2 Corinthians 1:3-11 | Trusting God Who Raises the Dead

Happy Mother's Day to all of the moms out there! My name is Jason Barrest; I serve as the pastor of Emmanuel Church in Fullerton. I have the privilege of having Ben John Lee's pastor. I was his pastor when he came over to you, so we view John as our sent missionary to Artesia. It was a joy for us to be able to send him here and a delight to hear of all the good things that are happening in what we view as our sister church. So, happy Sunday, First Baptist Artesia.

This Sunday, John and I are doing a pulpit swap. We were at the same pastor's fellowship this week, and instead of trying to enjoy pastoral fellowship and write a sermon at the same time, we decided to switch pulpits today. So, he's preaching at Emmanuel Church right now. I am preaching an old sermon at your church. So, it's a delight to be with you.

As we prepare to hear from God's Word, let's go to the Lord one more time in prayer and ask for his help. Let's pray.

Father, you are indeed a good God, and we come to you today and confess that everything good that we have comes from you. So, Father, we come to you as your beloved children, asking you to hear our prayers and to answer. Father, we pray today for First Baptist Church of Artesia. We pray that you would be at work here, causing this church to be a faithful gospel witness here in Artesia. Father, we do pray that First Baptist Artesia would be a church that preaches the gospel faithfully, weekend in and week out, as they are gathered. We pray that they would be faithful to preach the gospel throughout the weeks as they are scattered into the community here. We pray that through the witness of this church, many would come to know Christ in the days ahead.

Father, we do pray that you would help First Baptist Artesia to be a church that demonstrates unity in diversity. We pray that in a world that is so divided along so many lines, that this would be a church that shows the kind of unity that can only happen because of Christ. Father, we pray that people from different backgrounds, people of different ages, people of different socioeconomic status would demonstrate their unity in Christ that shatters these walls of separation — walls that Christ has come to overcome. Father, we do pray for the mothers here today. We thank you for them. We pray that they would be encouraged not only today, but every day in their work. We pray that you would help the mothers to find joy in the reality that they get to picture what you are like, our Heavenly Father, to children. Father, we pray that the women today would find strength and encouragement to persevere in being faithful in their work. We pray as well not only for physical mothers, but for spiritual mothers as well, that you would encourage the women here in their work of spiritual mothering, of taking responsibility in helping other Christians to grow.

Father, we pray today for Emmanuel Church of Orange County. We thank you for the opportunity we have to link arms together as churches here in Southern California. We do pray that as John prepares to preach there even now, that you would be with him and that you would fill him with your Spirit, and that you would cause him to preach your Word faithfully for the building up of that church. Father, we do pray today for your gospel to be at work both here and around the world. We thank you for the ministry of ACME, for the opportunity that John had to visit the ACME conference this week. We pray for good fruit through ACME, both here in the US and around the world. Thank you for the good work that's happening in other parts of the world that ACME has been able to fund: good work of church planting, of translation of the Bible and good Christian resources into other languages, for the training of pastors and church planters. Father, we pray that this work would bear fruit and increase so that your gospel would spread around the world.

Finally, Father, we pray today for your Word to be at work among us as we prepare to sit under it. Father, we pray that your Spirit would be at work through me as I hold out your Word. Father, we pray that your people would be encouraged and built up. We pray this in Christ's name, amen.

The Overlooked Resurrection

As a pastor, perhaps my favorite job, or maybe my second favorite job, is membership interviews. After preaching the gospel, I think membership interviews may be my favorite part of being a pastor because in a membership interview, I have an opportunity to sit with another Christian and to hear about God's work in their life and to hear about the miracle of the new birth and how God brought this soul from darkness to light, from death to eternal life.

And in my membership interviews, one of the final things that I do is I ask people to share the gospel with me. I want to have a sense that they know the gospel message, the message that has saved them. Now, when these prospective members share the gospel, they usually share about our Creator God, who is both loving and holy. And they share about human beings, who are created in the image of God and yet have sinned against our good God. And they share about Jesus, God become man, who lived and died a sacrificial death on the cross for sinners. And they tell me, usually, that if we repent of our sins and trust in Christ, that we would have salvation.

And yet, you'd be surprised how often people forget one key part of the gospel. I actually left it out just now. Did you catch it? The resurrection. So often, they talk about Jesus' life and his death and his incarnation, and yet they leave out the resurrection. And when they do, I usually say something like, "And did Jesus stay dead?" And with sheepish looks, I hear, "No, three days later. He rose again, victorious on the third day."

Why does this happen? Why would the resurrection, perhaps the most crucial part of the gospel message, be left out? Apostle Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 15 that if Jesus had not been raised from the dead, "we Christians ought to be the most pitied of all people." He says in 1 Corinthians 15, "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is in vain. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is empty and futile. And you are still in your sins. If we have hope in this life only in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied" (1 Corinthians 15:17, 19).

We can spend the rest of our lives learning about the resurrection of Jesus Christ in all of its aspects and never come to the end of it. But today, this morning, we're going to zoom in on how we as believers can apply the truth of the resurrection to our lives. And you know that we can do this. We can apply the resurrection on a daily basis, and as we'll see in this passage, especially when we experience suffering.

In a beautiful passage of Scripture, the Apostle Paul is going to model for us in this text how to do this. He shows us masterfully how we as believers ought not to take the resurrection for granted. Paul shows us how we can wield our theology of the resurrection like a sword, putting to death our doubts, our fears, and our temptations. And not only that, as we will see, our theology of the resurrection is meant to produce for us confidence in God for today and hope in God for eternity. Confidence in God for today and hope in God for eternity.

So in our passage today, the Apostle Paul remembers a time when the truth of the resurrection came alive for him. And Paul doesn't record this event as a merely personal experience; he shares his experience to encourage the faith of these believers, to encourage the faith of other Christians. So wherever you find yourself in your relationship with the Lord, today our passage is a lightning bolt of truth about the resurrection. And I pray that it would land home for us the truth of the resurrection.

Our Hope in God Who Raises the Dead

So let's look at 2 Corinthians chapter one, and we're going to be looking at verses 3-11 of 2 Corinthians chapter one, but we're going to give special focus to verses 8-11. And if you're taking notes, our main point today is this: Christians set their hope on God who raises the dead. Christians set their hope on God who raises the dead. And it is my prayer that we would see the resurrection of Jesus Christ as our hope for today and our hope for eternity.

We're going to walk through the text a little out of order today. I hope Apostle Paul will forgive me when I meet him one day for taking his text out of order, but I think it will help us make sense of what he is doing in this text. So if you're taking notes, three points: Trial Faced, that's point number one; Comfort Received, that'll be verses 9 and 10; and then point number three, Comfort Shared. And that will be verse 11, and then I'll reference back to verses 3 and 4 as well. So, Trial Faced, Comfort Received, Comfort Shared.

Now this letter of 2 Corinthians was written by the Apostle Paul, the man that God used to plant this Corinthian church. Paul was originally a Pharisee. He was a skeptic of Jesus and of his teachings, and he even counted himself an enemy of Christ. That is, until the day that he met Jesus himself face-to-face on the road to Damascus. Paul was on his way to Damascus, Acts tells us, breathing threats against Christians and against the church, when Jesus appeared to him. And that's when Paul's life was changed forever. Jesus called Paul to be his witness. You can read this account in the New Testament book of Acts in chapter nine. Jesus says this about Paul:

But the Lord said to him, “Go, for this man is my chosen instrument to take my name to Gentiles, kings, and Israelites. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.” — Acts 9:15-16 (CSB)

And from that moment, the moment that Paul met the risen Christ, he became Jesus' apostle and missionary church planter. And here in 2 Corinthians 1, Paul is reporting back to the church about his recent missionary endeavors, and he begins describing to them the persecution that he faced. Now listen as I read the passage. I'm going to read starting in verse 3, but just as a reminder, most of our time is going to be spent on verses 8-11. And as you listen, notice that Paul in verses 3-7 lays out God's purposes in our suffering, more broadly. And then in our section, verses 8-11, he demonstrates God's purposes in his own suffering, applying those truths.

So let's read beginning in verse 3 of 2 Corinthians chapter one. This is God's Word:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort. He comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any kind of affliction, through the comfort we ourselves receive from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ overflow to us, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation. If we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings that we suffer. And our hope for you is firm, because we know that as you share in the sufferings, so you will also share in the comfort. We don’t want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, of our affliction that took place in Asia. We were completely overwhelmed—beyond our strength—so that we even despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death, so that we would not trust in ourselves but in God who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a terrible death, and he will deliver us. We have put our hope in him that he will deliver us again while you join in helping us by your prayers. Then many will give thanks on our behalf for the gift that came to us through the prayers of many. — 2 Corinthians 1:3-11 (CSB)

Trial Faced: Overwhelmed Beyond Strength

That's point number one: Trial Faced, verses 8 and 9. Paul is giving the Corinthians this update on his missionary endeavors in Asia, and he says that the persecution that they faced there was so extreme that, one, they were completely overwhelmed, he says, by this persecution. He says that it was beyond their strength, beyond what their physical strength could take. And he says that it got to the point that Paul and his ministry partners were convinced that they were going to die for the gospel in Asia. He says, in verse 8, they "despaired of life itself," and in verse 9, "indeed we felt that we had received the sentence of death." They were convinced that they were going to face a death sentence for taking the gospel to Asia. "Completely overwhelmed, beyond our strength."

Have you ever felt this way? That is actually the theme of this letter of 2 Corinthians: that weakness is the way God works, not through strong people doing great things for him. No, God works through weak people, demonstrating his strength through them. God works not through our strength but through his strength. And in fact, God will give us more than we can handle in our own strength so that we can learn to lean on him. He delights in demonstrating his strength through weak vessels so that he will get all the glory. Brothers and sisters, as God has brought you to a place where your circumstances are beyond your strength or more than you can handle, do you see that that is his plan to meet you in your weakness with his strength?

Now Paul not only came to the end of his strength, he came to the brink of death. You see it there: death. Death, we don't like to talk about death. We don't like to think about death. The 17th-century Christian philosopher, Blaise Pascal, wrote this about death. He said, "Being unable to cure death, mankind has decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things." And then he goes on to talk about how human beings love to fill their lives with preoccupations and diversions, distractions and entertainments, in order to avoid thinking about death. Here's a philosopher saying that we have no answer to death, and so we try our hardest not to think about it. We're uncomfortable thinking about it. We're uncomfortable talking about it. Why is this? Because it's the great inevitability that is completely beyond our control, and the reality that we can all face, and the reality that we have no strength to overcome.

By nature, we are not like Moses, who wrote in Psalm 90, "Lord, teach us to number our days so that we may gain a heart of wisdom." So often we'd rather live endless days of distraction instead of dealing with the most important questions of life and death. A good reason for this: death and all of the afflictions and the sufferings that are connected with it are the horrible, lingering effects from the disease of sin. Suffering and death are devastating reminders that humanity is under a curse and that life in this world is not as it should be.

And the Bible tells us about this. In Genesis chapters 1-3, we have the true account of our creation by a good God who created all things and created us, human beings, in his image for him. And he has created the first man and the first woman, Adam and Eve, to know him, to love him, to walk with him, and to serve him with joy. And yet the Bible tells us in Genesis chapter 3 that the reason this world is not the paradise of Genesis 1 and 2 is because of sin. And death was the good and right judgment for our sin.

But friends, all hope is not lost. For we see that in the midst of the curse, even there in Genesis 3, Jesus is promised, and the seeds there are sown of a promise of eternal hope that one would come, the seed of the woman, who would come in order to deal with the problems of sin and death and take upon himself death itself in the place of sinners like us, receiving himself a death blow by the serpent and yet conquering death through the resurrection. While we find it difficult to think about death or even to talk about death, we are a conflicted race, us human beings. We are also oddly drawn to near-death experiences and stories.

If you go through Barnes & Noble today, you'll see many books. You may even see movies there on Netflix or Disney Plus that track stories of near-death experiences. These books are bestsellers, these movies are blockbusters, and these stories usually follow a similar storyline. There is this experience and then there is a resolution to it, and then there is a resolve afterwards to live life differently now, right? "We are now going to no longer take life for granted," or "we're going to treasure time or our family more," or "we're going to be more present," or "we're going to enjoy each day now that we've had this near-death experience, and now we're going to change." There was an article in The Atlantic in 2015 where a professor who studies these things says, "If your life has been a struggle, a near-death experience sets you in a different direction. You nearly died, and so something has to change."

Now, is that what happens to Paul in his near-death experience here? Well, no, it's something much more glorious. Paul experienced in his near-death experience, he tells us, God's comfort in the midst of his affliction, and it is a life-changing comfort, and it is this comfort that he then shares with the Corinthian Christians. This professor, Litchfield from The Atlantic article, wrote, "You nearly died, so something has to change," but the Bible says that Jesus has died and been raised from the dead, and so everything has changed. And this is the reality that hits home for the Apostle Paul. We won't experience the comfort that God offers until we grasp the seriousness of the weight of sin and death and the curse that we are all under, and it is the Christian who can set their hope on God who raises the dead. That's point number one: Trial Faced.

Comfort Received: Relying on God

Now look here, verses 9 and 10, at point number two: Comfort Received. So Paul tells us about the trial that he faced, near death in Asia. Now he's going to share what he experienced in that trial: comfort received from God who raises the dead, verses 9 and 10. Now, I mentioned at the beginning that Paul lays out God's purposes in our suffering in verses 3-7. So look again at verses 3 and 4: "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Mercies and the God of all comfort. He comforts us in all our affliction so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any kind of affliction through the comfort we ourselves receive from God."

Then I said that Paul demonstrates this in verses 8-11. So Paul is now sharing the comfort that he received from God during his trial. Look at verses 9 and 10: "Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death so that we would not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a terrible death and he will deliver us. We have put our hope in him that he will deliver us again."

Now this word "comfort" may be confusing to you. There's something crazy going on in this passage that makes it difficult for us to grasp. Paul here speaks of comfort, but it's not the kind of comfort that we tend to think of here in 21st-century Southern California. If you notice, Paul explains one of God's main purposes for bringing suffering into the lives of his people in this fallen world: it's to visit his people with comfort in their suffering, which will equip them to comfort others who are suffering as well with that same comfort. Now we must admit, this is completely countercultural and completely counterintuitive, for we live in a time in history and in a place in the world that lives for comfort, but comfort of a completely different kind.

Comfort clothes. Does anyone dress up anymore? I had to do a wedding last week, and I confess it's the first time I'd put on a tie in more than a year. I joke that I moved to Southern California so that I could wear Hawaiian shirts and not have to dress up on Sundays as a pastor. But comfort clothes, we love being comfortable. And with so many people working from home these days, raise your hand if you've attended a Zoom meeting with a nice shirt on and pajama pants underneath sometime in this last year. I know that I have. We love our comfort clothes.

We also love our comfort food. We love comfort food, and we comfort ourselves with food. I am now married to a Chinese American woman, an Asian man, and when I get sick, what I want is pho. That is my comfort food when I'm sick. I want my, please, get it for me. Not only do we want comfort clothes and comfort food, we want the comfort of endless entertainment at our fingertips. Try explaining Blockbuster to your kids or to your grandkids or young people today. We used to get in the car and drive miles to rent a movie, and we would pay money, and then we'd get back in the car, drive back home for an hour and a half of entertainment. Now we have all of that at our fingertips. Explain that to kids. They'll think it isn't worth the effort. We use food language to talk about our entertainment intake. We binge-watch shows and movies. When we think of comfort, we think of a life free from discomfort: no pain, no suffering, only comfortable all the time.

And if that's our definition of comfort, this passage will not make sense for us. For that's not what the Apostle Paul is talking about. This is not the kind of comfort that God is speaking about here. He didn't show up with Paul as he was facing death with an angel bringing a bowl of comfort food. No, God's plan for our lives and God's plan for Paul was to bring him into great suffering, to bring us through trials, and in the midst of that trial to visit us with his comfort, to sustain us and to draw us near to himself in that time of need. While we experience trials, suffering, loss, grief, and pain at God's hand, God visits us in those trials in a unique way with his presence, with his love, with his tenderness, with his help, with his strength to persevere, and with his sweet and precious promises. And it is clear that somehow this comfort in the midst of great suffering is better for our souls and better for our faith than a life free from discomfort.

The comfort that we receive from God in the midst of trials is like his promise for his people in Isaiah 66, verse 13:

As a mother comforts her son, so I will comfort you, and you will be comforted in Jerusalem. — Isaiah 66:13 (CSB)

Now I love, as a dad, being there for my kids when they experience hurt and suffering. I loved when they were smaller than they are now, being the one that when they would fall down and cry, they would turn and want to run into my arms in order to be comforted by me. Today is Mother's Day. My mothers, you understand this: to be a mother means to know how to comfort our children and to show them more of ourselves and of our love when they experience hurt. I remember being in an emergency room and experiencing in an emergency room, just how much my mom and my dad loved me as they did whatever it took to make sure that I was going to be okay, going to bat for me with doctors to make sure that their son was okay. And I remember in that hospital room realizing just how much my parents loved me.

Friends, this is something that God intends to do in our suffering: to visit us and to draw us near to him and to give us his comfort. God has a goal for all of Paul's suffering, and friends, he has a goal for all of your suffering as well. Look at verse 9 again: "Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death." Why? "But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead." God brought this trial into Paul's life to teach him not to rely on himself, but to rely on his sovereign God, to teach Paul to no longer be self-reliant but God-reliant. This is the lesson that we all must learn.

Now, you can talk to my family. I regularly spend time wandering around my house looking for that cup of coffee or tea that I've made, not sure where I set it down. Is it in my office? Is it in the bedroom? Where did I put that cup of coffee? Is it in the microwave where I put it to warm it up because I'd forgotten to drink it? We are forgetful people, and I don't think it's just me. Trials remind us of the truth that is always true: We need God. The problem is not with God; it's with us that we forget this. We are only strong when we are strong in God's strength, and God loves to remind us of our weakness so that we would be strong in Him. But do you notice that God not only visits Paul with his presence and strength, but he also visits him with fresh views of gospel truth that are highlighted in that trial? God comforted Paul with the truth that shone forth in the midst of his deadly trial. Now, as Christians, we often talk about applying the gospel. Whatever that means. Well, if you're not sure what that means, look at this passage. Here's a biblical case of gospel application, and there's an art and a skill that can be developed and sharpened. The Christian who lives for Christ will learn the skill of applying gospel truth to all of life's circumstances with great precision, seeing all of life through the lens of Christ. This is what Paul is showing us here. However, fresh aspect of the gospel came alive for him in a moment of difficulty.