Shalom Aleichem...
Reflections is a weekly Christian Teaching Ministry. Each week we will talk about the Bible and lessons we can put to use in our daily life. We will try to, on a weekly basis, provide to you stories, thoughts, and just easy ways to live your life on a straight path.
THIS WEEK'S TEACHING....March 1, 2021
Have you ever wondered about how chaotic, or comfortable, your life is?? You do realize that God has a lot to do with which of these adjectives rules your life.
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 may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. 5 For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. 6 If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer.7 Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort. 2 Corinthians 1:3-7
This passage repeats "comfort" again and again. What does Paul teach us hear about God's comfort?HARD ROAD: This life is tough and we will need some comfort along the way.
- Even if you were only half paying attention when you read the passage, you know the main word: “comfort.” It’s littered throughout the verses.
- Comfort is something that we all need from time to time. What truth does this passage have for us about what we can expect from God when we need comfort?
MORE ABOUT THAT COMFORT:
1. It’s part of who He is. 2 Corinthians 1:3 – “God of all comfort.”
It’s in His nature. Verse 3 gives Him the title “the God of all comfort.” It also declares Him to be the Father of compassion,” which is encouraging.
For those who have a vision of God as distant or indifferent, this is important. Providing comfort for the hurting is a part of who God is.
How does God comfort us?
a. Holy Spirit.
b. Providential occurrences.
c. Friends.
d. Church.
e. Speaking in prayer.
f. Encouraging Scripture.
Receiving comfort requires that we admit that we need it. Many are unwilling to acknowledge that.
Our stubbornness and refusal to look to God leaves us without much of the help that God is willing to give.
Think of how many are depressed, dejected, and demoralized today? It’s epidemic. Now think of the several things I just mentioned that God uses to comfort us and how underused those are. Just to cite one, the church is supposed to be a community of care and concern instead of a bunch of people sitting near each other weekly. How much more comforted we would be if we had a body of caring believers looking after us. For example, think of how much more care and concern has been shown since we started the card ministry. So many have expressed their appreciation for having people sending them notes of encouragement regularly.
2. He’s not selective in giving His comfort. 2 Corinthians 1:4 – “all our troubles.”
It’s nice that Paul gives us an inclusive statement when he tells us how many of our struggles we can expect God to provide comfort in. Verse 4 tells us “all our troubles.” So when we’re going to through struggles we can be confident that God is willing to provide us with comfort.
3. We are to share the comfort we’ve been given by God. 2 Corinthians 1:4 – “with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.”
We need God’s comfort and so we thankfully receive it. As we receive it, though, we are to share that comfort with those around us.
What might that look like?
a. A sympathetic phone call.
b. A caring visit.
c. Going to the hospital.
d. A card in the mail.
e. Telling the person that you’re praying for them and then finding out how things went.
f. A church full of embraces and handshakes.
g. A small group that keeps up with what’s going in your life.
If God offers comfort, why not just have God comfort them?
a. Some don’t know God.
b. Some won’t receive comfort from God.
c. Sometimes God uses us as His representatives to bring the comfort.
4. Comfort is essential because suffering is necessary. 2 Corinthians 1:5. "For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too."
The simple fact that we need to be comforted means that Christianity is something many wish that is wasn’t. Many want it to be a road of easy answers, quick fixes, and no suffering. That’s not what’s promised here.
God comforting us does not mean that He will necessarily remove the suffering.
People ask me often, :Why doesn’t God just take away the suffering?
Because we are in a world that does not share the vision and values of the gospel. As we attempt to pursue the expansion of the Kingdom, it puts us at odds with the world. The gospel is not a generic, safe morality tale. It is an indictment of the world and its leader. It is a repudiation of what the world holds dear. So there will be push back.
5. Being comforted is not the ultimate goal. 2 Corinthians 1:6. "If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer."
This verse can be a little difficult to understand at first. Let’s look at in halves.
The first half of the verse tells us that Paul sometimes was distressed, but it brought them comfort and salvation. What does that mean? Paul went through struggles and distress in order to preach the gospel to them. He was “distressed” by all he had to go through the preach the gospel to them but going through that enabled him to bring them salvation, which in turn brought them comfort.
The second half speaks of when Paul is comforted. Here he is speaking of the times when God comforts him through the struggles that he has to endure. When God does that for him, it gives encouragement to the Corinthians because they see how God is taking care of Paul and so they know they can be confident that he will take care of them too. Specifically, Paul says that it will give them a “patient endurance” when they’re in similar straights.
In both cases, the comfort is not an end to itself. In the first case, the larger end was their salvation; in the second case, the larger end was their endurance.
This is important to understand because, as alluded to earlier, we have the tendency to want God to focus His work on making our lives comfortable. Yes, He does comfort us, but only as part of His larger purposes. When our highest goal for our Christian becomes our comfort rather than His glory, we are way off track.
6. How many of you, over the past year, have heard this phrase....We’re in this together. 2 Corinthians 1:7. "Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort."
This is a nice point for Paul to end on. It’s a reminder that we are all are going to suffer and we all need comfort. So we need to be there for each other in both. We help each other when we suffer; we share in each other’s comfort.
We’re all going to be at each point at some point. So we need to be there for each other, just as we want others to be there for us.
CONFIDENCE THAT GOD WILL ACTUALLY PROVIDE THIS COMFORT: Paul knows a lot more about suffering than you do. Here are some examples for you to research....
- 2 Corinthians 2:12-13; 2 Corinthians 4:8-12; 2 Corinthians 6:3-10; 2 Corinthians 7:5; 2 Corinthians 11:23-33;
2 Corinthians 12:7-10.
There are several places in 2 Corinthians where Paul shares various details of his sufferings. Those sufferings are far beyond what any of us have dealt with, with rare exception.
I want to end on this point because it would be easy for us to dismiss Paul’s words about God’s comfort as being Pollyannaish. Because of that, we need to remember that he is the one with far greater experience with suffering and therefore he knows better than we do.
DID YOU EVER WONDER???
On the rules of life for graduates.
Some have said this was from Bill Gates talk to high school graduates but probably he did not say this unless he quoted Sykes.
RULE 1.
Life is not fair; get used to it.
RULE 2.
The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you
to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
RULE 3.
You will NOT make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school OR
college. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone, until you earn
both.
RULE 4.
If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss. He
doesn't have tenure.
RULE 5.
Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a
different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.
RULE 6.
If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your
mistakes, learn from them.
RULE 7.
Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now.
They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and
listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the
rain forest from the parasites of your parents' generation, try
"delousing" the closet in your own room.
RULE 8.
Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has
not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades; they'll give
you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear
the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
RULE 9.
Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very
few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on
your own time.
RULE 10.
Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave
the coffee shop and go to jobs.
RULE 11.
Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.
BOOKS OF THE BIBLE...A TEACHING
This week, we look at the cult known as....Jehovah’s Witnesses
Jehovah’s Witnesses are well known for the door-to-door pairs who encourage people to join Bible studies and purchase Watchtower literature. They have produced more than thirty billion pieces of literature and spend over a billion hours annually distributing it. The Watchtower magazine is published in nearly two hundred languages and has a worldwide circulation that more than doubles that of Reader’s Digest.
Jehovah’s Witness theology is based on the writings of Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916), who, influenced by certain Adventist preachers as to the second coming of Christ, founded the Zion’s Watch Tower and Herald of Christ’s Presence magazine in 1879. He wrote articles teaching that Christ had returned invisibly in 1874 and would establish God’s visible kingdom in 1914. Soon after, he established Zion’s Watch Tower Tract Society, the forerunner of the current Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. As they do today, Russell’s followers sold books, magazines, and other literature door to door. In 1904, he completed his six-volume Studies in the Scriptures.
Then 1914 passed without Russell’s prophecies coming true, and he died in 1916. His successor was Joseph Rutherford, a prolific writer of nearly a hundred books and tracts. Rutherford taught that Christ’s invisible return began, rather than ended, in 1914, and that God’s kingdom would arrive in 1925. This also failed. When Rutherford died in 1942, his replacement was Nathan Knorr, best known for (1) his training programs for door-to-door work and (2) the New World Translation of the Bible, which “restored” the name Jehovah to the New Testament (Jehovah is based on an Old Testament Hebrew word, translated LORD in most English versions. It does not exist in Greek, the primary original New Testament language). The New World Translation also differs from recognized scholarship in altering the translation of passages that touch on the deity of Christ.
Even before Knorr’s death, in 1977, major reorganization of the Watchtower Society and its entities occurred. Under his leadership, the Society had predicted Christ would return in 1975 and establish an earthly paradise. When this likewise failed, many Witnesses were disillusioned. A second restructuring followed in 2000, separating administrative duties from the “ministry of the word.” Subsequent leaders have sought to downplay the setting of dates and create explanations for the “seeming” failure of previous prophecies.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are discouraged from questioning their leaders’ teachings. The Watchtower has admonished, “We should seek for dependent Bible study rather than for independent Bible study” (e.g., 09/15/11, 4885). Central to these teachings are that God the Father is Jehovah and that he, the only true God, must be referenced by this name alone. Jesus is a lesser god, created by Jehovah as the Archangel Michael; through him the world and everything else was created. The Trinity, therefore, is a false teaching with origins in ancient Babylonian theology. Jesus’ earthly life was not an incarnation—his birth was as an ordinary human. Thus his sacrificial death on the cross cancelled out Adam’s sin but no one else’s. Further, his resurrection was as an angelic spirit being, not with a glorified body. His bodily appearances to his disciples were in a temporary form, as angels can sometimes take on a temporary body. And finally, with regard to the nature of God, Jehovah’s Witnesses teach that the Holy Spirit is an impersonal force (not the third person of the Trinity).
With regard to humanity, Jehovah’s Witnesses speak of Christ’s ransom as applying only to those who earn it through adherence to Watchtower doctrine and practices. Among the righteous are two classes of people. The “anointed class” numbers 144,000 (taken from Revelation 7:4). This group is variously described as either very righteous Witnesses who died before 1935, or who were already alive, even as infants, in 1918. The anointed class will rule in heaven with Christ. The “other sheep” (see John 10:16) are the rest of the faithful Witnesses. They will not go to heaven, but will live forever in an earthly paradise. Humans have no eternal spirit that lives on after physical death. The body simply lies in the grave until the resurrection. At Christ’s return the dead are raised and the great battle of Armageddon takes place, followed by the Judgment. The anointed ones go to heaven, the other sheep go to the earthly paradise, and all the rest are annihilated and cease to exist.
Socially, the Jehovah’s Witnesses face a number of challenges. They do not celebrate any holidays, religious or national, or even birthdays, since they view a holiday as giving honor to someone or something other than Jehovah. For the same reason, they refuse to salute the flag or say the Pledge of Allegiance. More controversially, Witnesses refuse to have blood transfusions, believing the Bible prohibits it. The Supreme Court ruled that religious conviction does not allow someone to refuse blood transfusion if it is court-ordered, but court intervention has been rare, and many have died in need of a transfusion.
The idea that the highest God created the universe through a lesser god is not new with Jehovah’s Witnesses’ teaching. The ancient Greeks believed spirit was pure, and flesh (the material world) was evil. In order to avoid contamination by proximity to material things, the high God created a lesser god through whom the world was created. This philosophy crept into some early Christian heresies as an attempt to explain how Jesus could still be “god” yet not equal to God the Father. The essential unity and equality of the Father, Son, and Spirit is well supported in Scripture, however, meaning that Jehovah’s Witnesses are not (nor have they ever claimed to be) just another Christian denomination.
HAVE A SAFE AND BLESSED WEEK:)
Ho'omaikaʻi ka Pua iā kākou