Day Nineteen
Movement VII — The Outflow
Springs
Go back to where the volume started, and read one verse further than we did on Day Two.
Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God. 2 Corinthians 1:4, KJV
Count the comfort words. Four forms of one root in a single sentence — comforteth, comfort, comfort, comforted. Paul is hammering.
And notice the little hinge in the middle: that we may be able. Everything in front of it was heading there. The comfort was not the destination. It was issued toward something.
Today’s morsel
“That we may be able.”
Say it, then say one name. Not a category — a name.
Wells
The Greek is eis to dunasthai hēmas parakalein — literally, unto our being able to comfort. A purpose clause built on dunamai, the verb for having power or capacity.
This is the single most practically useful thing in the letter, and it will not be obvious on a bad day. What God gives is not first a feeling. It is a capacity.
Which means the honest test of whether you have been comforted is not whether you feel consoled. It is whether you are able. Able to stand up. Able to sit with somebody else who cannot. That is what confortare meant all the way back at the start: strengthened thoroughly.
If you have been waiting to feel comforted before you would believe you had been, you may have been comforted for weeks.
Now read the two little words the King James preserves so carefully. God comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may comfort them in any trouble.
The transfer is not matched. Paul does not say you are equipped to help people with your exact affliction. The comfort received in one specific trouble qualifies you for somebody else’s entirely different one, because what you received was not information about your situation. It was paraklēsis — and being called alongside transfers.
You do not need to have had their diagnosis, their loss, or their week. You need to have been stood beside.
By the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God. You hand on the same thing you were given. Not advice. Not an account of what you learned. Not an explanation of their trouble — that was the mistake of Job’s three friends, and Job’s siblings got the verb instead.
The thing you pass along is the presence you received.
Aquifer
The all/any is in the Greek. Paul uses pas in both halves — in all our affliction, toward those in every affliction. Some modern versions render both as “all” or both as “any,” which is defensible, but the King James rendering catches something true: the scope narrows to Paul’s own case in the first clause and opens to anyone’s in the second. The traffic runs from a particular trouble outward to whatever trouble is in front of you.
Who Paul is talking to. Remember the situation from Day 10. This is the opening of a letter to a congregation that had been questioning his credentials, partly on the grounds that he suffered too much. He answers by telling them his sufferings were being spent on them. There is no self-defence in the argument at all, which is itself the argument.