2 Corinthians 4:17
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Anyone who knows me or my family decently well, relatively well, knows that we are Disney people. We love to go to Disney World. Shout out all the other Disney people. If you're a hater, I'm sorry. Every time that vacation planning comes around, my wife and I are like, we should do this, we should do that, and then, yeah, we always just end up going to Disney World again. But one of the inconvenient things about enjoying going to Orlando, Florida as often as you can, especially if you're a kid, is that it takes a long time to get there.
You either have to fly, which is expensive, and we cannot do that, or you have to drive. And when you have kids, that's a long drive. It's two days for us, and we have to stop and go to the bathroom all the time and eat food and all these other things. And I can tell you from experience that a three and a four-year-old, that two-day drive is an eternity. It is not momentary and it's not light. To them, that is affliction, that two-day drive.
But what then do we do as parents when we see our kids are struggling in waiting for something good that's coming? We're like, come on, guys, hold on. We know it's hard. We know the wait is hard. But we're going to Disney World. Something way better is coming than this drive. Well, that's a silly illustration for something eternally greater that we see in our passage this morning in 2 Corinthians.
In an infinitely greater way, the Apostle Paul is telling the Corinthian church basically that same thing. Hold on. I know it's hard. Hold on. heaven is coming. So let's just look at our passage. It's on the front of your bulletin, 2 Corinthians chapter 4 verse 17. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.
So I think the main point of our devotional this evening is this. Life is hard but take heart Christian God is preparing you for heaven Life is hard but take heart Christian God's preparing you through that hardness, in that hardness, for heaven. I love how this passage dovetails so well with the sermon this morning.
If the sermon this morning is, hey, God is coming, he's gonna make things right, he's gonna restore all things, then tonight we're gonna kind of say, yeah, but what do we do now? because life seems really hard now. So we're going to look at two very short points here. Our affliction, number one, our affliction, and number two, the eternal weight of glory. So our affliction. So we're jumping right here, as we often do on Sunday evenings, right?
We're just jumping into the middle of something. So this is Paul's letter to the Corinthian church. And just so that you're kind of aware as we're thinking about this, this theme of suffering and pain is all over the letter. This isn't odd. This isn't weird. This section comes after lots of discussion about suffering and pain and affliction. And there's going to be more discussion about it later. So here in chapter 4, Paul's been talking about the grace that believers have in the gospel, and in particular, how the grace of the gospel is helping them kind of get through the difficulties of life, even physical difficulties.
So he's encouraging them. And what does he encourage them with? What we just read, this light and momentary affliction that you, believer, are going through is preparing you for an eternal weight of glory. But I think, I don't know, I think it's helpful to ponder just for a second before we get to the light and momentary bit of affliction. I think it's helpful to just kind of pause for a second because it seems almost a bit shocking what Paul is saying.
That he's calling affliction light and momentary because if you've lived like much life at all and you've gone through hard things, that might actually be hard to hear. It might sound trite or like Paul just doesn't know what he's talking about. When you're in the middle of it, of suffering, of pain, you might even be tempted to think that these words sound uncaring How can you say that my pain and suffering is light So we need to understand what Paul really means here Is he just saying hey if you going through hard things, it's not that bad. Don't worry about it. I don't think that is what he's saying.
In fact, earlier in the letter, Paul talks about his own affliction that he's going through. In chapter 1, verse 8, he says, he's talking about the affliction that he experienced in Asia, and he says, for we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. So the affliction that's light and momentary is also the same kind of affliction that despairs you of life itself? That's really interesting. So he's not making light of pain and suffering.
He's not trivializing it. Again, this is worth dwelling on for a second. Before we get into the amazing ways that we can have hope that heaven is coming, Jesus is coming. He's going to get rid of the affliction. I think it's helpful to think, what is God getting rid of? What is the pain and the suffering that we see in this world? I'm a big Puritan fan. I love the Puritans. And one of my favorite things about the Puritans is that they lived really hard lives.
And they teach us, I think, just really helpful things about humans going through hard things. And I love what one Puritan pastor, Thomas Watson, said about troubles and hardship in life. It's so good. He says this, life and trouble are married together. Man is born to trouble. He is heir to it. It is his birthright. You may as well separate weight from lead as trouble from the life of man. In other words, it's impossible.
Life is hard. That just is what it is. Lead is heavy. That's a fact. You can't separate the two. Life is full of trouble. So I wonder, brothers and sisters, when you hear affliction, when you hear that word affliction or pain or suffering, I know from knowing you that you're thinking of something. What is the thing that you are thinking of when you're thinking about hard life in this fallen world?
We just prayed about a lot of them Family relationships that are on the brink of ruin or maybe they are just flat out ruined Questions about where the next rent payment or mortgage payment is coming from. What happens if my car breaks down? Death. Sickness. Sin. The affliction of that sin that just keeps on creeping up over and over again, struggles with assurance of salvation.
We will really appreciate the glory, the weight of the glory of heaven when we appreciate these afflictions that God is going to save us from. So that's our first point, affliction. So let's move on to the second and kind of have the positive to the negative. So God's not being trivial here about our suffering. Suffering and pain are real. But that real affliction, listen to this, that real affliction compared to eternity, it's as if it's light and momentary.
So it's not the trivializing of suffering, it's to say that's how great eternity with God is. Eternity with God is so incredible and amazing seeing God face to face through Christ that it's as if those hard things are like nothing. You can't even compare them with the glory of seeing God. this is amazing hope isn't it that the the suffering that you are going through christian right now it is temporary it's not going to last forever again that's not to say that suffering is not real it's it's to say that that's how amazing heaven is I think that when we see how kind of hard life is in a fallen world, it should make us be really
hungry for heaven. I'm so thankful that every Sunday evening we pray that Christ would come back. We're not content to just live comfortable in this world. We're not content to just live sense that the world is just not the way it should be but at the same time that acute sense of kind of you know seeing how broken the world is should be flavored by knowing that it's not going to last forever. That Christ is going to make everything right. He's going to put death to death. He's going to wipe every tear away. I think that's maybe a little bit of what Paul's getting at when he says that this suffering, this affliction is preparing the Christian for the eternal weight of glory. I think that's just interesting. He doesn't kind of just say, hey, comparatively, affliction's bad,
but heaven is better. He says, actually, the affliction is preparing you for heaven. Think about how much more joy do you have in something when in order to get there, it was really difficult. You could probably think of any number of examples in your job in a relationship whatever Getting something easily doesn make you appreciate the thing in the same way When we think about the suffering of this world preparing us for heaven I mean think in heaven we will just be all the more grateful of all the things that God saved us from.
The more we dwell on the things that God saves us from, the more we are appreciative and hunger for heaven. I mentioned the Puritans, more Puritans, sorry it's Jared preaching. Another Puritan pastor and my favorite theologian, John Owen, he wrote a very well-known book on heaven, on Christians dwelling on heaven and how to have a heavenly mind on earth. And the life circumstances that led to him writing this book were that he had 11 children and he didn't see a single one of them into adulthood. The circumstances that led to him writing this book were going from the kind of top of being a government official to being fired and preaching to a congregation of probably 10 people. This book was written at the end of John Owen's life.
when he was on his deathbed. I think that that's interesting, isn't it? That when life is hard, when you see the difficulties of life, it makes you hunger for heaven in a unique way. So think about those things that we thought of earlier. Where does your mind go when you think about affliction And how is that preparing you for heaven Well those broken family relationships No broken relationships in heaven.
Praise the Lord for that. Those financial worries. God owns the universe. You'll be fine. sickness death jesus killed death that's why we call it eternal life praise the lord for that brothers and sisters we have hope in heaven the suffering that we go through now should make us hungry for heaven. You know, if you are here this evening and you are not in Christ, you don't have faith in Christ, then you don't have this same hope. You simply don't. You probably feel the same as us in the sense of you feel how hard life is.
You see how difficult life can be. But friend, if you don't know Christ, you're just kind of stuck there. I can't lie to you and say, oh, but you'll be fine too. But I can give you hope. Put your faith in Christ. He's standing there with open arms saying, come into my kingdom. have the same hope as everybody else. I will put away all of this pain and suffering And think about that Brothers and sisters think about the gospel in terms of this of affliction preparing us for an eternal weight of glory You and I as believers in Christ are united to our Lord, who was raised through affliction.
He was stricken, smitten, and afflicted. Christ is the ultimate example that we see of glory through suffering, isn't he? And so surely as Christ is our head, and as we look to Christ as our example, we can be encouraged that that's our fate as well. In our suffering, we have hope. In the midst of affliction, we have hope because of Christ.
So as we think about the affliction we face, we can be thankful. We have hope of eternity. So just as we pray every Sunday evening that Christ would return, let's keep that in mind as we pray and as we pray that Christ would return. Let's pray. Lord, we are so thankful as we've been thinking about this morning and this evening that you are coming to set everything right. That you love your people and you have promised to dwell with your people.
And Lord, we are so grateful that in the meantime, you give us hope that even though life is difficult, you have promised us that you are coming back and you are going to make everything right. We pray all this in Christ's name. Amen.