Hey Bridge Town and to any and all of you listening over the internet, John Mark Comer

here. Welcome to the Bridge Town Daily for Tuesday, April 21st. Yesterday we kicked off

a week-long mini-series on the theme of endurance in the New Testament because that is the felt

need of the hour. And I just have another scripture that I want to read over you. I have been

reading and rereading. I think I'm on my third read through in as many weeks. Paul's second

letter to the church in Corinth, which is the one that a lot of people overlook, but man, it is just

rich. And from the very beginning, Paul writes about endurance in a time of in his language

trouble. Let me read over you chapter 1 verse 3. Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus

the Father of compassion and God of all comfort. Man, I love Paul's vision of God, the Father of

compassion. He is most likely referring to a famous passage in Exodus 34, which is the most

quoted verse in the Bible by the Bible, where God describes himself and at the top of God's

list of self-disclosure is compassionate. And compassion in Hebrew is from a root word for female

womb. It's a feeling word. It's the way that a mother or a father feels about a son or a daughter.

That's the way that God feels about you or me. His baseline emotional disposition toward you and

me and all of humanity is that of a mother or a father is compassion and love. And Paul's onto

that, the Father of compassion, that's his name for God. And notice the next line, the God of all

comfort. What does a compassionate mom or dad do when a child is suffering? Well, they rush to the

child's aid and comfort the child. If it's a little kid and they fall down and skin a knee, they

pick up the child while she is crying or he is crying and hold and comfort and love and soothe.

Honestly, good parents do this to 30-somethings and 40-somethings just in a very different way.

That's who God is. But notice what Paul says next. God comforts us in all of our troubles.

So that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.

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