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Dec 17, 2023

Glory made and meant for comfort

Glory made and meant for comfort

Passage: 2 Corinthians 4:7-18

Speaker: Patrick Lafferty

Series: 2023 Advent: Glory Days

Keywords: power, glory, treasure, comfort, eternal, affliction, unseen

This season solicits merriment–some might say almost mandates it if you wish to fit in. But often the mirth belies the burdens so many of us carry. We all naturally seek comfort in such times. The glory of God, far from being an abstract idea, is meant to offer comfort in whatever our affliction. There is a character to that comfort we want to explore; and also the basis for it; but mostly the practical path to such comfort.

Readings & Scripture

PRE SERVICE TEXT: 2 Corinthians 4:16-17
16 So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. 17 For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison,

POEM: LOVE SONG by Adélia Prado, recited by Becky Morgan
First came cancer of the liver, then came the man
leaping from bed to floor and crawling around
on all fours, shouting: “Leave me alone, all of you,
just leave me be,” such was his pain without remission.
Then came death and, in that zero hour, the shirt missing
a button.
I’ll sew it on, I promise,
but wait, let me cry first.

“Ah,” said Martha and Mary, “if You had been here,
our brother would not have died.” “Wait,” said Jesus,
“let me cry first.”
So it’s okay to cry? I can cry too?
If they asked me now about life’s joy,
I would only have the memory of a tiny flower.
Or maybe more, I’m very sad today:
what I say, I unsay. But God’s Word
is the truth. That’s why this song has the name it has.

PREPARATION: Hebrews 2:6-10

LEADER: “What is man, that you are mindful of him,
or the son of man, that you care for him?
You made him for a little while lower than the angels;
you have crowned him with glory and honor,
putting everything in subjection under his feet.”

Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him.
ALL: For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.

LEADER: But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels,

ALL: namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH/SCRIPTURE READING/CORPORATE PRAYER: James 1:2-4, 27-2:1
LEADER: Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, 3 for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. 4 And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. . . .Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. . . My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory.

CENTRAL TEXT: 2 Corinthians 4:7-18
7 But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. 8 We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; 9 persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; 10 always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. 11 For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. 12 So death is at work in us, but life in you.

2Cor. 4:13 Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, “I believed, and so I spoke,” we also believe, and so we also speak, 14 knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence. 15 For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.

2Cor. 4:16 So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. 17 For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, 18 as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. 

CONFESSION OF SIN:

LEADER: Let us confess our sin.

ALL: You know well we are frail, and fragile–made from the dust and to the dust we shall return. In between those days known intimately to you, we become familiar with suffering. For the suffering we have created for another or for ourselves, we ask your pardon. For the suffering we have compounded by our refusal to receive your consolation, we ask not just for pardon, but for strength–strength to believe you are both familiar with our sorrows and able to bear us up in them.

ABSOLUTION OF PARDON: John 15:13

LEADER: Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.

BENEDICTION: 1 Peter 5:10, 11
LEADER: And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the dominion forever and ever..

ALL: Amen.

RELATED SCRIPTURES:

  • Mark 13:3-8, 17-20, 24-27 
  • Romans 8:17-23

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

  1. Best Christmas ever–worst Christmas ever? Go.
  2. Why might Paul begin with reminding them that he/we are merely frail and dispensable containers for the precious news of Jesus? What are those tasked with something important always tempted with?
  3. Take stock of the contrasts he draws early in the passage. What is that repeated kind of contrast meant to suggest about the comfort of God’s glory? It’s been said great art is often produced by great suffering. What else is great suffering capable of producing in those who refuse to be swallowed by it?
  4. For your own biblical edification, what is Paul quoting there toward the middle of the passage (v. 13)? What is the context of that passage he references? Why do you think he employs that here?
  5. Resurrection from the dead has its own appeal. Why is being brought into the presence of God even more grand? (Venture answers first–then read below the quote from John Piper and discuss)
  6. Paul is audacious enough to claim that this “light, momentary affliction” will be eclipse by comparison to the “weight of glory” yet to come, but the former will in some sense “prepare” us (or in other translations “produce” for us) that weight of glory. Can you point to a story in your own life or another’s life in which suffering “succeeded” in producing a clearer sense of God’s life in yours/theirs? (Perhaps another can speak for you?)
  7. How can one “look” to the things that are unseen and eternal? What could that–must that–look like in a practical way? However one might practice that, on what else does its “efficacy” depend?

ILLUSTRATIONS:  

QUOTES

  • First came cancer of the liver, then came the man
    leaping from bed to floor and crawling around
    on all fours, shouting: “Leave me alone, all of you,
    just leave me be,” such was his pain without remission.
    Then came death and, in that zero hour, the shirt missing
    a button.

    I’ll sew it on, I promise,
    but wait, let me cry first.

    “Ah,” said Martha and Mary, “if You had been here,
    our brother would not have died.” “Wait,” said Jesus,
    “let me cry first.”

    So it’s okay to cry? I can cry too?
    If they asked me now about life’s joy,
    I would only have the memory of a tiny flower.

    Or maybe more, I’m very sad today:
    what I say, I unsay. But God’s Word
    is the truth. That’s why this song has the name it has.
    -LOVE SONG, Adélia Prado
  • This is a dark time. In easier times we left night out of the picture and made a lighthearted holiday of festival and merriment, but now we are back where Christmas started--with its deep black background behind the Savior's coming, like midnight behind the star. -Fosdick 1944
  • The more the marble wastes, the more the statue grows. Michelangelo (HT: Murray J Harris)
  • How do you not see God in a war zone? The God I believe in was tortured and died in agony on the cross. God is there when I see another human being and see something of infinite worth and value. God is there in this infinite horror and majesty of the world. The idea to me that all of this beauty and all of this horror is nothing but mere matter seems ridiculous, and I can’t disentangle my sense of horror from my sense of the beauty and value of what is being destroyed in war. Phil Klay
  • I don't know what to say except that the worst misfortune isn't only misfortune. Rev. Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead
  • [The resurrection] promises, bizarrely enough, that love is stronger than death. But it does not promise that death is imaginary, that death is avoidable, that death is temporary. To have death, this once, be reversed is to let us feel the depth of our ordinary loss in it, not to pretend it away. Some people ask nowadays what kind of a religion it is that chooses an instrument of torture for its symbol, as if the cross on churches must represent some kind of endorsement. The answer is: one that takes the existence of suffering seriously.  Francis Spufford
  • If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

    C.S. Lewis, “On Living in an Atomic Age

  • Affliction then is ours;
    We are the trees, whom shaking fastens more,
    While blustring winds destroy the wanton bowres,
    And ruffle all their curious knots and store.
             My God, so temper joy and wo,
            That thy bright beams may tame thy bow. George Herbert, “Affliction, V”

  • I have come around to the intuition that grounds Lewis’s thought. There is a created order, which we are not the authors of. Crucially, this order is good. That is because its author is good, and he made it out of love. If you are fortunate enough to be hit with this experience (it comes as a surprise gift), it is like dropping acid. Under its influence, you feel like you have gained perceptual access to the most fundamental layer, which was always there waiting to be noticed. Matthew B Crawford (and a little unrelated bonus material from Crawford)
  • “The critical question for our generation—and for every generation—is this: If you could have heaven, with no sickness, and with all the friends you ever had on earth, and all the food you ever liked, and all the leisure activities you ever enjoyed, and all the natural beauties you ever saw, all the physical pleasures you ever tasted, and no human conflict or any natural disasters, could you be satisfied with heaven, if Christ were not there? ”― John Piper, God Is the Gospel: Meditations on God's Love as the Gift of Himself

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