Sermons

THE desire for comfort may be a very high or a very low, a noble or a most ignoble wish. It is like the love of life, the wish to keep on living, which may be full of courage and patience, or may be nothing but a cowardly fear of death. We know what kind of comfort it must have been that St. Paul prayed for, and for which he was thankful when it came. We have all probably desired comfort which he would have scorned, and prayed to God in tones which he would have counted unworthy alike of God and of himself.

And the difference in the way in which people ask comfort of God, no doubt, depends very largely upon the reason why they ask it, upon what it is that makes them wish that God would take away their pain and comfort them. The nobleness of actions, we all know, depends more upon the reasons why we do them than on the acts themselves. Very few acts are so essentially noble that they may not be done for an ignoble reason, and so be come ignoble. Very few acts are so absolutely mean that some light may not be cast through them by a bright mctive burning within. And so it is not merely with what we do, but with what happens to us. It is not our fortune in life, our sorrow, or our joy; it is the explanation which we give of it to ourselves, the depth to which we see down into it, that makes our lives significant or in significant to us.

All this, I think, applies to what St. Paul says about the comfort which God had given him. He gave to it its deepest and most unselfish reason, and so the fact of God’s comforting him became the exaltation and the strengthening of his life. I should like to study his feeling about it all with you this morning. Out of your closets and pews, from many hearts that need it, hearts sore and wounded with the world, there go up prayers for comfort. This verse of St. Paul seems to me to shine with a supreme motive for such prayers as those, a motive which perhaps as we first look at it will seem overstrained and impossible; but which I hope we shall see is really capable of being felt, and of stirring to their deepest depths the desire and the gratitude of a strong man.

It does not matter what the special trouble was for which God had comforted St. Paul. It happened to be a certain deep anxiety about his church at Corinth. But it might have been anything. The point is this — that Paul thanked God because the comfort which had come to him gave him the power to comfort other people. “Blessed be the God of all comfort, who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble.” Now, my dear friends, try to recall the joy and peace and thankfulness that have ever filled your hearts when you became thoroughly sure that God had relieved you from some great danger, or opened His hand and shed upon you some great blessing. Think how you thanked Him. Remember how the sense that He loved you occupied your soul. Think how your sense of privilege exalted you and solemnized you. Think how your own happiness filled you with kindliness to other people. But ask yourself at the same time, “Did any such thought as this come up first and foremost to my mind, and seem to me the most precious part of all my blessing, that God had done this for me just to make me a fitter and more transparent medium through which He might send his comfort to other men? When He lifted me up from the gates of death did I thank Him most of all that my experience of danger and deliverance had made clear to some poor sufferer beside me how truly our God is the Lord of life and death? When He came and filled with His own presence the awful blank of my bereavement, did I praise Him most devoutly that my refilled and recreated life could become a gospel to other men of the satisfaction of His perfect friendship?” But this was the beauty of God’s comfort to St. Paul. “Blessed be God who comforteth us, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble.”

In the first place, then, I think the power of Paul or of any man to grasp and realize this high idea of the pur pose of the help which God sends, shows a very clear understanding that it is really God who sends the help. In deed, I think no man can really mount up to the idea that God truly and personally cares for him enough to reach down and turn the bitterness of his cup to sweetness, without being, as it were, compelled to look beyond himself. All strong emotions, all really great ideas, outgo our individual life, and make us feel our human nature. If you are not sure that any mercy comes to you from God; if, whatever pious words you use about it, the recovery of your health, or the saving of your fortune, seems to you a piece of luck, some good thing which has dropped down upon you from the clouds, then you may be meanly and miserably selfish about it. You shut it up within the jealous walls of your own life. It is a light which you have struck out for yourself, and may burn in your own lantern. But if the light came down from God, if He gave you this blessing, it is too big for you to keep to yourself. He must have meant it for a wider circle than your little life can cover, and it breaks through your selfishness to find for itself the mission that it claims. Oh, if men who are disgusted at their own selfishness and unsympathetic narrowness, and who try to break through it and come to their fellow-men in love, but cannot, would learn this higher and profounder method, that the only way really to come close to and to care for men is to realize God; the only way to love the children is to know the Father; the only way to make it our joy and mission to help mankind is to feel all through us the certainty that the help which has come to us has come from God!

Go on a little farther. A man whose first thought about any mercy to himself is that God means by it to help other people, must have something else besides this strong belief that his mercy does really come from God. He must have a genuine unselfishness and a true humility. He must have a habit of looking out beyond him self, a yearning and instinctive wish to know how what comes to him will change the lot and life of other people; and, along with this, a lowly estimate of his own self, a true humbleness of self-esteem. Put these together into a nature and you clear away those obstructions which, in so many men, stop God’s mercies short, and absorb, as personal privileges, what they were meant to radiate as blessings to mankind. Think of it even in reference to the lowest things. Who is the man whom we rejoice to see possessing wealth? Who is the man whose making money on the street delights us, because it means benefaction and help to other men? It is the reverent, the unselfish, and the humble man. It is the man who, as the treasure pours in at his doors, stands saying over it, “God sent this;” and, “I am not worthy of this; He could not have sent it just for me;” and, “Where are my brethren?” Reverence, Humility, Unselfishness. Those are the elements of true stewardship even in the lowest things, and also in the highest. Who is the man who, in his bereavement or his pain, receiving comfort from God radiates it, so that the world is richer by the help the Lord has given him? It is the reverent, the unselfish, and the humble man. The sunlight falls upon a clod, and the clod drinks it in, is warmed by it itself, but lies as black as ever, and sheds out no light. But the sun touches a diamond, and the diamond almost chills itself as it sends out in radiance on every side the light that has fallen on it. So God helps one man bear his pan., and nobody but that one man is a whit the richer. God comes to another sufferer, reverent, unselfish, humble, and the lame leap, and the dumb speak, and the wretched are comforted all around by the radiated comfort of that happy soul. Our lot has been dark in deed if we have not known some souls, reverent, unselfish, humble, who not merely caught and drank in themselves, but poured out on other sufferers, on us, the comfort of God.

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