The Power To Comfort Others

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Welcome to Thrive. It's good to have you here today. And I'm excited. We are starting a new series called Vulnerability. And it's really an exploration of this vulnerable, emotional letter that Paul wrote called 2 Corinthians. In some ways, it's actually 3 Corinthians. I don't know if you realize that. But we lost a letter. Between 1 Corinthians and this letter, there's another letter he refers to that got to this church. And in some ways, it might be good that we lost it because it was kind of a harsh letter. There's enough harshness in any of Paul's writings, let alone one that kind of really gave it to this church out of love, okay? Out of love. But he did. So today, we're looking at this letter of 2 Corinthians for about eight weeks. We're going to not get through all of it, but we're going to kind of wrap this series around a word called vulnerability. How many of you like this word vulnerability? Do you like being vulnerable? No. Yeah. And nobody does. And yet, if you're not vulnerable, we've got problems. And we'll talk about that, why it's so important to have some vulnerability. And how that fits in with not just Paul's ministry, but with being a follower of Jesus and the God who shows his vulnerability to us. So that's kind of the overall theme. And it's in contrast, I think, not only to our culture, but to the Greco-Roman culture that the Corinthians were used to. And so when you study a book like any book in the New Testament, in the Old Testament, in any ancient literature, actually, you have to ask the question, so when they read this the first time, the people who read this the first time, what did they get out of it? And in order to do that, that's called hermeneutics, by the way, in order to do that, you have to kind of understand what they were thinking in the first place. And so you have to understand the kind of the background. And the Corinthians thought of themselves pretty highly. If you read through 1 Corinthians, they were kind of full of themselves in every way that you can imagine. And the Greco-Roman world kind of wanted that kind of life. In fact, they kind of valued being full of yourself, being full of the idea of finding as much status as you can, as much honor as you can, as much wisdom as you can, talking about your victories and your successes and winning and having the good life. Because the big problem in life, they said, was change. That is, why does everything fall apart? Have you ever asked that question? Dick, you might be asking that question with your birthday. I'm asking that question at my age, it's like, why is everything falling apart? Even as a child, I was asking, why can't my clothes fold themselves up and put themselves away? Why can't Mary Poppins be true? You ever seen that where she magically it all happens, right? Why does everything fall apart? Why does everything change? Why does everything decay? That was the main problem that Greco-Roman world looked at. And then they said, yeah, this world is filled with that, but the gods, and they had many multiple gods. They don't decay. They don't fall apart. Things don't change for them. And if you notice, if you ever study the Greco-Roman world and mythology, any of you do that anymore? Yeah, you did a little of that. The gods, how would you describe the gods, Kevin? Yeah, so they're human beings, but in a sense, but what do they got? Superpowers, much like a lot of our hero movies today. The only difference between these gods and humans is that they are immortal, invincible, immutable, and yes, invulnerable. They don't change. And that's what everybody wanted. And in fact, the Corinthians as well bought into this. They basically said, if God, if human means being fallible and not just imperfect, but also things fall apart and are broken and don't go the way we want, God must have everything his way. And he must be all powerful and immovable and immortal, of course, and invulnerable and unable to change. That's what everybody wanted. And Paul says, that's not the God of the Bible. He's not, yes, he's immutable, he can get his way, but God freely chooses to be vulnerable. And it makes all the difference. I think it makes all the difference of why we're here and why Christianity stands out among all the world religions. Now you might still wonder, why do we need to study vulnerability? Why is this important? Nobody likes it. Nobody wants to be vulnerable. We kind of want to keep our guard up as much as we can. We don't like the idea because it feels weak. And I then become, quote, dependent on others. And that's the last thing in our society we want to do. That if I am not vulnerable, I am not open. And if I am not open to others, this is where C.S. Lewis takes things. I really like this quote from his book, The Four Loves. He says, to love is to be vulnerable. Love anyth...