Blessed Is God, Part 1

2 Corinthians 1:3

It is now that time when we learn what God has for us from the text of Scripture. Take your Bible and open it, please, to 2 Corinthians chapter 1. We have just begun a study of this tremendous epistle and though we've only been in it for really a week, already it is dawning on us what tremendous treasure will be found as we work our way through these 13 chapters.

To begin our study this morning, I want to read...if I might...starting at verse 3 down through verse 11. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For just as the sufferings of Christ are ours in abundance, so also our comfort is abundant through Christ. But if we are afflicted it is for your comfort and salvation or if we are comforted it is for your comfort which is effective in the patient enduring of the same sufferings which we also suffer. And our hope for you is firmly grounded, knowing that as you are sharers of our sufferings, so also you are sharers of our comfort. For we do not want you to be unaware, brethren, of our affliction which came to us in Asia, that we were burdened excessively beyond our strength so that we despaired even of life. Indeed we had the sentence of death within ourselves in order that we should not trust in ourselves but in God who raises the dead, who delivered us from so great a peril of death and will deliver us, He on whom