Overflowing With Joy Until He Comes Series

WELCOME & INTRODUCTION

o Pleasure to be here—we are waiting on the glorious day of Christ’s return.

o Many days we are already ready—sickness, pain, tired, seeing things in culture, burdens in life, persecution.

A GRIEF OBSERVED

For C. S. Lewis, it was the death of his wife, Joy.

Married—hospital, cancer

Notebooks – he would keep his thoughts in notebooks where he could write down and explore his grief. He speaks of all the trials he is feeling and explores what it means to have faith in such situations. He later compiled these notes into his book A Grief Observed in 1961.

He writes: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty.”

Later he asks: “Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is in vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence…”

The Apostle Paul speaks regularly of his hope. He tells the church in Corinth about what he experienced to get to them.

READ 2 CORINTHIANS 7:2-13 (6 Slides)

2 Make room in your hearts for us. We have wronged no one, we have corrupted no one, we have taken advantage of no one. 3 I do not say this to condemn you, for I said before that you are in our hearts, to die together and to live together.

4 I am acting with great boldness toward you; I have great pride in you; I am filled with comfort. In all our affliction, I am overflowing with joy. 5 For even when we came into Macedonia, our bodies had no rest, but we were afflicted at every turn—fighting without and fear within.

6 But God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus, 7 and not only by his coming but also by the comfort with which he was comforted by you, as he told us of your longing, your mourning, your zeal for me, so that I rejoiced still more.

8 For even if I made you grieve with my letter, I do not regret it—though I did regret it, for I see that that letter grieved you, though only for a while. 9 As it is, I rejoice, not because you were grieved, but because you were grieved into repenting. For you felt a godly grief, so that you suffered no loss through us.

10 For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death. 11 For see what earnestness this godly grief has produced in you, but also what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what fear, what longing, what zeal, what punishment!

At every point you have proved yourselves innocent in the matter. 12 So although I wrote to you, it was not for the sake of the one who did the wrong, nor for the sake of the one who suffered the wrong, but in order that your earnestness for us might be revealed to you in the sight of God. 13 Therefore we are comforted.

Finding joy in the midst of pain. It’s the riddle we are faced with.

Paul shared transparently all that he had experienced in life. All the ways people sought to hurt him emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and physically. How in this world we will face trial and persecution. But Paul finds hope.

What Paul sees when he envisions the people who make up the church is hope. He sees the possibilities of the future. Paul looks at those who have been a blessing and encouragement to him as the cherry on top of the thousands that spread throughout Asia as he ministers the Gospel.

Where First Corinthians is a call to unity as the church, Second Corinthians is a call to unity with him as he teaches. He has had so many that want him to fail because they could not believe that someone who has endured the kind of hardships he’s endured is of God. Why would God afflict his people with such calamity? But Paul insists.