Praying for Comfort and Encouragement

Whether we are experiencing a major trial, a “blah” day for no apparent reason, or anything in between, we are people who need comfort and encouragement. And if we are in need of encouragement, it is very likely that the people around us are too.

Paul prayed such a prayer for the encouragement of the Thessalonians in 2 Thessalonians 2:16-17:

“Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts and establish them in every good work and word.”

We will take a quick look at the reasons for Paul’s prayer, his previous teaching, the prayer itself, and some takeaways for ourselves.

The Reasons for Paul’s Prayer

Paul had good reason to pray for the Thessalonians’ comfort and encouragement. They had been undergoing persecution, and he encouraged them to persevere:

“We ourselves boast about you in the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith in all your persecutions and in the afflictions that you are enduring. This is evidence of the righteous judgment of God, that you may be considered worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are also suffering” (2 Thessalonians 1:4-5).

Not only were they being attacked by persecution, but the believers in the church were fearful because of false teaching being circulated about the Lord’s coming:

“Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you, brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter seeming to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come. Let no one deceive you in any way” (2 Thessalonians 2:1-3a).

Paul’s Previous Teaching

Paul corrected the Thessalonians and explained that the day of the Lord had not yet come, so they did not need to fear. Then he gave reasons that he was thankful to God for them. Perhaps these reasons were another roundabout means of encouraging them:

“But we ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers beloved by the Lord, because God chose you as the firstfruits to be saved, through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth. To this he called you through our gospel, so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Thessalonians 2:13-14).

He encouraged them by recalling their past: God had chosen them to salvation. In the present, they were sanctified by the Spirit. And they were called in the future to obtain the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ! This reminder of the what God had done for them through the Gospel should then motivate them and call them to the action Paul calls for next—to stand firm:

“So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter” (2 Thessalonians 2:15).

Because they had been chosen, sanctified, and called to obtain glory, they were to stand firm and hold fast to truth. These gospel truths would not just call them persevere, but they would encourage them as well. And this is why Paul prays, asking God to comfort them.

“At the end of the day, therefore, when the apostle as teacher has done all he can by way of reassuring argumentation, he clearly recognizes that all is in vain without the enabling work of God—Father, Son, and Spirit—on their behalf.”¹

Paul’s Prayer

The Basis for Paul’s requests

Before we get to the content of the prayer, we shouldn’t miss to whom Paul prayed: our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father. Himself is an emphatic pronoun, so it literally reads, “Himself Lord, our Jesus Christ.” As Lord, he is God who rules all things sovereignly. As Jesus, he is a man like we are who sympathizes with our weaknesses. As Christ, he is the Messiah, God’s anointed one. And to personalize these great truths, he is ours!

God is our Father, and fathers give good gifts (cf. James 1:17; Matthew 7:9-11). The Thessalonians had turned to him “from idols to serve the living and true God” (1 Thessalonians 1:9). They understood the hopelessness of serving and praying to an idol (cf. Isaiah 44:9-20).

The very nature of who Jesus Christ and God the Father are and what they have already done for us provides the bases for Paul’s requests.

The Father and Son loved us.

While we could look at a million ways this is true, here a just a handful of ways in which we see their love:

• The Father loved us by predestining us for adoption (cf. Ephesians 1:3-6).
• The Father loved us by sending his Son to die for us (cf. 1 John 4:10).
• Nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ (cf. Romans 8:37-39).
• Christ loved both the church (cf. Ephesians 5:25) and individuals (cf. Galatians 2:20) by “giving himself up” for them.

A.W. Pink captures well this reminder of God’s love:

“That [love] is what the apostle eyed first as he was about to make intercession for those tried saints, and that is what our faith must never lose sight of, for nothing else will keep our hearts warm and our affections fresh to God. All of God’s dispensations to and all of His dealings with us should be considered in the light of His infinite and unchanging love for us. Yet that is only possible as faith is daily exercised regarding these facts. When God’s providences are contemplated and interpreted by carnal reason, unbelief clouds our vision, and we give the devil an advantage to inject into our minds, poisonous and blasphemous aspersions against God. It is one of the enemy’s favorite devices to induce a Christian to entertain doubts of God’s love toward him—especially so in a time of trial or tribulation—and nought but ‘the shield of faith’ can stop his fiery darts. Faith resists his evil suggestions, looks away from the things seen, and lays hold upon the declarations and promises of Him who has covenanted with His people, ‘I will not turn away from them, to do them good’ (Jer. 32:40). There is solid ground to rest upon amid the storms of life. This is an unfailing cordial for the fainting heart.”²

The Father and Son specifically loved us by giving us eternal comfort and good hope.

At one point, we had no hope.

“Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ. . . having no hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12, emphasis added).

Many people have a misplaced, fragile hope.

“So are the paths of all who forget God; And the hope of the godless will perish, Whose confidence is fragile, And whose trust a spider’s web” (Job 8:13-14, NASB, emphasis added).

Believers do not just have temporary hope.

“If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:19, emphasis added).

Instead, believers have an eternal and living hope.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Peter 1:3-5, emphasis added).

This eternal comfort and good hope that the Father and Son give us is through grace.

Paul brings us around full circle. Our hope is found in grace, which grace is found in our Savior Jesus Christ:

“For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works” (Titus 2:11-14).

The Requests Paul Makes

We finally get to Paul’s requests. He asks that Jesus Christ and God the Father “comfort your hearts and establish them in every good work and word.”

As we’ve seen in the first part of Paul’s prayer, God had already given them eternal comfort, so why does God ask that God would comfort their hearts? Paul wanted the very real truth, hope, and encouragement of the truths of God and the gospel to take place in their hearts.

“The supplication was that they might have inward enjoyment of the same, that the glorious contents of the gospel should be brought home in power to their hearts, that the substance of their consolation and the object of their hope would be made so real and solid as to fill them with peace and joy. Paul desired that they might have such a satisfying and blissful realization of the divine love and its manifestations to them that no tribulations and sufferings should be able to rob them or even becloud the same in their apprehensions.”³

The word comfort comes from the Greek parakaleō, which means “to ask to come and be present where the speaker is, call to one’s side” or “to instill someone with courage or cheer, comfort, encourage, cheer up.”⁴

The word establish is sometimes translated strengthen. It is the Greek word stērizō, a similar word from which we get the word steroids.

Paul prayed that God would instill the Thessalonians with courage and comfort and strengthen their hearts, so that they would be able to do and speak good in the midst of difficulty.

Paul had actually sent Timothy to them to be a means of establishing them and comforting them:

“And we sent Timothy, our brother and God’s coworker in the gospel of Christ, to establish and exhort [same Greek word as comfort] you in your faith, that no one be moved by these afflictions. For you yourselves know that we are destined for this” (1 Thessalonians 3:2-3, emphasis added).

Takeaways

Whether our trials are as heavy as the persecution the Thessalonians were facing or whether we are faced with small issues that bother us, we have free access to the throne of grace to ask for comfort and encouragement.

• Remember to whom you pray: Himself, our Lord Jesus Christ and God the Father.
• Remember the Father’s love to you in Christ.
• Take hold of the eternal comfort and hope you have in Christ.
• Ask God to apply that eternal comfort and hope to your own heart (and others for whom you pray). This can bring comfort and encouragement, enabling obedience and perseverance.
• You can even be the answer to a prayer that God would comfort, exhort, and encourage someone. As Timothy was sent to the Thessalonians, you can not only pray for others, but you can even be part of the means in answering that prayer!

As he has already done, may God continue to give us hope, grace, comfort, and strength so that we may stand firm and obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.

—

Holly Huffstutler serves with her husband David, the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Troy in Troy, MI. She has a master’s degree in Biblical Ministries and blogs with him here where this post first appeared. Holly is a homemaker, raising and putting her four children through school.

All quotes ESV

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1. Gordon D. Fee, The First and Second Letters to the Thessalonians, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2009), 309–310. [↩]
2. Arthur Walkington Pink, Gleanings from Paul Studies in the Prayers of the Apostle (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2005), 309–310. [↩]
3. Ibid., 314. [↩]
4. William Arndt et al., in A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 764–65. [↩]