Revised Common Lectionary (Semicontinuous)

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.