image of Christ. We are called to take the comfort, the healing and deliverence we have experienced and use it to bring God's comfort, God's healing and God's deliverence to others.