Book of Common Prayer

The God of all comfort

1 Paul, an apostle of Messiah Jesus through God’s will, and Timothy our brother; to God’s assembly in Corinth, with all God’s people in the whole of Achaea: ² grace and peace to you from God our father and the Lord, Messiah Jesus!

³ Let us bless God, the father of our Lord, Messiah Jesus; he is the father of mercies and the God of all comfort. ⁴ He comforts us in all our trouble, so that we can then comfort people in every kind of trouble, through the comfort with which God comforts us. ⁵ Just as we have an overflowing share of the Messiah’s sufferings, you see, so we have an overflowing share in comfort through the Messiah. ⁶ If we are troubled, it’s because of your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it’s for the sake of your comfort, which comes about as you bear patiently with the same sufferings that we are going through. ⁷ And our hope about you remains firm, because we know that, just as you’ve shared in our sufferings, so you will also share in our comfort.

Unbearably crushed

⁸ You see, my dear family, we don’t want to keep you in the dark about the suffering we went through in Asia. The load we had to carry was far too heavy for us; it got to the point where we gave up on life itself. ⁹ Yes: deep inside ourselves we received the death sentence. This was to stop us relying on ourselves, and to make us rely on the God who raises the dead. ¹⁰ He rescued us from such a great and deadly peril, and he’ll do it again; we have placed our hope in him, that he’ll do it again! ¹¹ But you must cooperate with us through prayer for us, so that when God gives us this gift, answering the prayers of so many, all the more will give thanks because of what’s happened to us.

The cost of discipleship

²⁵ A large crowd was gathering around him. Jesus turned to face them.

²⁶ “If any of you come to me,” he said to them, “and don’t hate your father and your mother, your wife and your children, your brothers and your sisters—yes, and even your own life!—you can’t be my disciple. ²⁷ If you don’t pick up your own cross and come after me, you can’t be my disciple.

²⁸ “Don’t you see? Supposing one of you wants to build a tower; what will you do? You will first of all sit down and work out how much it will cost, to see whether you have enough to finish it. ²⁹ Otherwise, when you’ve laid the foundation and then can’t finish it, everyone who sees it will begin to make fun of you. ³⁰ ‘Here’s a fellow,’ they’ll say, ‘who began to build but couldn’t finish!’

³¹ “Or think of a king, on the way to fight a war against another king. What will he do? He will first sit down and discuss with his advisers whether, with ten thousand troops, he is going to be a match for the other side who are coming with twenty thousand! ³² If they decide he isn’t, he will send a delegation, while the other one is still a long way away, and sue for peace.

³³ “In the same way, none of you can be my disciple unless you give up all your possessions.

³⁴ “Salt is good; but if even the salt loses its savor, how can it be made salty again? ³⁵ It’s no good for soil and no good for manure. People throw it away. If you have ears, then listen!”