2 Corinthians 1:1-11 • Confidence in God Encourages Dependence on Him

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Have you received comfort from God that only He could give to you? What did He use to comfort you? Maybe it was a Bible verse that grabbed your attention. Or it might have been a loving friend who came alongside you. Perhaps it was an unexpected event that totally amazed you. Whatever it was, we can know God’s comfort when we need it. That is a promise to us. In the last post, we learned that 2 Corinthians calls us to a life of dependent living. This is post #2 in the God-Dependent Woman blog series. We will cover 2 Corinthians 1:1-11 and focus on why we can have confidence in our God. Such confidence encourages us to depend on Him more than on ourselves.

Listen to this post as a similar podcast from The God-Dependent Woman Bible Study covering 2 Corinthians in the New Testament. (11 lessons)

When I Needed God’s Comfort

Back in the 1980s, I was going through some difficult times in my life. I remember during that summer when I was in a neighborhood prayer group, I asked the Lord to help me cry more. That sounds silly, I know. But I don’t cry easily, and I wanted to experience the relief of tears rather than holding everything inside of me. Well, He certainly answered that prayer!

Within weeks, a couple of things happened that put stress on me, and I started crying. Daily. I would drop my preschooler off in the morning, go home and cry on the sofa for 3 hours, then go to pick her up. I had not lost my faith in God, but I felt so discouraged. Have you ever felt that way?

After a few months of feeling such distress that I couldn’t even read my Bible and pray like I had been doing for years, someone told me about a women’s Bible study at a local church. There, a woman named Vickie Kraft was teaching every Wednesday morning. I had heard Vickie speak at a conference a few years before and knew she was a really good teacher.

So, I started attending the Bible study. My life radically changed as Vickie taught through Hebrews chapter 11—“The Hall of Faith”—and showed me that many other women who have gone before me depended on God to get them through some very tough times.

The Word of God restored my confidence in the goodness of God. I began to feel His comfort. The crying every day stopped. I started facing my challenges with courage and hope that my God could and would get me through it. He did! And He has done that so many times since!!

Read the blog, “What Vickie Kraft Taught Me about Our Lord” on bible.org.

Praise God Who Is the Father of Compassion

Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians chapter 1 are true. Our God is one who comforts us.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ. (2 Corinthians 1:3-5)

Paul describes God as “the Father of compassion” (v. 3) and “the God of all comfort,” the one to whom we should go first in our troubles. Compassion means to not just feel sympathy for someone’s pain but to do something to alleviate it. Paul equates this with receiving “comfort” from God.

I looked up the word comfort to make sure I understood what that meant. To comfort means “to give strength, to console, and to aid.” That is what God does for us. He gives us strength to sustain us through the pain of life on earth. We live in a fallen world full of heartache and trouble. We live in a war zone, both physically and spiritually. A broken world.

The most wonderful thing is knowing that our Lord Jesus Christ experienced this very world just like we do. He totally understands every suffering you and I experience. Because He was 100% human as well as 100% God, He knows exactly how to comfort us and sustain us through our pain.

How God Comforts Us

What are the ways in which our God comforts us? How does He give us strength and aid in our time of sadness or trouble? I have recognized several ways.

Through His word

Most of the time God uses His Word to comfort us. You know how some verses just jump out at you when you are needing comfort. Maybe they are verses that you memorized in the past or that you are currently reading. They just seem to leap off the page at you, almost shouting, “Hold onto this. It will get you through it.”

Through His people

God also comforts us through people He sends our way. At a neighborhood gathering of ladies around my table recently, I asked the question, “When you went through a time of trouble, what got you through it?” Two women shared nearly identical stories of how God sent someone to their house with a gift that was exactly what they needed during a time of grief. Both of the women shared that they did not really know the gift-givers. But this act of love from a stranger told them that God was present and aware of their need. It gave them comfort. God uses people to send comfort.

Through prayers of other believers

And God comforts us through the prayers of other believers. Paul tells the Corinthians that their prayers were part of God’s deliverance for him. He says in 2 Corinthians chapter 1,

“as you help us by your prayers. Then many will give thanks on our behalf for the gracious favor granted us in answer to the prayers of many.” (2 Corinthians 1:10-11)

What is the relationship between others praying for us and God working on our behalf? This is not a cause and effect. Our prayers don’t change God’s purposes for us or other believers. But knowing that others are praying for us gives us strength to endure the pain. That is comfort.

For those believers who are praying for us, when they hear how God has answered their prayer, they receive God’s comfort as well. It is partnership with God to desire His purposes to be fulfilled. In that way, we share in God’s comfort as we pray for others to be strengthened during their time of trouble.

As you pray for those who are going through trouble—whether It is grief, illness, persecution, joblessness, pray rightly. Always pray for God to work His purpose in their lives regardless of the outcome. This might require sacrificing your sense of entitlement to something you think you or they deserve. It also requires releasing your expectations of acceptable outcomes. Focus on God fulfilling His purpose in that situation.

God answers our prayers out of His graciousness (2 Corinthians 1:11). God’s grace is His gift. Answered prayers are a gift. Deliverance is a gift. Healing is a gift.

Our God knows, understands, empathizes with, and responds to the pain in our lives with compassion. This is beautifully illustrated in the life of Jesus. Over and over in the gospels, Jesus comforted people with His compassion like He did for the widow of Nain. When we recognize and feel His comfort, we know what to do to comfort others. You know what meant the most to you and helped you and what didn’t. You can ask the Lord to show you how to give comfort to someone going through pain.

Through unexpected events

God also comforts us through unexpected events. When Paul and Silas were in miserable conditions in a Philippian jail (Acts 16), God surprised them with an earthquake that released their chains and gave them a receptive audience for the gospel in the jailer and his family. The prisoners were treated as guests in the jailer’s house for a few hours, bandaged and fed, before being returned to jail to face the next day.

Remember the story I told earlier of two women who opened their doors to surprise gifts of love? Those were unexpected events God used to comfort them. And they gave God the glory for it.

Through the Spirit on the inside

God also comforts us from the inside through His Spirit. Romans 5:5 says that God’s Holy Spirit pours God’s love into our hearts. Pours it! We can feel it. Have you felt God’s love when you needed it? We can have confidence in His presence with us. We never go through pain alone. But God’s comfort does not always mean deliverance from the pain.

God’s Comfort Does Not Always Mean Deliverance

Let us go back to our theme for this blog series. God wants for us women to be God-dependent women—not “independent except for when we need Him.” But we are to be God-dependent all the time.

The key to being a God-dependent woman is what can be described as dependent living. It is relying on His power to get us through all of life—whether we are strong and everything is going well or whether we are in pain and weakness and in dire need of relief. Whatever God brings into our lives that makes us more dependent upon Him is good for us. That is how we learn dependent living.

But the world and even other Christians will try to tell you that God does not want you to suffer. They will try to convince you that we have been delivered from all suffering by our benevolent God. If you are suffering, you must have done something wrong so that God is disciplining you. The message is this, “Get right with God, and all your troubles will go away.”

That is not biblical! You see godly men and women suffering throughout the book of Acts. You see the same thing throughout all of Paul’s letters. You see it throughout the other New Testament writings. God allows His children to undergo very hard things. The purpose is to teach us to trust Him with all of us, not just bits of us.

Does God Not Give You More Than You Can Handle?

In every post in this God-Dependent Woman blog series, I will evaluate a popular saying that especially floats around on social media. In this post, our saying to evaluate is this one that is often promoted in feel-good books, movies, and TV shows, “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.” True or false?

Dear reader, this is a false teaching. It is bad. Why is it bad? Look at 2 Corinthians 1:8. Paul was in the center of God’s will, doing everything that God purposed for him to do. This is what he plainly and unashamedly states. Read this carefully.

“We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself.” (2 Corinthians 1:8).

Did you catch it? They were under great pressure, far beyond their ability to endure. Paul used a Greek term that meant exceedingly, beyond our strength and power. Oh yeah. God gives us more than we can handle. On our own, that is.

Read carefully Paul’s next words,

“Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead.” (2 Corinthians 1:9)

What do we tend to rely upon in messy, painful situations? Usually, it is our own inner strength, our life experiences, our skills and know-how, and our own logic.

Paul had years of experience figuring out how to get out of a messy, painful situation. But after all those years of walking with and serving God, God wanted Paul to rely on Him rather than on his own figuring out. If God wanted Paul and his friends to do that, you can with confidence be assured that God wants you to rely on Him rather than your own figuring out when you have pain and trouble. It is a given.

God gives you more than you can handle on your own so that you will learn to rely on Him more.

What if you believed that God doesn’t give you more than you can handle? Then, something comes along that just wipes you out, that floors you, that takes every resource you have, and the pain is still there. That kind of teaching leads to a sense of failure because you could not handle whatever God gave you.

Ask anyone who has a life-long debilitating injury or illness. Ask anyone who has a physically or mentally challenged child. Ask anyone who has seen one job loss after another. Don’t add to their pain by making them feel like failures.

God gives everyone—you and me and your neighbor—more than we can handle on our own in order to drive us to Him. To rely on Him. To gain the confidence in Him so that we will depend on Him more.

God Is Trustworthy of Our Confidence in Him

Going back to my story from the 1980s, I sat under Vickie’s teaching for several years. This is what I learned to increase my confidence in a trustworthy God:

God loves me as a woman because He created me as a woman of worth and value to Him.
God gives women what we most desperately want—security and significance—as we trust in Him.
Our Creator Jesus designed us with a mind to know God, emotions to love God, and a will to obey God. Our female minds need to be filled with the knowledge of Him so that our hearts may respond with great love for Him, and our wills can choose to obey Him.
Over and over, she would reinforce that our God is trustworthy of our confidence in Him.

Life is hard, but God is good. Don’t panic! Trust in the one who has the power to raise the dead.

I wrote a blog about what Vicki Kraft taught me about my Lord. Although she is with Jesus now, her teaching is still on Bible.org. You can access her Hebrews 11 study here, the one that turned my life around. Her other teaching is on the women’s Bible Study curriculum page.

Reasons Why God Wants Us to Depend on Him More Than on Ourselves

In every blog, we will also cover some reasons from our passage why God wants us to depend on Him more than on ourselves. From 2 Corinthians 1:1-11, we get these reasons:

We receive comfort from God for ourselves and to comfort others. (1:4)
He’s more powerful than we are. (1:9)
We can set our hope on Him to continue to deliver us. (1:10)
God answers our prayers out of His graciousness. (1:11)

In the next post, we will see how we can depend on God in the pain of relationships.

Let Jesus satisfy your heart with confidence that you can depend on Him. Then, live each day as a God-dependent woman!

All of the above information is covered in The God-Dependent Woman Bible Study of 2 Corinthians.