God or Comfort?

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 have received from God. For just as the suffering of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. - 2 Corinthians 1:3-5

Last week I told my "support group" a few "long-term" prayer requests, one of them being, choose God rather than comfort. I felt that comfort is one of the last few things I'm still struggling to surrender to God completely. Why did I want so much to go back and live in Raleigh? It's comfortable! It's large enough but doesn't have bad traffic, I can find all the stores and restaurants I like - all those are physical comfort. It's also emotionally and even spiritually comfortable - I love Grace and already have so many old friends there.

Yet Berk's talk at Faithwalkers 2012 shocked me: when Lot chose comfort rather than God, he not only brought his family into a lot of trouble later, but his daughters learned it from him and continued to way worse choices. I told myself at that time, "My addiction to comfort needs to go. PS @ God: thank you that I don't have children yet!"


Then after a couple of months, God reminded me again by 2 Samuel 24:24 - if I'm only choosing God when it's comfortable either way, then I'm basically offering sacrifices that don't really cost me anything. Hence the prayer request mentioned above. I honestly expected all the prayer requests I sent out to take years for me to be able to start seeing obvious changes/results, and that's why I called them "long-term" prayer requests. But just within a week, God has already made a huge progress in my heart concerning the prayer about choosing Him rather than comfort!

Today as I was reading through 2 Corinthians 1, it suddenly occurred to me that God is the ultimate source of our comfort! The choice for me was never as hard as "God or comfort" because God doesn't equal "discomfort"! The original choice was actually, the comfort from God or the comfort from the world? But this would have been a no-brainier for many, and that's why the devil has disguised it and twisted the choice into "God or comfort", which a lot more people fell for. I was reading Passion and Purity by Elisabeth Elliot a while back, and she recorded an interesting conversation with a young lady:

Young lady: "...Don't you think God would want me to be happy?"
Elisabeth: "Yes, but God wants most for you to be holy!"
Young lady (almost crying): "Why would God want me to be miserable?!"

I had a wow moment when I read that - since when did we equate "holy" to "miserable"?! Yet the devil is pulling the exact same, age old trick! And he does that with love, marriage, and all the good things God originally created. Instead of "God of comfort", "God of love", and "God of all the good things", the devil has successfully twisted these texts into "God or comfort", "God or love", and "God or all the good things".

All of a sudden I don't have a desire for what the devil defines as "comfort" anymore. Just a week (and even a day) ago, I was praying that God would help me to become more disciplined so even though I would want comfort, I can choose God instead. But my wonderful savior almost always has a much better plan - He wants to free me up completely by changing my heart and the desires within it. He not only wants to give me the best, but also wants to open my eyes so I can see that what He's giving me is the best! Amen.