Charles Spurgeon said of Paul, “Here was a man, who never knew but what he might be dead the next day, for his enemies were many, and cruel, and mighty; and yet he spent a great part of his time in praising and blessing God.”
I believe that the degree to which we can comfort others is a direct parallel to how we ourselves have experienced the comfort of God. That’s what tends to make a “good comforter.” It is a day of liberation when a person comes to the “end of their self” when all they were confident in themselves has been dashed upon the rocks of reality!
What may bring you there may very well be extremely different than what brings me there, but the main thing isn’t what got us there or how long it took till we got there; it’s that we finally have arrived. We may very well be experiencing the “sentence of death” in our lives.
Some of these are quite severe like the death of a marriage, business, or something else, but look carefully at what Paul has to say about God in the same verse, that the purpose of this death sentence was our death to trusting in ourselves so that we could learn to trust in God who raises the dead!