Another Kind of Comfort: Another Kind of Strength-5/28/23

The music that Bryan chose to complement the reading of the Word is a piece called “O Magnum Mysterium,” which is a hymn about the incarnation of Jesus, and you can Google it. Go on (what is it called again?) YouTube. It’s going to be an interesting morning. But the point is that this really, really big, great God actually cares about the pain that you’re feeling right this minute.

So, what pain are you experiencing today? What’s your greatest challenge today? What’s the thing that, more than anything else, keeps you awake at night, either literally physical pain, emotional pain, financial pain, that you lie in bed going through the same thought loops that you’ve gone through one or a million times?

The question this morning is does God really care about that? Sometimes maybe you, like me, wonder if God cares. Even in Isaiah 40, God says,

“O Jacob, how can you say the Lord does not see your troubles? O, Israel, how can you say God ignores your rights?”

And sometimes, if we’re honest, that’s exactly what we say — that God has ignored me, God has forgotten me. Maybe you’ve even thought, as I’ve thought at times in my life, God maybe thinks my life is kind of a joke.

A friend of mine wrote this week describing the way she encounters a certain kind of pain. Maybe some of you can relate to this. She wrote,

“Sometimes during the day or when I’m sitting in the dark holding my baby in just the right arm-numbing, spine-pulling, contorted way to keep him asleep for ten minutes, just so he can wake up and mess up my house and nerves, I ask God, ‘You there?’ It’s excruciating, and it’s lonely, and there’s actually no way that I can think or do one thing.”

So, God wants you to know this morning that he never grows weak or weary, that no one can measure the depths of his understanding.

“He gives power to the weak and strength to the powerless.”

And when it talks about “no one can understand his understanding” at this part of this passage, it’s talking about his understanding of you, not just his understanding of nuclear physics. But at this stage of this passage, he’s saying, “I know you better than you know yourself. I’m inside your pain more than you can ever imagine.”

So, my goal today is to deepen our understanding of how God actually meets us in our pain and how he comforts us. And so, because it’s Family Sunday, I’m turning to one of the highest forms of communication we know — cartoons. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Anatomy of Pain, and this is Penelope, the Pain Warrior. So, Penelope represents us as we go through life. Someone has said, “Into every life a little pain must fall.” Well, into most of our lives, it’s much more than a little pain. And she represents the way we sometimes feel when we first encounter pain. It’s like, “I got this! It is not going to beat me. I’m going to take it down. It is on!” But the funny thing about pain (and most of you know this) — that pain rarely comes alone; pain always brings a buddy. So, your car, which decides the day before you’re going to leave on that big trip you’ve been thinking about for three or four years, decides “I’m going to bite the dust.” But your car can’t just bite the dust. It has to call your refrigerator and say, “Hey, I’ve got an idea. Let’s both bite the dust.” What could be better than that?!

And so, pain seems to come in bunches. And then your refrigerator and your car get on a zoom call with your body and say, “We’re going to dial up some COVID or some cancer or some shingles, or you’re going to just step in a hole like a stupid person and twist your ankle. And now, all of a sudden, we’re in this whole world of pain. But as though that’s not enough, your boss decides that it’s his week to apply for Jerk Boss of the Year award, and someone who is generally somewhat rational becomes completely irrational and unreasonable. And no, John, I’m not talking about you, okay? And then your kid loses his mind and shaves his head or half his head, like the back half of his head, and all of a sudden, you’re saying what pretty much every human being in history has said in every time, in every culture — “I just want it to stop. Stop the world. I’m getting off.” And we’re looking for an exit sign from our pain.

And when pain gets bad enough, we will do almost anything to make it stop. That’s who we are. Things that we would never have imagined, things that we would have judged other people for doing. We’ll be thinking about crazy solutions to our pain. Can you believe that even in the 21st century, there are still people who are turning to an idol, formed in a mold, overlaid with gold, and decorated with silver chains? Can you believe that’s still happening in the modern world?

One of the last trips I took before COVID came to bless us was a trip to India. I went to India to visit some of the locations where our partners have dug wells. And when you give to dig wells, we go to actually see what’s going on the field. So, I was in this village of about twenty-four hundred people, with this temple, and you can see right to the left of the image that there is a grass-roof structure. And in this village, the Hindu priest ruled with an iron hand. He controlled every part of life. And when our partners, Praveen and some of his other pastor associates, came to this village to bring clean water, because the people in this village have been getting their water from groundwater that collected after rains, which was very full of all kinds of impurities and microorganisms … So, in the name of Jesus, Praveen came to this village and said, “We want to drill you a well so that you can have pure water.” And we went to actually see the well that had been drilled in that village using the funds that you have given, and we were standing there, and it was blazing hot.

So, we got under this little grass structure, this little roof thing, and the people were telling us stories about how the Hindu priest had come out when Praveen had come to town, and he had said, “I put a curse on this in the name of my gods, and the gods say that no matter how deep you drill this well, you will never hit water.” So, the challenge was on. So, the day came that they were going to drill the well. They brought the drill rig to the village. Praveen brought a van full of pastors who had been praying and fasting. They started to drill and at a relatively shallow depth, they struck the most beautiful, pure, clean water that came crashing up out of the ground. And at that point, that priest’s stock was pretty much bust. And there’s a whole story about that.

But they were telling us the story and we were just like, “Wow! This is awesome!” But we’re standing in this little grass-roof structure, and I’m noticing that there are these shapes on the ground. They look like maybe fire pits. One was square, and one was a circle, and one was a triangle. And I got very fascinated by … What are these shapes? What’s going on in these shapes? So, I asked, “What is this place?” I’m thinking maybe it’s a place they came as a village and had a barbecue. But then I thought, “They’re Hindu.” So, I don’t know what they were barbecuing, but … And the people said, “Oh, well, if you had been under that roof one year ago, we would have killed you without a thought because this was the most sacred spot in the village, and these were the places where we made sacrifices” that I can’t even describe in this meeting. Horrible! Unthinkable!

And, you know, you stand there with that, and you think, “What kind of messed-up monster people are these people? Maybe they should just die because why would they do that?” And then it occurred to me, “No, these people are just in pain, and they’re looking for any way to make it stop.”

And if you go to the “Comfort Store” in India, there’s not a lot to choose from. There’s not booze there. There’s not good food. You don’t get to go to Disney World. There’s not Netflix. Pretty much at the Comfort Store in that village, it’s just gods. In India, there are actually, more or less, 330 million gods. And every god is designed to offer a form of comfort. If you can’t have a baby, there’s a god. There’s a temple. You go. You pay money. If you want your enemy to die, there’s a god, or there actually many gods for that. If you want a certain job, there are gods for that. And so, you come to the Comfort Store, you choose a god, you pay the money, and you hope for comfort because that is the only thing you have.

Now, of course, we’re not like that. We’re modern. We go to the Comfort Superstore. The Comfort Superstore has lots of things, actually, whole aisles. Actually, it’s like the Mall of America times a million, and it all is right here on your phone. The best food in the world, the best scenery, the best entertainment, the best shopping. So many comforts! And you click “buy it now” — that is so comforting! Actually, physiologically, it’s comforting. Dopamine is released, and you feel a chemical-kind-of comfort surge through your body. Or you can doom scroll on your phone, which has become quite popular, and that’s also strangely comforting in some way. There are so many ways for us to find comfort, so many ways for us to escape our pain.

And the reality is that pretty much all of them, virtually all of them, were created by God. They are gifts to us from God. God is the one who created work for us before the fall. It’s a good thing. God is the one who wrote a whole book of the Bible about intimacy in marriage. God is the one who said in Psalm 104:15 that wine can make the heart glad. God is the one who created feasting. God has provided so many comforts.

But all of those earthly comforts have limits, right? If I’m eating a carton of Blue Bunny ice cream, it’s only comforting as long as I’m taking a bite. And when the ice cream is gone, it’s over. And then I got to pay the bill. When I hit “buy it now,” I get a certain kind of comfort, right? And then I get the package the next day. I don’t have to wait. And I open the package, and it’s a new computer. It’s like “this thing is a screamer!” It’s glowing! It’s like, okay, now what?

You know, it used to be that comforts lasted longer like when Jim was growing up in the Little House on the Prairie in Michigan, and he wanted a comfort. He would go to the Sears catalog, and he would order something; he would mail a letter off, and then you wait seven weeks. You get seven weeks of comfort literally! The anticipation was a kind of comfort, right, ’til got those boots. Yeah.

But now, we get it immediately. I can have the best comforts that money can buy right now. And that’s when the trouble really starts because when I stop eating or shopping or working or swiping, what happens? The pain kicks in again, and that’s when our God-given comforts can become something really dark. They can become obsessions and addictions and compulsions and attachments, and we can’t stop because we can’t bear feeling the pain again, and after that comfort that we’ve looked to save us is gone, the pain is even worse. Our comforts become our captors, our joys become our jailers, and finally, we put a carton of Blue Bunny Dutch chocolate ice cream to our heads and pull the trigger, or a bottle, or our career, or a credit card, or Amazon, or another binge watch, or Fortnite. And when it’s over, we’re not really comforted, not in our soul, and the path from delight to despair has never been shorter because there’s never been a moment in history when we could get those things. It was actually a mercy of God back in the days when we had to wait for comforts because now people are finding out in a nanosecond this isn’t cutting it, this is not bringing relief from my pain. And what do you do after that?

Thoreau said,

“Unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called games and amusements of mankind.”

And we live in a moment, brothers and sisters, where I’ve been hearing this phrase recently, where people say, “I’m going to live in the world that I create,” which basically means I’m going to curate and choose the comforts that I like, and I want to get to a place in life when I can only be doing the things that I find comforting. That’s the dream. But the reality is that — who wants to create a world where you have to depend on God? I want to create a world where I have enough money, I can do anything I want. And who wants to create a world where I have to be around people that I don’t like or that aren’t like me? And we have this illusion, this delusion, this dream of creating a world of comforts. What we don’t understand till it’s too late is that dream is actually separating us from God and separating us from one another and separating us from our true selves. It actually leads to isolation and actually leads to despair. And you know it. You know it. You know who really knows it is young people. They’ve figured it out.

So, let’s talk about a different kind of comfort. How does God respond to all of our idolatry? How does God respond to the way that we turn to the things he created and start bowing down before them and say, “Deliver me, deliver me from my pain?” Well, it’s surprising because from heaven, a cry erupts, “Comfort them!” Not “Obliterate them!” Not, “Hey, you made your bed. Now lie in it.” No.

“Comfort my people. Speak comfortably, speak tenderly to Jerusalem. Tell her that her sad days are gone, and her sins, the sins of our idolatrous attachments to the things of this world …God is ready to pardon them.”

This great, big, immense, transcendent God who calls out the stars to dance and knows the name of every single one of the trillion billion stars in the universe invades our world and our pain and our brokenness with a different kind of comfort. God does not usually take away our pain. Sometimes he does. God comes to be with us in our pain.

And this is what’s happening in Isaiah. You need to understand — when this was written, things were not about to get rosy for them. Things were actually going to get really, really bad and desperate for them. And God doesn’t say, “You know, I’m going to turn that around and make Israel great again.” What God says is “I am going to be with you no matter what.” He comes. He feeds his flock like a shepherd. He carries the lambs in his arms, holding them close to his heart. He gently leads the mother sheep with their young. See, God doesn’t come the way I want him to. He doesn’t come like Iron Man, obliterating my pain with a cosmic-pain ray gun. He comes like a shepherd, picking us up and carrying us close to his heart because, listen, Iron Man isn’t all he’s cracked up to be. It wasn’t no picnic for Pepper Potts, right, because he was a jerk. I didn’t have that in my notes. God comes to us, not with the momentary dopamine hit of a doughnut, but with the incomparable comfort of a father’s embrace. God says, “I have chosen you, and I will not throw you away. Don’t be afraid.” Why? Because I’m taking your pain away? Not always.

“Don’t be afraid for I am with you. Don’t be discouraged for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you … For I, the Lord, your God, hold your right hand. It is I who say to you ‘Fear not, for I am the one who helps you.’” [Isaiah 41:10,13]

So, let’s talk about how that works. What does that look like? Well, the golden key is found in the end of the chapter, verse 31.

“Those who wait for the Lord will gain new strength.”

You see, all those comforts that we talked about at the Comfort Store, those are all escape comforts, and sometimes those things can be helpful. They’re not all evil. But we need something more than an escape comfort. God is offering us an exchange. The word “wait” is literally “exchange.”

So, maybe you think about waiting like this. This is kind of how I think of waiting — just sitting, hoping something’s going to happen, hoping my train or my bus comes. But the word that’s used here in Isaiah 40 is a beautiful word picture. It’s the Hebrew word “qavah,” and it’s actually the word that’s used when someone would weave two ropes together. They would say they’re “waiting,” or they’re collecting, or they’re combining; they’re gathering those two things so that two things actually become one. The two ropes become one rope. The first time this word is used is in Genesis chapter 1, verse 9. It says,

“And God said, ‘Let us gather.’”

It’s the same word — wait. It’s the same word — gather. “Let us gather the waters.” He said,

“Let the waters [below] the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” [Genesis 1:9]

So, when God was creating the world, there was water everywhere. Water in the sky. Water just diffused. And God gathered up that water into a body, into a lake, where you can actually have fish and it’s beautiful, and you can dip a dipper in and get what you need. This is what God does. This is the way that God meets with us in our pain. God is calling us to turn our attention to God, to set our affections and our awareness on God. And the same way that a rope is woven together, we make God our center, and we are gathered, we are connected to God in a way that we have never been before.

Jesus said it this way.

“Live in me. Make your home in me just as I do in you. When you are joined with me and I with you, the relation intimate and organic, the harvest is sure to be abundant. I’ve loved you the way my Father has loved me. Make yourselves at home in my love.” [John 15:4,5,9 MSG]

Brothers and sisters, the essence of the Christian life is not learning information or living by some kind of moral code though those things are part of it. It is an intimate connection to the loving God who invites us into himself. Instead of saying to all these comforts in the Comfort Store “take me away, rescue me, medicate my pain,” we say to God, “You are my comfort.” There are no magic words. It’s not a magic incantation. But I am saying that if we know how to look, we can find God in our pain. We actually host the presence of God in our pain.

And then we exchange. The word “renew” is to exchange for something better. In our pain, we don’t always get relief, but we do always get him. And if in your pain, the only connection you have to God is to say, “God, take it away,” and that’s the only connection you have, you’re probably going to be disappointed.

So, here’s the question. Look at this picture. In our pain, do we reach for the bread or the key? Do we reach for the immediate comfort so that we can medicate or hide or forget our pain for a moment, but once we eat that bread, it’s gone and we’re hungry again? Or do we reach for God? Jesus said it this way —

“Come unto me all you who labor and are heavy laden.”

You’re just bogged down, you feel like you can’t go on, which is like a vast number of us sitting in here this morning. And I will do what?

“and I will give you rest.”

And it’s very interesting because he says, “Are you laboring? Take my yoke on you.” What? Okay, I’m weighed down, and you’re giving me a yoke. Thanks for that. You know what a yoke is, right? It’s those things that they put on oxen. They’re heavy. But he says when you take my yoke, when you choose to live in connection with me, in your pain and weariness, you actually find rest for your soul. Because none of those comforts in the Comfort Store, as scintillating as they are — not a new computer or a new car or a new season of college football or a new hit of whatever you’re looking at that you know you shouldn’t be — not only will they never provide rest for your soul, they actually degrade and deteriorate your soul till there’s nothing left. But Jesus said, “You will find rest for your soul.” It’s a different kind of comfort.

Here’s a paraphrase from the message of Matthew 11:28-30.

“Are you tired? Worn down? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me — watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

See, it’s not another thing to do. It’s another way to live. And I could illustrate it like this if we go back to the Comfort Store. And for every single one of those legitimate comforts that God has created, he’s also created a way for us to be connected to him in that comfort. For instance, God created work. I love work. I love what I do. I hope you do. Work can be very comforting to me. So, God created this thing called Sabbath. And over the last two and a half years, my wife and I have been pressing into Sabbath because when we press into Sabbath, which is the discipline of rest, we can actually experience work with God but never become captive to it, never bow down to it and make it the center of my life.

Or God created this thing called fasting. God created the comfort of food. It’s beautiful. It’s wonderful. We can have foods from all over the world. But those things can get out of order. They can become too important to us. So, in this season of my life, I’m learning how that through fasting, the beauty of it is that God wants to be in my food with me, that as I participate in that unforced rhythm of grace week by week, I enjoy the comforts of food without the bondage of food.

Making money, saving money can be very comforting. God commands us to save money in the Bible. But if that’s what you’re looking forward to, that I can get to this certain level and my life will be good, it will be the opposite. So, God creates this thing called generosity. And as we live generously, as we give generously, we can enjoy the comforts of money without being in bondage to money.

So, what comfort are you looking to, giving yourself to in the forlorn and impossible hope that when you get to a certain level of that comfort, your life is going to be good because you have been deceived? There are so many ways. Every part of life, as we’re going to see in just a minute, even breathing, I can experience the presence and comfort of God. I never knew. I never knew that God wanted to be a part of my life. Every single part of my life he wants to be intimately involved as my Friend, as my Father, as my Shepherd, as my Comforter. Wow!

So, this is how I want to live the rest of my life — the thirty or forty years I have left. (Nobody laughed. That’s great.) Isaiah says,

“Make a straight highway through the wasteland for our God! Fill in the valleys, and level the mountains and hills. Straighten the curves, and smooth out the rough places. Then the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all the people will see it together.” [Isaiah 40:3-5 NLT]

You see, back in Isaiah’s time when a really big, important person was coming to your city, they didn’t want that person to have to ride in the chariot around a mountain or right around a valley, or go down and up. If he was really important, this is what we want to do. We’re going to actually level that mountain, and we’re going to fill in that valley so that that person can come straight into my city because that he’s that important.

And in my life, this is the story of my life and this season, as my wife and I are encountering more pain than we ever have in our lives. But what I’m finding is I have this deep desire that the mountains, the barriers, the things I have erected in my life to feel safe, man, mow them down, God. Holy Spirit, mow them down. And the deficits in my life, the ways that I have been hurt or disappointed, Holy Spirit, fill them in because God, I want a straight path between you and me. I want you to come straight in — no boundaries, no barriers, no conditions, no fear. This is what God invites us to.

So, in my suffering, I pray for relief and deliverance because I know God cares and he invites me to pray, but now it’s become more of a conversation than an accusation. In my suffering, I receive the legitimate comforts that God provides, that material things provide. Listen, sometimes we can over spiritualize. Sometimes you just need sleep. Elijah, the prophet, was suicidal. God made him a meal and told him to sleep. And some of us just need to stop trying to be Superman or Superwoman or some kind of Messiah to meet everybody’s needs, and we actually need to be more open to earthly comforts. But ultimately, in my suffering, I embrace God’s invitation to press into his heart and experience a deeper level of connection than I’ve ever known in my life. I wait for him like a watchman waits for the morning because he promises to show up.

And when I look at this audience this morning. I am very deeply aware of the pain that many of you carry, and I suspect that there are countless more stories of pain. In our church, I know a lady whose husband abandoned her without reason, left her in a very desperate situation, and she’s finding comfort moment by moment as God speaks to her specifically and personally. I know people in this church who are experiencing cancer and other forms of debilitating and desperate diseases, and they’re experiencing a comfort through the Word of God as the promises of God are just actually coming to life. I have friends who are living today as exiles from their country. They’ve been told they can never return. They’re stateless. They will never see their family or their friends again, and they’re experiencing comfort as they encounter God in community in countless ways. There’s so many ways.

There are infinite ways that God wants to presence himself with us in our pain. When that happens, when that happens, there are these moments in the midst of our pain where we soar like an eagle. And you talk to the people in this church who have been there. There are moments in our lives where we are experiencing God and feeling connection to one another in a way that we never dreamed was humanly possible on this earth.

There are those times that we’re running. Whatever was chasing us, it’s still chasing us. But we find ourselves running in a way that we can’t even explain. We find ourselves living and breathing and going on and enjoying life. And there are moments when we’re just walking. There are moments for some of us where I think I can get out of bed because I’m experiencing the comfort of God in this moment, and that may be the biggest miracle of all. My friend, the North Hills mom who I read from this morning, later on in her email, she’ll say, “In my pain, I’ll ask God, ‘You here?’ And he’ll say, ‘Yup.’ And I’m like, ‘Cool.’” Sometimes the comfort’s just like that.

So, in a moment, I want us to stand, but before we do … Your pain is not mindless or without purpose. And I want to close with a quote, an ancient Greek quote from a poet named Aeschylus that has meant a lot to me.

“He who learns must suffer.”

I can’t think of anyone who has arrived at a deep place of intimacy with God who hasn’t suffered. Maybe it can happen. Maybe not everyone is as hardheaded as I am, but most of the time “he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”

So, I’m going to invite the worship team to come back up, and in a moment, we’re going to stand. But I just want us to not just talk about comfort. (Yeah, come on up.) I want us to experience God’s comfort, and I talked about breathing. One thing that I do at times when I have very little energy or mental bandwidth is I’ll just breathe out to God. I’ll breathe “Yahweh.” I’ll breathe in “Yah-,” and I’ll breathe out “weh.” Because sometimes our minds are so full, and our emotions are so depleted, and our energy is so low that all I can do is to invite God into that moment just to breathe. Just in your seat, you don’t have to say it out loud, try it with me. Breathe in, say “Yah-.” Breathe out and say “weh.” That’s his name, Yahweh, the eternally present one, the immanent one.

Another way that I’ll pray, and I’ll invite you to stand with me now. We’re going to do this together. Everybody stand up. Another way that I’ll pray is to pray, to breathe in, and say “Abba,” and then I’ll breathe out “I belong to you. I belong to you.” So, let’s just do that together. Just breathe in, say, “Abba.” Breathe out, “I belong to you.”

Abba, in our pain. Breathe out “I belong to you.” Abba, in my hunger, in my desperation for comfort, I choose not to turn first to the things of this world, the things that are material and temporary. I belong to you. I turn to you. I focus my attention. I make space in my spirit to encounter you.

So, we’re going to sing this song. When we sing this song, we’re actually singing a prayer. When we get to the verse where it says, “Abba, I belong to you,” we’re actually praying. And as we do that together, I just would invite you, as we pray, to pray and to breathe out, in and out, in and out, “Abba, I belong to you.” So, let’s sing together.