The Purpose and Use of Comfort

“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, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God” — 2 COR. i. 3, 4.

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.

I know one danger which I may seem to incur as I speak thus. It may appear as if in order to find a deep, far-reaching purpose in God’s goodness to our souls, to trace it out into designs for other people, we had to take away something from its freedom and spontaneousness; as if it interfered with that first consciousness of the re ligious life, the first and most surprising, as it is also the last and sweetest and most inexhaustible, that God loves each of us distinctly, separately, and blesses each of us out of His personal love. Nothing must interfere with that. Whatever mercy falls into our lot must be felt warm with the personal love of Him who sends it. It would be better to lose all the larger and longer thoughts of God’s care for the world, and think of Him, as men have thought, merely in the light of His love for the individual, than to become so absorbed in the larger thought that the individual should seem to be only the unconsidered machinery through which His power reached the world, blessed by accident, as it were, and on the way, as the blessing sped to some more general and distant need. But we are reduced to no such dilemma. The simpler ideas of religion include the more profound, and open into them without losing their own simplicity. The soul, I think, which has really reached the idea that what God does for it has purposes beyond it in the good of others, comes to a deeper knowledge of the love of God for it. It finds itself honored with confidence and use, as well as gratified with happiness. The older children of a family gradually come to the knowledge of what deeper purposes run through the government of the household. When a child is young, it seems as if his father’s purpose concerning him were just that he should find every hour pleasant, and be happy all the time. As he grows up he learns that his father is treating him with reference to some thing which lies deeper than his happiness, and also that what his father does to him has reference to the whole family, and is part of a larger scheme. Does that lessen the warmth of his personal gratitude and love? Not unless he is a very mean-minded and jealous child indeed. If he has any largeness of character, it all comes out. A new sacredness appears in the kindness when its designs are known, and as gratitude grows reasonable it grows deeper. So it is with gratitude to God. The superstitious devotee begs for a kindness which is to have no end beyond himself. He asks for comfort and help as if he had to tease it from a God of whims; but the Christian asks, as his highest privilege, to be taken into the purposes of a purposeful Father, and counts it the best part of the stream which refreshes his life, that it goes on through his to refresh some other life beyond. Oh, let us never fear that in making God considerate and reasonable we shall lose His affection; let us never try to keep His love by denying His law. Let us be sure that the more we realize His vaster purposes, the more dearly we can feel His personal care.

And one thing more let me say here. This higher thought of God and His blessings will always be easier and more real to us in proportion as we dwell habitually upon the profounder and more spiritual of His mercies. If what I am in the habit of thanking God for is mainly food and clothes and house, it will not be easy for me to realize the deepest purpose for which God gives me those things; it will be very easy for me to take them as if the final purpose of them was that I might be warm and well-fed. But if what I thank Him for is spiritual strength, the way in which He helps me bear pain, resist temptation, and feed upon spiritual joy, — in one word, if what I thank Him for most is not that He gives me his gifts, but that He gives me Himself, — then I cannot resist the tendency of that mercy to outgrow my life. The more spiritual is a man’s religion, the more expansive and broad it always is. A stream may leave its deposits in the pool it flows through, but the stream itself hurries on to other pools in the thick woods; and so God’s gifts a soul may selfishly appropriate, but God Himself, the more truly a soul possesses Him, the more truly, it will long and try to share Him.

Thus I have tried to picture the man who in the profoundest way accepts and values God’s mercies. ‘You see how clear his superiority is. The Pharisee says, “I thank Thee that I am not as other men are,” and evidently it is his difference from other men that he values most, and he means to keep himself different from other men as long as possible. The Christian says, “I thank Thee that Thou hast made me this, because it is a sign and may be made a means of bringing other men to the same help and joy.” You see how different the two men are: one is hard and selfish; the other is warm and generous. And yet there must be people here this morning who have knelt side by side and both said sincerely, “We bless Thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life,” who were as far apart from ona another as the Pharisee is from the Christian spirit.

But having said thus much in general about the way in which men receive God’s comforts, now I should like to take, one after another, a few of the special helps which God gives to men, and see, very briefly, how what I have been saying applies to each of them.

The first of the comforts of God to which I would apply our truth is the comfort which God sends a man when he is in religious doubt. And that does not by any means always take the shape of a solution of his difficulties, and a filling of every darkness with perfect light. God may do that. God does often do that for men. I think that none of us ever ought to believe that any re ligious difficulty of his is hopeless, and to give it up in despair. We ought always to stand looking at every such difficulty, owning its darkness, but ready to see it brighten as the east brightens with the rising of the sun. Many of our religious doubts are like buildings which stand beside the road which we are travelling, which, as we first come in sight of them, we cannot understand. They are all in confusion. They show no plan. We have come on them from the rear, from the wrong side. But, as we travel on, the road sweeps round them. We come in front of them. Their design unsnarls itself, and we understand the beauty of wall and tower and window. So we come to many religious questions from the rear, from the wrong side. Let us keep on along the open road of righteousness. Some day we shall perhaps face them and see their orderly beauty.

No doubt God does thus answer our questions for us* sometimes if we will “walk in His ways.” But he knows little of the abundance of God’s mercy who thinks that there is no other comfort for the doubting man than this.

He has had little experience of God who has not oftec felt how sometimes, with a question still unanswered, a deep doubt in the soul unsolved, the Father will fold about His doubting child a sense of Himself so deep, so true, so self-witnessing, that the child is content to carry his unanswered question because of the unanswerable assurance of his Father which he has received. Is that a fancy? Surely not. Surely you are comforting your child just in that way every day; comforting him with your love, and the peace of your presence, which passeth all his understanding, for the hundred questions which yow cannot answer, and the hundred puzzles which you cannot make him understand. Suppose God gives that sort of comfort to any man. Thenceforth .the doubter goes with his curious doubts, not solved, but wraptabout and lost in the richness of a personal faith. But tell me, is it the gain of that one doubter only? Is the world no richer? Is no other questioner helped? Oh, when I see how few men are aided by the arguments with which their friends plead for their faith, compared with those to whom religion becomes a clear reality from the sight of some fellow-man who is evidently living with God, who carries the life of God wherever he goes; when I see how the real difficulty of multitudes of bewildered men is not this or that unsolved problem, but the whole incapacity of comprehending God; when I see this, I understand how the best boon that God can give to any group of men must often be to take one of them — the greatest of them it may be, the least of them it may be — and, bearing witness of Himself to him, set him to bearing that witness of the Lord to his brethren which only a man surrounded and filled with God can bear.

And when we look at the other side, at the doubter himself, and his feeling about the removal of his doubt, it is oven more plain. I can find no certainty about religious things, and I hardly dare ask for certainty. It seems like haggling and arguing with God to tell him of my doubts. Who am I that He should care to convince me and answer my questions? It is a bad mood, but it is common enough. But if I can count my enlightenment as something greater than my own release from doubt; if I can see it as part of the process by which “the light that lighteneth every man” is slowly spreading through the world, then it no longer is insignificant. I dare to hope for it. I dare to pray for it. I make myself ready for it. I cast aside frivolity and despair, the two benighteners of the human soul, and when God comes and over, under, nay, through every doubt proves Himself to me, I take Him with a certainty which is as humble as it is solemn and sure.

2. Turn to another of the consolations which God sends to men: the way He proves to us that the soul is more than the body. In the breakage or decay of physical power He brings out spiritual richness and strength. This was something that St. Paul knew well. Only two chapters later in this same epistle there comes the great verse where he describes it. “Though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.” It is something whose experience is repeated constantly on every side of us. It is hard for us to imagine how flat and shallow human life would be if there were taken out of it this constant element, the coming up of the spiritual where the physical has failed; and so, as the result of this, the impression, made even upon men who seem to trust most in the physical, that there is a spiritual life which lies deeper, on which their profoundest reliance must and may be placed. A man who has been in the full whirl of prosperous business fails in these hardpressed days, and then for the first time he learns the joy of conscious integrity preserved through all temptations, and of daily trust in God for daily bread. A man who never knew an ache or pain comes to a break in health, from which he can look out into nothing but years of sickness; and then the soul within him, which has been so borne along in the torrent of bodily health that it has seemed almost like a mere part and consequence of the bodily condition, separates itself, claims its independence and supremacy, and stands strong in the midgtj)f weakness, calm in the very centre of the turmoil and panic of the aching body. The temper of the fickle people changes, and the favorite of yesterday becomes the victim of to-day; but in his martyrdom for the first time he sees the full value of the truth he dies for, and thanks the flames that have lighted up its preciousness. Now ask yourself in all these cases if it must not be an element in the comfort which fills the sick room, or gathers about the martyr’s stake, that by this revelation of the spiritual through the broken physical life other men may learn its value. This is what makes the sick rooms and the martyr fires reasonable. In them has been made manifest by suffering that the soul is really more than the body, that the soul can triumph when the body has nothing left but disease and misery. There are young people here looking forward to their lives, wondering what God haa in reserve for them in these mysterious and beautiful years which lie before them. It may be health, strength, joy, activity. I trust it is. But you must own that it would be no sign of God’s displeasure, but rather of His truest love, if the life which He assigned should prove to be all comprised in this: that by some form of suffering and disappointment you were first to find out for yourself, and then to manifest to some circle of your fellow-men, that the soul is more precious than the body, and has i happiness and strength which no bodily experience can touch. What would you not suffer if your life could bo made a beacon to show the world that?

This is the secret of great men. And in all the greatest men there is some sense of this always present. No man has come to true greatness who has not felt in some degree that his life belongs to his race, and that what God gives him He gives him for mankind. The different degrees of this consciousness are really what makes the different degrees of greatness in men. If you take your man full of acuteness, at the top of his specialty, of vast knowledge, of exhaustless skill, and ask yourself where the mysterious lack is which keeps you from thinking that man great, — why it is that although he may be a great naturalist, or a great merchant, or a great inventor, he is not a great man, — the answer will be here, that he is selfish: that what God gives him stops in himself; that he has no such essential humanity as to make his life a reservoir from which refreshment is distributed, or a point of radiation for God’s light. And then if you take another man, rude, simple, untaught, in whom it is hard to find special attainments or striking points of character, but whom you instinctively call great, and ask yourself the reason of that instinct, I think you find it in the fact that that man has this quality: that his life does take all which it receives, not for its own use but in trust; that in the highest sense it is unselfish, so that by it God reaches men, and it is His greatness that you feel in it. For greatness after all, in spite of its name, appears to be not so much a certain size as a certain quality in human lives. It may be present in lives whose range is very small. There is greatness in a mother’s life whose utter unselfishness fills her household with the life and love of God, transmitted through her consecration. There is greatness in a child’s life who is patient under a wrong and shows the world at some new point the dignity of self-restraint and the beauty of conquered passions. And thence we rise until we come to Christ and find thetperfection of His human greatness in His trans missiveness; in the fact that what He was as man, He was not for Himself alone but for all men, for mankind. All through the range of human life, from lowest up to highest, any religious conception of human greatness must be ultimately reducible to this: a quality in any man by which he is capable first of taking into himself, and then of distributing through himself to others, some part of the life of God.

I spoke just now of Jesus and His greatness. It seems to me that most of the struggles of theology to define His work are really trying to get hold of and utter this idea: that in Him was the perfect power of uttering God to men and of being full of God not for Himself only but for mankind. His headship of our race, His mediatorship, His atonement, are various ways of stating this idea. Everything that He was and did, He was and did for us. He lived his life, He died his death, for us. He took sorvow for us. He took joy and comfort for us also. Let me not say that Christ saves us only by what He suffered for us. He saves us by what He enjoyed for us too. The completeness and unity of His salvation lies in the completeness and unity with which His whole life, in its joy and pain together, lies between us and God, so that through it God comes to us and we go to God. Let us always pray that we may lose the blessing of no part of the complete mediatorship of our Mediator.

3. There is one other of the comforts of God to which I hoped that we might apply our truth, but I must take only a moment for it. I mean the comfort which God gives a man who has found out his sin and has repented of it. That comfort is forgiveness, — forgiveness promised by Christ, assured by the whole loving nature of God, and sealed by the new life of thankful obedience which begins at once in the forgiven man. And what shall we say of that forgiveness? Is it only for the forgiven man lhat it is bestowed, that God loves to bestow it so? It often seems to me as if we took too low a ground in pleading with the man living in sin and indifference to turn around, to be converted and live another life. We tell him of his danger. That puts it on the lowest ground. We assure him that no man can go on in wilful sin in a universe over which a good God reigns, without sooner or later coming to unhappiness, nay, without really being in unhappiness all the time, however it may seem to him. We go higher than that: we tell him of the happiness of the life with God. We assure him of faculties in himself, capable of a kind of pleasure which he does not know, which will come out to their true enjoyment if he will only come to God. We tell him of the heaven of the inner life here, and then point onward to the dim but certain joys of the heaven that stands with its golden walls and gates of pearl in the splendor of the revelation there. Many men hear and believe. Many men hear and do not believe. Suppose we took a higher strain; suppose we cast all selfishness aside; .suppose we pointed to a world all full of wickedness, a world self-willed, rebellious against God; suppose we went to men and said: “Think of this. Every time any man humbly takes God’s forgiveness, enters into Christ’s service, begins a godly life, that man becomes a new witness to this world of how strong and good the Saviour is. Here is Christ. There are the men who need Him. If you will let Him fill and possess your life, He will make these men see Him through you. And look, how they need to see Him! Not for yourself now, but for them, for Him, take Hia forgiveness and give up yourself inwardly and outwardly to Him.” So used one grows to find men respond to the noblest motives who are deaf to a motive which is less noble, that I am ready to believe that there are men among you, whose faces I know, whom I have so often urged to be Christians, who might feel this higher appeal. Is it nothing that by a new purity and devotion in youi life, brought there by obedience to Christ, you may help men out of their sins to Him? His promises seem to the men you meet too good to be true, so glorious and sweet that they are unreal. Take them to yourself. Let them shine in their manifest power through the familiar windows of your life. Be a new man in Christ for these men’s sake. Put your hand in His, that as He leads you other men, who have turned away from Him, may look and see you walking with Him, learn to love Him through your love. I do not believe any man ever yet genuinely, humbly, the roughly gave himself to Christ without some otl.er finding Christ through him. I wish it might tempt some of your souls to the higher life. I hope it may. At least I am sure that it may add a new sweetness and nobleness to the consecration which some young heart is making of itself to-day, if it can hear, down the new path on which it is entering, not merely the great triumphant chant of personal salvation, “Unto Him that loved us and washed us from our sins be glory and dominion;” but also the calmer, deeper thanksgiving for usefulness, “Blessed be the God of comfort, who comforteth us that we may be able to comfort them that are in tribulation.” Such are a few of the illustrations and

applications of the truth which I have tried to define and to urge upon you this morning. The truth is that we are our best when we try to be it not for ourselves alone, but for our brethren; and that we take God’s gifts most completely for ourselves when we realize that He sends them to us for the benefit of other men, who stand beyond us needing them. I have spoken very feebly, unless you have felt something of the difference which it would make to all of us if this truth really took possession of us. It would make our struggles after a higher life so much more intense as they become more noble. “For their sakes I sanctify myself,” said Jesus; and He hardly ever said words more wonderful than those. There was the power by which He was holy; the world was to be made holy, was to be sanctified through Him. I am sure that you or I could indeed be strengthened to meet some great experience of pain if we really believed that by our suffering we were to be made luminous with help to other men. They are to get from us painlessly what we have got most painfully from God. There is the power of the bravest martyrdom and the hardest work that the world has ever seen.

And again, it would make our spiritual lives and experiences more recognizable and certain things. Not by mere moods, not by how I feel to-day or how I felt yesterday, may I know whether I am indeed living the life of God, but only by knowing that God is using me to help others. No mood is so bright that it can do without that warrant. No mood is so dark that, if it has that, it need despair. It is good for us to think no grace or blessing truly ours till we are aware that God has blessed some one else with it through us.

I have not painted an ideal and impossible picture to you to-day, my friends. This truth and all the motives that flow from it may really fill your life. They filled the life of Christ. Come near to Him; be like Him, and they shall fill yours. So your Gethsemane and the an gels that come to you after it may be precious to you as His were to Him, not only for the peace which they brought Him, but because they were to be the fountain of strength and hope to countless souls forever. May God grant us something of the privilege of Christ, which was to live a manly life for God’s sake, and also to live a godly life for men’s sake; for it was thus that He was a mediator between God and man.