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The sermon teaches that suffering is a normal and costly aspect of Christian discipleship, but suffering alone does not prove that a person is a Christian. Genuine Christlike suffering is accompanied by Christ’s presence and consolation, which God supplies in proportion to the believer’s affliction. Trials can sanctify believers, deepen sympathy, restrain wandering, and display Christ’s sufficiency in spiritual battle. The sermon also presses hearers to examine whether they are truly born again and whether Jesus is their Savior.
Theological center: Union with Christ means that believers may share in Christ’s sufferings while receiving proportionate consolation from Christ Himself.
Applications: Expect Christian suffering · Test the source of suffering · Do not fear trials prematurely · Endure present affliction with faith
Primary texts: 2 Corinthians 1:5 · 1 Peter 4:12 · Hebrews 12:6
“For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also aboundeth by Christ.” 2 Corinthians 1:5 SEEK you rest from your distresses, you children of woe and sorrow? This is the place where you may lighten your burden and lose your cares. Oh, son of affliction and misery, would you forget for a time your pains and griefs? This is the Bethesda, the house of mercy. This is the place where God designs to cheer you and to make your distresses stay their never-ceasing course. This is the spot where His children love to be found, because here they find consolation in the midst of tribulation, joy in their sorrows, and comfort in their afflictions. Even worldly men admit that there is something extremely comforting in the sacred Scriptures and in our holy religion. I have even heard it said of some that after they had, by their logic, as they thought, annihilated Christianity and proved it to be untrue, they acknowledged that they had spoilt an excellently comforting delusion, and that they could almost sit down and weep to think it was not a reality. Ay, my friends, if it were not true, you might weep. If the Bible were not the truth of God—if we could not meet together around His mercy seat, then you might put your hands upon your loins and walk about as if you were in travail. If you had not something in the world beside your reason, beside the fleeting joys of earth—if you had not something which God had given to you, some hope beyond the sky, some refuge that should be more than terrestrial, some deliverance which should be more than earthly, then you might weep—Ah! weep your heart out at your eyes and let your whole bodies waste away in one perpetual tear. You might ask the clouds to rest on your head, the rivers to roll down in streams from both your eyes, for your grief would “have need of all the watery things that nature could produce.” But blessed be God, we have consolation, we have joy in the Holy Ghost. We find it nowhere else. We have raked the earth through, but we have ne’er discovered a jewel. We have turned this dunghillworld o’er and o’er a thousand times and we have found nought that is precious. But here, in this Bible, here in the religion of the blessed Jesus, we, the sons of God, have found comfort and joy. While we can truly say, “As our afflictions abound, so our consolations also abound by Christ.” There are four things in my text to which I invite your attention. The first is the sufferings to be expected, “The sufferings of Christ abound in us.” Secondly, the distinction to be noticed—they are the sufferings of Christ…