I bleed orange and brown.
I am a Cleveland Browns fan. Not a casual, “oh I’ll watch if they’re doing well this year” kind of fan. The real kind. The kind who has an orange and brown Christmas tree. Every December, while the rest of the world hangs garland and silver baubles, I trim a tree in the colors of a franchise that has historically made suffering into an art form.
I was there through the winless season of 2017. Zero wins. Sixteen losses. And I didn’t leave.
But here’s what most people don’t know: I wasn’t born into it. I grew up in West Virginia. West Virginia doesn’t have an NFL team, so you absorb one. You pick up allegiances by proximity, by the people around you, by the slow accumulation of shared experience. I was drawn in by people, by place, by belonging, and somewhere along the way their story became my story. Their losses became my losses. Their stubborn, laughable, beautiful misery became mine.
I didn’t become a Browns fan. I was adopted into it.
It reminds me a lot of what happens to us in the Body of Christ. We do not reason our way into a belonging this deep. We are drawn in by grace, by people, by a Sunday we almost didn’t show up for, and somewhere along the way the story of a crucified and risen Lord becomes our story. His people become our people. And their suffering — this is the part nobody puts in the welcome brochure — becomes ours, too.
Paul knows this better than anyone. He was beaten, imprisoned, shipwrecked, and left for dead. He was not theorizing about suffering. He was testifying from inside it. And what he wrote in 2 Corinthians 1 changes how we understand affliction, community, and the God who meets us in both. Look at what he says.
“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 as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.” — 2 Corinthians 1:3–7 (ESV)
Begin with Who God Is
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort.” (v. 3)
Before Paul says a word about suffering, he says something about God. He opens with worship. Not a strategy. Not an explanation. Worship. And the names he reaches for are not decorative. They are load-bearing. Father of mercies. The plural matters. There are more kinds of broken than one, and God has a mercy for each of them. God of all comfort. Not comfort when things are manageable. Not comfort once the season finally changes. All comfort, in every affliction, without exception. In the midst of his own suffering, the first thing out of Paul’s mouth is a blessing toward God. That is not denial. It is the testimony of a man who has been to the bottom of himself and found God already there.
This is where everything begins. Before we understand the direction comfort flows, we have to stand here and let the character of God fill the room. A god of limited mercies produces a trickle. The Father of mercies produces a flood. And this God did not comfort humanity from a distance. He sent his Son into the affliction. Into the sorrow. Into the suffering itself.
That changes everything about how we suffer.
Comfort Was Never Meant to Stop with You
“Who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction…” (v. 4)
Here Paul traces a direction, and it is not what we expect. God’s comfort moves into Paul in his affliction, and it does not stop there. It has a destination beyond him. The purpose clause is the whole point: so that we may be able to comfort others. Not merely so that we feel better, though God is kind enough to do that. Not simply so we can move on. The stated purpose is others. The comfort was never designed to terminate with the person who received it. This confronts the way most of us instinctively handle suffering. We treat hard seasons as private transactions between ourselves and God, chapters to endure quietly and close quickly. Paul treats suffering as something entrusted to him on behalf of a community.
Pastor, hear this. The year the church nearly split. The family you visited week after week and could not help. The diagnosis that arrived during an already impossible stretch of ministry. The Sunday mornings you stood behind a pulpit and preached resurrection hope while privately wondering if you had any left.
None of it was wasted. Not one sleepless night. Not one tearful drive home. Not one moment of sitting with someone in a grief so thick you could not find words. God was making something in you during those seasons that does not belong to you alone. It belongs to the Body. It belongs to the person who is sitting right now where you once sat, wondering if anyone has ever felt what they are feeling. Your scar tissue is someone else’s map. The comfort that found you is looking for somewhere to go. You are not just a leader. You are a conduit.
We Suffer in Christ, Not Apart from Him
“For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.” (vv. 5–6)
This is the hinge on which the passage turns. Paul does not say our sufferings merely resemble Christ’s sufferings. He says we share in them. This is union with Christ. We are genuinely joined to a crucified and risen Savior, and because we are in him, our suffering is caught up into his story. We are not suffering beside Christ. We are suffering in Him, and He in us.
And who is this Christ we are united to? He is the One who left the glory of heaven and took on flesh. He grew tired. He wept. He was misunderstood by His family, betrayed by His friends, abandoned by His disciples, and crucified by the people He came to save. Isaiah called Him a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. He knows suffering from the inside. He is not a high priest who watches affliction from a safe distance. He carried the full weight of human sorrow all the way to the cross.
At Calvary, Jesus did not observe suffering from outside it. He absorbed it. He entered fully into the depth of human grief and affliction, bore sin and death in our place, and walked through suffering all the way to its bitter end. And then on the third day, He walked out of the grave. Not despite the suffering. Through it. The road to glory ran straight through the cross, and it still does.
This means the comfort flowing through the Body of Christ is more than human solidarity. It is the comfort of a risen Savior moving through His people toward a broken world. Christ is the original suffering servant, and the church, united to Him by the Spirit, now carries that same ministry into the lives of others. Every time you sit with someone in grief and say, “I have been here too, and God met me here,” you are bearing the compassionate presence of Christ into that moment.
Paul then presses the communal implication with force: “If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort.” The suffering of one member of the body is never merely personal. God is working it toward something the whole Body needs. When we hide our wounds behind polished ministry appearances, we are not being strong. We are withholding from others the comfort God intends to pass through us.
Some of you reading this are in the hardest season of ministry you have ever known. Some of you are carrying burdens no one in your congregation knows about. The loneliness of ministry is pressing down on you in ways that are difficult to name. You are not outside the story. You are sharing in the sufferings of the same Christ who was raised from the dead, and what God is producing in you right now is not for you alone. It is for the Body. It is for the person coming behind you who will someday need what only your suffering can teach.
Hope Cannot Be Shaken
“Our hope for you is unshaken…” (v. 7)
Paul closes with hope. Not optimism. Hope. And he calls it unshaken. He does not say the circumstances are improving. He does not say the suffering is almost over. He says the hope is unshaken right now, in the middle of it. Why? Because it is not resting on circumstances. It is resting on a fact: the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Father of mercies has already shown us, at the cross, exactly how far His love will go. And the empty tomb declares that suffering, grief, abandonment, and death do not have the final word. God does. And His final word is life.
We do not suffer toward nothing. We suffer as people who know the grave could not hold the Son of God. The resurrection is not a footnote to the Gospel. It is the triumphant declaration that Christ has conquered the deepest enemy we possess. This is the hope that cannot be moved. Not because our afflictions are small. Not because the road is easy. But because the character of God does not change, the resurrection of Jesus Christ cannot be undone, and the promise of verse 7 is as certain as the empty tomb it rests on.
He is the Father of mercies. There is a mercy for what you are carrying.
He is the God of all comfort. There is a comfort that has your name on it, produced in the affliction of someone who walked your road before you, flowing toward you now through the Body of Christ.
And He will be glorified — in your suffering, in your endurance, in the comfort you carry to others, in the unshaken hope you preach on the Sundays when you are barely holding it together — until the final day when every tear is wiped away by His own hand.
That is where this passage is going. That is where we are going. Blessed be His name.
Written by Josh Rollins, the lead pastor of Newark Grace Church, a new church plant launching in Newark, Ohio in January 2027. More info can be found at NewarkGrace.org.