I think we're good. All right. Go ahead and get your Bibles out, if you have those with you, and open up to Paul's letter, to the second letter, to the Corinthians, 2 Corinthians chapter one. Father, it's my gift to you as the beginning of a new book, verse by verse, through 2 Corinthians, you're welcome. You are welcome. I have heard, though, that manna has fallen from heaven once again, and there will be some frozen custard after the service in the fields for you to gather. I don't know how exactly that's going to get to us, but it is here. And wives, don't sacrificial love your husband out of his ice cream. Let him enjoy it. Let him have a moment. All right. So the title of this sermon today is The Father of Mercies and we'll get to the first four, well really first three verses and part of verse four in this text and we're really looking at affliction, suffering, and mercy and comfort in these first couple texts for the first couple weeks, and we'll see a lot more of that as we get through the letter. I don't want to front load a lot of this with context, but I do need to give some. The letter to 2 Corinthians is, well one commentator says it's a playground for higher criticism. It's a little bit different than Paul's other letters just kind of in the flow and in the tone and some of it seems Kistenmacher says it's disjointed. The tone kind of changes and there's some criticism that it's actually pieces of other letters put together as one and there's some things there that really you need not worry about for all intents and purposes. It's a genuine epistle. It's one collective unit most likely written in stages which can explain some of the disjointedness but From the canonized letters that we do have, so 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians, we know that there are also two other letters that we don't have. So there's really four letters that were written, and the first letter we don't have, the second letter is called 1 Corinthians, the third letter we don't have, and the fourth letter is called 2 Corinthians. So we're clear on all that. We have some explanations that will come across, and I'll talk more about that, where Paul references letters that we don't have. One of those, he says, was a very sorrowful, tearful letter that he has written. And so there's some references there that some people kind of struggle with because we don't have those letters, and we'll get more into that as we as we go, but what we have in this letter, it really does break out fairly neatly into five sections. You have the introduction and the first 11 verses, and then you have a very autobiographical sketch of Paul's ministry. just opens himself up to his afflictions and all that he's gone through, through about the mid of chapter seven. Then you have the issue of the collection for the churches that gets dealt with, and then Paul gives a defense for his apostolic authority towards the end, followed by a conclusion. But it's, I think, a timely letter for us to go through because of the comfort of God that is in these pages. The adversities that we face, not just as pastors or messengers for God, but just as Christians who live in a fallen world. It's really interesting. Paul is getting ridiculed and slandered by this church that he planted. He's been there. He's left. Other problems have arisen. He's tried to go back. He has to leave before he can get there. He's rebuffed by leadership. He sends Titus, and that's probably when that third letter is delivered. Then he comes back, and he hears something of a good report, but he also does hear that there is challenges going on in this church to his apostolic authority and other things. But understand, this is a letter written with an extremely heavy heart. over the problems within the church and the attack against him, and the attack against the church that he loves, that he's so devoted to. And it does seem, and I think it stands true today, that the worst hurts that we feel, the most pain that we go through, it genuinely comes when something is happening to or from the ones that we love. the most. And so Paul writes this letter, a very emotional letter that I pray will minister to us in special ways as we work through it. So let me read through the text that we'll cover today and then we'll pray. Beginning in verse one, this is the word of the true and living God. 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, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction. We'll stop there for today. Let's let's pray. Father, we bow before you on this Lord's Day, commending ourselves to you or just acknowledging not unlike the Apostle Paul, we suffer heavily under afflictions and the only comfort that we truly have, other than distractions, the comfort that you can give and that you delight to give as our father of mercies. You have not even withheld your only son. God, help us to take that comfort that you give. Pray that you would draw near to us today in a special way. Help us, Lord, we desperately need you. And we ask this in the name of your son. Amen. So I mentioned, I titled this, The Father of Mercies. which is a title that Paul gives here for God in verse three, which will be the bulk of where the message will come from. But that word alone, mercy, is a word that we don't know, and it's a gift that we don't know apart from pain. apart from some sort of discomfort. So we have a merciful God because we have afflictions in our lives. The word affliction, the Greek word is a word that really speaks to pressure. And it's the idea of being closed or compressed all around from an outside source. And I know many, many in our congregation are feeling that pressure. And right now you are in the midst of great afflictions, afflictions that I have not experienced, can't imagine the pressure that comes. But what we see here is this beautiful diamond of truth in the rough of the scriptures that there is a great, immense value in suffering affliction. So this morning we'll look at what that value is And then next week, we'll continue at the end of verse four, go through 11, and we'll see that the purpose, the way that we use that experience of suffering. But I wanna try to deal somewhat with why we suffer in the first place. Whose fault is it? Often our tendency when suffering comes is to blame God. And we do that partly because we do know that God is sovereign, that nothing passes through His hands that He does not allow. But Jesus actually, I think, gives us one of our best explanations in Luke 13. describing how we live in a world of afflictions. We can look at that a couple different ways, how many afflictions that we have in that sense, but our world is an afflicted world. Let me read this text to you from Luke 13, verses one through five. It says, now on the same occasion, there were some present who reported to him about the Galileans, whose blood Pilate mixed with their sacrifices. And Jesus said to them, do you suppose that these Galileans were greater sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered this fate? Jesus answers, I tell you, no. But unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. He proposes another question, or do you suppose that those 18 on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them were worse culprits than all the men who live in Jerusalem? I tell you no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. So the Lord Jesus, in this statement, he almost seems a bit cold or indifferent towards those who have been martyred, or at least just killed for their nationality, possibly their faith in the God of Israel. Pilate, in a sick and twisted show of worship, takes the blood from those people, mixing it with their own sacrifices. And then we get a different instance of sort of a natural disaster. This tower falls and kills 18 people, seemingly innocent people, just walking by. And Jesus, when he's speaking about this, he's really saying, don't be surprised by that. This is the world that you live in. It's not that these men were worse sinners or that those men were worse sinners, but you're going to live in a relationship with suffering because you live in a world that is cursed with sin. So what he's doing is he's bringing out the perspective that because the world is cursed, the door has been opened for afflictions of all kind and the world is being filled with those afflictions constantly. And unless we turn to Christ and repent, the suffering and the afflictions that we feel in this world will not end here. They will go on even worse when God's restraining grace is taking away or is taken off of unbelievers and they suffer without any restraining graces. And there was a time when this world was peaceful and there was no disease and there were no disasters because there was no sin. And this is what God warns Adam about if we go back into the garden where things fell. He tells Adam, if you break the covenant that I'm establishing with you, you will surely die. And if you look at the language in the Hebrew, surely die actually says something to the effect of dying you will die. It's the same word surely and die used twice. So he's telling Adam, If you do this, if you break my word, dying, you will then die. And what that amounts to is that opening the door to sin, the curse will come flooding in and there will be instant and immediate effects of that on the body, in the ground, The body begins to decay, the body begins to break down, and even the core of man becomes infected with sin, so our thoughts, our minds, our emotions, our heart, all of us, the extent of our makeup becomes cursed, and the earth is cursed to its core. So now, dying, you will finally and ultimately die. but this door stands wide open. And there's an onslaught of crime, there's an onslaught of hurt and lies and disease, and even from an earth that's groaning with this curse spews natural disasters. And we must remember when we feel the effects of this cursed world, and we want to point at God, we need to remember it was man who opened the door of chaos and confusion and death to a world that was created with perfect peace and life. So what does that mean? When we wake up, or let's go even further, when we go to sleep, and we can't sleep because we're afflicted, and we have too much pressure on our minds, and we're hurting too bad, and we can't even lay down, and we wake up to pain the next day, that shouldn't surprise us. Whenever we have those days where we are able to lay down with a clear mind, with gentle thoughts, and go to sleep easy, and wake up to good news, and have a good day, That's the shock. The norm in this world is a world of affliction from a curse of sin. The not norm is the grace of God, the mercy of God that restrains so much from us daily that we actually do have good days, good relationships, good thoughts, good nights, A lot of people, we just don't realize how much Christ purchased by coming into this world and going to the cross. Even the common graces that hold God's judgment back from the wicked were purchased by Jesus Christ. If there was no redeeming work being done, Noah and his family would have been destroyed with the rest of mankind and we wouldn't even be here. but because there is a redemptive work being done, because God is rescuing a people for himself out of this fallen world, bringing them into a relationship of father-son, father-daughter relationship, the majority of the wicked that would consume us from all angles is held back. So Jesus really in Luke 13, what he's doing is he's making the point that because of sin, we shouldn't expect less than suffering. We shouldn't expect less than affliction. But when we come to him, when we do repent and when we trust in him, there is a peace that comes through him. We live in a world of afflictions, but we live under the God of all mercies and comfort. And so when we come into a relationship with Him, we have a special sense of comfort in this world. And at the end of this world, we go to be with Him in a perfect place, a paradise with no suffering and no affliction. Jesus says, these things I say to you, John 16. so that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation, but take courage, I have overcome the world." So when Paul lays out his introduction here, his greeting, In verse 2 when he says, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, this isn't just his standard, hello, Timothy says hi, I'll get there when I can, grace and peace. This is Paul acknowledging peace does not belong to us. It is not our right. It is not owed to us, but the peace that we do experience, it is not random, it is granted to us by the grace of God through the Lord Jesus Christ. And the reason I'm trying to set this maybe dark background of affliction in the world that we live in is so when we read verse three, our hearts could potentially erupt with the praise that Paul has when he writes, so blessed be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the father of mercies and the God of all comfort who comforts us. in our affliction. Paul doesn't say that light-hearted. He says that very worshipful. God comforts us in every affliction. He's blessing God, he's praising God, not simply for mercy and comfort, but because God is the only true source of mercy and comfort that we have in this world, that anyone has. And we'll talk more about how that works out as this chapter unfolds. And you might think, now, well, I can find comfort and I can find, you know, some sort of solace from our pressure and things that aren't of God. That's not comfort you're finding. That's a distraction. That's a delay of the inevitable, if you will say. We see a lot of self-medicating. Look at the self-medicators the next morning and tell me how comfortable they look. I've been one of those people. But consider God as a source of our mercies. Paul, we're going to kind of dive in deep a little bit here. But Paul brings out something of the Trinity or the Trinitarian relationship between the Father and the Son. And he's implicating that it was God the Father who sent the Son to us. And then by faith in him, we become united to the Father in Christ. But he's given him the title, the Father of Mercies. And so because we're united to him through the Son, it was out of his mercy that he sent the Son to us, that we might be saved from sin, that we might not get what we deserve as sinners. Remember God made him who knew no sin to be sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. So there's something Paul is doing here saying, he's a father of mercies and you can believe this because he sent his son to die for your sins. And so now then, when affliction does come, we now have the Father of mercies who has demonstrated that mercy in the greatest show of mercy ever displayed, sending His Son to the cross. But mercy originates from Him. He makes mercy possible, and He guaranteed it by the blood of His Son. And He is watching over you now, not to punish you, but to deal mercifully with you because you are now looked at as his son. Christ has taken the punishment of your sin and so now the holy and righteous God who punishes the wicked, he sees you as his son and he sees you with merciful eyes and eyes of comfort for the afflictions that you go through. And in John 16, when Jesus promises to send the Holy Spirit, he calls him the helper, paraclete, paracletos. It's the same root word that Paul uses here for comfort. Paraklesis. So Paul is saying here then that we have God our father. He's given us perfect mercy in his son. And he continues to be merciful towards us as his own sons and his own daughters and sends us the God of comfort, the Holy Spirit, the helper in our afflictions. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction. And to add to this, he's not just the source or the origin, but he has all of it. every amount of comfort ever needed for any type of affliction belongs to God, who is your Father, who is merciful. There's never any affliction that you can meet with that is beyond the comfort that God can send to you. And I think it's also important that Paul establishes him firmly, God, as the father of mercies first, because many of our afflictions, our sufferings, are self-inflicted by the sins that we commit. And when we do that, we tend to think of God, then, as looking to punish us for this. And we forget that He is the Father of mercies and that our sins have already been punished in the Lord Jesus Christ. So it's as if Paul is saying, even your afflictions that are sinful that you put on yourself, God is still merciful even in those afflictions through the Son. offering the greatest mercy, bringing the comfort to your soul of the atoning blood of Jesus Christ that guarantees your security in Him, that your sins have been covered. And the first level, if we could say, of comfort that we have is knowing that we are blood-bought children of God, and that's never going to change. the sins that we fall into, the temptations that cause us to stumble do not change God's position towards us and it does not change our position towards God. We are always nestled in Christ in the bosom of the Father. The hard part of this is Paul is telling us that God is the source of these things. One, because we need that source. Two, because we are not that source. And that it is in our reflections that we find out how insufficient our strength is. And when we find how deep the comfort of God is. and the more that we try to just grin and bear it, the more we try to just muscle through the hard times, the less comfort, the less mercy we will find. I suppose the bitter truth is that We won't know the fullness of God. We won't know God as the father of mercies. We won't know God as the God of comfort until we go through afflictions. And we won't realize the sufficiency of his comfort until those afflictions bring us to the end of ourselves. Suppose we could say that This comfort that God gives us is not a preventative medicine. It's not an immunization. It's a medicine given during the affliction that will either deliver you or it will give you strength to endure. And we don't know and we don't control which dose that we are given. But we do know that his comfort is sufficient for all afflictions because he is the God of all comfort. And that that suffering is not without value. But it is the hardest thing in the world, I think, for us to wrap our minds around. Something, I think the gift of comfort that Paul is referring to here is in a way correlating to the awfulness or the pain of the affliction. And so the deeper the hurt, the deeper the suffering, the greater the mercy, the greater the comfort that is known. So in a very real sense, in the deepest, darkest moments of our lives, when we are hurting so bad we think we might never recover, there is an avenue that is opened up from your suffering deep into the heart of your father that doesn't open any other way. There's no other way for you to know God on that level than in the midst of the sufferings that you go through. And the value of that the deepness of the love of God coming to you in a deeper way is so magnificent and it's so special that it overshadows and it takes away the pain of what you have to go through to get there. And it seems foolish and it seems hard for me to say that in suffering you're given a beautiful opportunity but you are. An opportunity to know God on a deeper level than you've ever known Him, to feel Him in your life working with a strength that you know is not your own, that you can't know any other way, and many around you will never know. If you read of the martyrs that have been killed by Somali pirates in Africa, some of the worst accounts of torture I've ever read, those people Well, one by one, say if they're asked, if you could trade places with the church in the West and worship there and not here so you wouldn't have to go through so much suffering, would you trade? And they all say no, because I wouldn't know God the way I know Him if I have not have suffered. And it's so sweet to them, it's so special, they wouldn't trade it for the world, and they keep living in the midst of affliction and suffering, and they're living with the closeness to God that most of us have no idea about. And not that we should apologize for that. That we should just want to go find a place to suffer in. But there is a value to that suffering that is only available to you. I don't know if you're familiar with Samuel Rutherford. He was a Scottish pastor, brilliant mind, one of the only six Scots that were part of the Westminster Assembly. I think he stayed the longest and had the most input. He was just a genius of a man. He was brilliant. Went to Edinburgh, Edinburgh, I think, at a young age, graduated, instantly became a professor at St. Andrews, so that's like the Oxford, Cambridge in Scotland, and very briefly was fired for their speculation, but some sort of an inappropriate relationship with a woman that he subsequently married, so he's this great and up-and-coming guy, and he kind of ruins his reputation. But then by the grace of God, he begins to work through these things. He's called as a pastor at Anwith. But in just a very short number of years, his wife began to suffer 13 months of intense suffering. till she died. In the meantime, he buries both of their infant children. All but one of his children he buried, just a daughter. And then within just a few years of that, he buried his mother who came to live with them. And he describes it, his feeling in this way. He says, next to Christ, I had but one joy, the apple of the eye of my delights, to preach Christ my Lord. and they have violently plucked that away from me." What he's describing is after all of this happened, he was still able to preach to the saints at his church, and then he was imprisoned for treason because he was nonconforming and wouldn't recognize the King of England as the head of the church. And he says, that was all I had left. Everything had been taken from me. I had this one rose left in my garden and it was violently plucked away. And I don't know that it's far-fetched to think that's maybe how some of you feel this morning. You're down to one rose and you're losing it. And on that day, or after his rose was ripped out of the ground, he grew closer to the Lord than he ever was. And he begins to experience this comfort and suffering And one of his letters from prison, which if you don't have Rutherford's letters, I'd recommend you get it and read it. It says, if your Lord calls you to suffering, do not be dismayed, for he will provide a deeper portion of Christ in your suffering. The softest pillow will be placed under your head, though you must set your bare feet among thorns. He says, my prison is my palace. My losses are rich losses. My pain, easy pain. My heavy days are holy and happy days. You don't talk like that when your life has been easy every day. You don't know the loveliness of Christ in that way when you have not walked through the thorns. For many of us who are not going through these gut-wrenching trials, we don't have that privilege or that special opportunity to know the mercy and grace and comfort of God in that way. But those who are and those who will do. So if I can say, Humbly is just a word of an encouragement, not minimizing anything, but it is to not waste your suffering. Don't waste it. Don't look around it. Don't try to go around it. Don't try to go find the distraction in the world that they would love to give you. Whatever those afflictions might be that you're going through, don't run from them. If you will go towards them on that deep, dark path, you will find the comfort of God. One of the greatest values Maybe the greatest in suffering is that we learn to bring these pains and we learn to bring these sorrows, even sinful guilt directly to God. And by doing so, we begin to know God like Paul does, not just as a father, the father, but the father of mercies, the God of all comfort. And many of you might feel this way as I have in recent weeks, but it seems like Satan is just circling our church with his hellish wagons and his little imps are just rounding us, looking for any inroad that they can find to bring pain and hurt and afflictions. But what they do not know is that in the deepest, darkest wound they can cut is where God pours in the deepest and greatest amounts of His love. And by trying to separate us, if we will trust His word, they're only bringing us closer to Him. So when those waves of affliction just come crashing down on top of you, let them push you against the rock of ages, the rock who cannot be moved, the one who stands firm as an anchor in the storm. And like Spurgeon, maybe say, I have learned to kiss the wave who pushes me against the rock of ages. And I'll close with this, you have an opportunity. When affliction comes, an opportunity comes to know more of God's mercy, his comfort than you've ever experienced. Take that avenue that opens an affliction that leads deep into the heart of God that can't be opened any other way. And recognize that the key to a greater knowledge of the steadfast love of God, it hangs by the door of your suffering chamber. I hope this is an encouragement. It is hard to suffer. Paul recognizes that as well as anybody. And so he gives us the strongest encouragement he can that in our suffering, God is our father of mercies and the God of all comfort. Oh God, you are the father of mercies. May we know you in that way. When we have so much suffering around us, Lord, might you draw us down that dark road that leads to your love. And we might know the value of our suffering by the comfort that you offer us in the midst of it. Lord, help your people. I pray help your people who need you. Let them know that you're there with them. And we ask that in Christ's name, amen.