Comfort: Friend or Foe?

Imagine you’re running a track race. Suddenly, you turn a corner and, to your surprise, there’s a couch sitting squarely in the middle of the track. It would be an incredibly unhelpful obstacle. Now imagine you’ve had a long day on your feet and you come home exhausted, only to find that the only item in your living room is a treadmill. A couch is a wonderful thing - it provides rest and relief, especially to those who are weary. And a treadmill is a wonderful thing - it allows for beneficial training and exercise, especially for those who want to run with strength. But both are supremely useless when they are taken out of their proper place.

This is how I view comfort and work. There is a time and place to enjoy comfort and there is a time and place to work diligently. The issue is when one oversteps its bounds and interferes with the other. I have seen that misconceptions about comfort and its role in our lives can keep us from experiencing true abundant life in Christ.

So how can we approach comfort in a healthy way? First let’s start with avoiding common pitfalls.

For some people, comfort is what life is about. You may strive for efficiency because it means you have to do less work. You may shy away from new experiences because it disrupts your current comfort levels. You may constantly daydream about an easy life. You may even work extremely hard because you want to be comfortable when you retire. Comfort can be a sneaky idol - it seems harmless, or even good, and easily entangles our hearts, eclipsing the true purpose of life which is enjoying Christ and making Him known. 

This doesn’t just affect individuals, I’d argue that comfort is worshiped by western society. It is what the American Dream is all about - and Christians aren’t immune to it. Especially in places where “Cultural Christianity” runs rampant, comfort becomes such a widespread hindrance to true devotion to God, that any hint of Christ-centered zeal seems overly radical. Complacency runs rampant, to the point where it becomes normalized.

Often, people don’t consider taking big steps of faith because it’ll require sacrificing key components of a comfortable life like time, money, energy, reputation, etc. God calls us higher, we must take up our cross to follow Him. We are all called to obey the Great Commission, and making disciples requires dedicated, selfless service to others. If a love of comfort is getting in the way of a person’s obedience, it is an idol, an invasive weed that must be uprooted. 

Additionally, I have seen people make radical, faith-filled life decisions to follow God and it required them to set aside their comfort. They grew tremendously through those challenging times and they see how God uses our resources for His glory. Praise God! I have also seen some of those people swing so far in the other direction that they develop a distrust/distaste for comfort in general. They work tirelessly for the kingdom (which is great!), but they also look down on those who don’t work as hard as they do and they begin to feel guilty or wrong when they rest or take leisure time. It can get to the point where enjoying the easy or beautiful things in their life feels like compromise - it’s almost as if the mindset is “if you’re not constantly, painfully suffering for the kingdom, you need to repent”. Comfort becomes enemy #1 because it gets incorrectly boiled down to an immature Christian’s stumbling block. I’d argue this tendency idolizes discomfort, however it's harder to identify that because it is shrouded moral superiority. And, I speak from experience, this lifestyle leads to endless cycles of discouragement and burnout. It is unsustainable for a lifetime of walking with Christ. 

For those who villainize comfort - in an effort to exalt Christ with every ounce of your time and energy, you neglect the truth about comfort: it is a blessing. For those who pursue or protect comfort to the point of compromising your obedience - you neglect another truth about comfort: it is not a god. 

When we see the word “comfort” in the Bible, it is most often described as a blessing from God. Just like any other blessing from God, we are to enjoy comfort without obsessing over it. When we recognize the true source of the comfort we have, we can take the pressure off of ourselves to attain or maintain it, knowing God will supply every need and we can enjoy a life spent trusting Him with our resources. And when we know that God blesses us with comfort, we can be thankful and treasure that comfort, knowing God was kind enough to dole it out. Want a template for recentering your perspective on comfort? The Psalms are full of rejoicing to God who generously gives comfort, rest, refuge, joy. 

Comfort can be vice for the sluggish, a refuge for the broken-hearted, an achievement for the ambitious, a taboo for the self-righteous, or a resting place for the weary. How we view comfort matters - it can lead us further from Christ, or it can lead us into worship. I pray that we all grow in enjoying the blessing of comfort by enjoying the one who comforts.

2 Corinthians 1:5 - “For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.”