The God Of All Comfort Bible Study Guide

After losing her husband to cancer, bestselling author and Bible teacher Brestin shares her own grief experience and spiritual recovery in this 10-lesson Bible study. She demonstrates how these handpicked psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs can calm a grieving heart.

Some of the greatest texts and most encouraging promises in all of Scripture are found in Paul's second letter to the Corinthians.

"Over these eight lessons, our journey will take us through a section of Scripture titled 'The God of all comfort,' in 2 Corinthians 1:3-7. The apostle Paul, the author of that letter and an expert when it came to suffering, lends insight and encouragement that God is not blind to our troubles. Along the way, we will meet faith-filled Christians who relied on faith despite their heartache"--P. [4] of cove

Popular author and Bible teacher Dee Brestin draws on her own grief experience to help readers find their way into the arms of God during times of pain and loss. Brestin demonstrates how speaking the truth to our souls with the help of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs can calm the grieving heart and help it rest like a child in the arms of a loving parent.

The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 1:3–4 that God is the “Father of compassion and the God of all comfort.” Is that really true? If God really does love me, why did He allow me to go through such horrible times of distress and pain? Why couldn’t I have a “normal” life just like everyone else? After all, I wasn’t really that bad of a person, was I? Hadn’t I worked hard to turn my life around? Here my husband and I were now attending a good, Bible-teaching church, and I was learning more about Jesus and His love for me every day. We were finally ready to start a family after being married for ten years—I felt in my heart that I was now ready to become a mom. But then everything started to fall apart. This book is to let you know that no matter what you are facing, God, our Heavenly Father, is always right beside us, and when we keep our eyes on Him and trust Him, He will see to it that we are brought to a place where life can make sense. Was this story something that I dreamed about as a little girl? Far from it! Yet I can honestly say that I am more at peace today than I have ever been in my life. The God of all comfort is always right here, just waiting for me to draw near to Him, and He is waiting for you as well.

2 Corinthians 1:3 declares that "God is the God of all comfort," and this Bible study called Knowing the God of All Comfort explores the many ways that believers are comforted by our Father God, our Savior Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. Anyone who grieves a loss and/or trauma from any source knows that grief is painful and hard and requires "work" to process. How are we to live by the truth that God is the God of all comfort? How are we to grieve as one who believes the truths of Scripture? This inductive study looks at the many ways we can be comforted through biblical truths and explores how the "work" of grief is modeled in the Psalms of Lament and in passages of Scripture where the sorrow of humanity is acknowledged. The many laments in the Bible model how we can "work" out our grief through the presence and ministry of "the God of all comfort." Each of the five lessons also challenge the participants to write their own psalm of lament and express words of gratitude as a means of drawing close to the Triune God and the comfort they each bring. This study can be a resource to help believers know the comfort God brings and share with others this comfort.

Hannah Whitall Smith knew firsthand the world's darkness and grief-but she was confident that "somewhere and somehow God [was] going to make everything right for all the creatures He has created." Her writings have often been censored to remove the more "heretical" portions, but her only heresy is her belief in Divine love, a love stronger than any obstacle. As a mother, she knew how much she loved her children-and she could not believe that God's love could be weaker than her own. "I began to see that the wideness of God's love was far beyond any wideness that I could even conceive of. . . if I took all the unselfish love of every mother's heart the whole world over, and piled it all together, and multiplied it by millions, I would still only get a faint idea of . . . the mother-heart of God." -Hannah Whitall Smith