What you tend to do is to isolate. That's the problem, we tend to isolate.
Proverbs 18:1 – “He that separates (or isolates himself) seeks his own desire”.
When we're trying to escape from the pain, we have our own things we're trying to do, and we're isolating to survive. How many understand that?
I'm going to show you how biblical comfort addresses the core problem - not just how you feel, but the root issue that happens, when you go through pain; and this is what it is: becoming isolated.
Church is called to be a community. The Christian faith is worked out as a community. It's not just all about you; and God's answers, many of them are provided through the community - not just directly from heaven to you. This ‘Lone Ranger’ thing, where it's just ‘God and me’, is absolutely a fallacy - and people who get into that zone, end up isolating themselves.
It says: “their heart rages against wisdom” - they don't take into account the wisdom of God. When our feelings are hurt and we go through pain - we tend to lose perspective
2) Our sinful nature leads us to isolate. We tend to isolate, and then want to find comfort in all kinds of unhealthy ways: eat chocolate; watch TV; alcohol... the list is endless, of the ways people try to feel better. Have a smoke – I’ve just got to have a smoke; and the reason usually people have to have a smoke, apart from addiction, is because they're in pain, they need comfort, and they turn to the drug.
The temporary solution to the problem has now created a new problem. The person who turns to alcohol to comfort themselves - do you feel better? Of course you do - today you do, while you're drinking - tomorrow you don't! If you keep doing that, then later on you've got a huge problem with alcohol.
So one of the tendencies we have is: not to follow God's process of dealing with pain. We tend to have our own way of dealing with it, and it's quite sinful and harmful to us.
People seek out sexual relationships, pornography - all kinds of things to try and find a solution to pain.
The solution is: the comfort of God. God wants to comfort us, and the whole nature of God is to comfort us - why don’t we just turn to Him?
3) When you're in pain and distress, there is a personal devil who seeks to torment you, and drive you into isolation.
The devil seeks to drive you into isolation, so he can then begin to work on your mind, and your emotions, and cause you to feel no value, to feel distress, to feel pain/tormented, and to lose all hope that the future could be better.
Anyone been in a deep depression? It's like the future looks so bleak, you can't find your way forward. The way forward is to have hope for the future - but before you have hope, you need comfort, because the pain is real.
In the next session, we talk about how you can use the scriptures to comfort someone - we'll learn to comfort one another - because part of the comfort God gives to us, comes through the body of Christ.
So there it is - 3 reasons why we need comfort: 1) when feelings are affected, we think crazy, we think wrongly, our perspective goes. 2) Our sinful nature means we tend to react, and do harmful things - we isolate, and then we try to solve it in different ways.
Esau comforted himself - as soon as dad's out of the way, I'm going to kill my brother - and he felt good about that feeling. I know lots of people, and they're just planning revenge: you wait, you just wait - I'll get them back! They're comforting themselves, in their pain, by harbouring revenge. These are very destructive ways, and demons torment people.