Sermon: Death & Hope

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And Martha said to him, I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.

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Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.

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And everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?

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She said to him, yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.

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When she had said this, she went and called her sister, Mary, saying in private, the teacher is here and is calling for you.

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And when she heard it, she rose quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come into the village, but was still in the place where Martha had met him.

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When the Jews who were with her in the house, with the Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw

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Mary rise quickly and go out, they followed her, supposing that she was going to the tomb to weep there. Now when

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Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.

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When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled.

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And he said, where have you laid him? They said to him, Lord, come and see. Jesus wept.

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So the Jews said, see how he loved him. But some of them said, could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying?

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Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb. It was a cave and a stone lay against it.

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Jesus said, take away the stone. Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, Lord, by this time there'll be an odor, for he's been dead four days.

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Jesus said to her, did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God? So they took away the stone and Jesus lifted up his eyes and said,

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Father, I thank you that you heard me, that you've heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this on the count of the people standing around, that they may believe that you sent me.

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When he had said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, Lazarus, come out. The man who had died came out.

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His hands and feet bound with linen strips and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, unbind him and let him go.

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Thus far is the reading of God's holy word. Let's pray. Father, we come to you as your people, trusting you.

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Lord, you are the king, the sovereign, the ruler over all things.

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Lord, you give and you take away. Lord, you determine the boundaries of our life and our breath and our heartbeats.

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You declare the end from the beginning and you cause all things to work together for good for those who love you and are called according to your purpose.

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You, Lord, entered into our rebellion, our sin, and our death, and you conquered our enemies, sin and death.

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Lord Jesus, we trust you that you are the resurrection and the life. We trust you that if we believe in you, though we die, yet shall we live.

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And we trust you and believe in you as you say that everyone who lives and believes in you shall never die.

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God, we are grateful for you and your condescension and your entering into this world, into this brokenness and showing us so much of the glory of God.

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Lord Jesus, even in this moment, you knew the future. You knew what it held.

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You knew what you were going to do, and yet you met them in their pain. Lord, you were deeply moved, and you wept over what ought not to be death, and yet in that grief,

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Lord, you knew the hope that you are. For, Lord, you have the power to speak into death and raise the dead to life.

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God, we love you. We thank you that we know you. We thank you that we have life in you and forgiveness, and we thank you that you have defeated,

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Lord, our greatest enemy. And, Lord, we long for the day when,

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Lord, all of this is wrapped up in victory and the dead hear the voice of the Son of Man and they rise.

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Lord, we long for the day when you speak our name into our tomb and call us out.

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Please bless us today as a church as we focus in upon your word and your promises. Give me the words to minister to your people in Jesus' name.

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Amen. So, if you're visiting, welcome to Apologia Church.

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For our church family, this is a particularly difficult time. Our beloved sister,

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Jana Fornelli, went home to be with the Lord this week. It was unexpected.

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She leaves behind Lonnie, her precious family, and her two children.

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And so, please continue to pray for the family, love them, and minister to them in the midst of this deep grief.

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So, I wanted to talk today to us as a church body, not with my own tips to success, my own encouraging words and motivations towards you, the people that I love the most.

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I wanted to give you the words of God to minister to you and to provide a foundation as we, as believers, focus on these two things, grief and hope.

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Pastor James and I were talking before service today, and it's like we were reading the same book because we both had the same ideas.

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It's interesting because sometimes, well, most of the time in the

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Christian life, Christians will fall off of a cliff one way or another. The Christian life is really about balance.

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And the Word of God, God's truth, brings that balance in so many ways. And what oftentimes Christians can do in light of death, the death of a loved one,

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C .S. Lewis said that the death of a beloved, someone you love, is like amputation. And that's so true.

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It's like losing a part of yourself. You have to figure out how to go along in life without that piece.

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It's always missing, though. You can learn to limp along, right, as a believer.

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You learn to sort of endure that pain and put it in its right context. But it really is, in many ways, like an amputation.

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And oftentimes Christians can go off of a cliff one of two ways. They can overemphasize the grief, and they could essentially start grieving like unbelievers, like Paul says in 1

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Thessalonians chapter 4, as those without hope. And so they can succumb to the grief and the pain and the difficulty, and they grieve as those unbelievers, those who don't know

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God. They believe they grieve as those without hope. So they fall off the cliff in grief, being so consumed by the grief that they neglect the divine truths, revelation from God about who we are, who

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God is, and what Christ has actually accomplished in His redemption for His people.

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And there are other times where believers will face down death, the death of a loved one, death of a believer, and they'll neglect grief altogether.

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And they'll just emphasize the joy that we have in Christ that that loved one has not truly died.

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The way that Jesus described it, they are asleep. Now, Jesus wasn't teaching some soul sleep doctrine there.

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That's actually how Paul describes death of a believer as well. It's like sleeping.

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You're going to get up again. There are times where a believer will sort of come in like a bull in a china cabinet, you know, sort of just saying, don't worry.

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There's nothing to cry about, nothing to be broken about. They're with the Lord. They're all good. And that's true enough, actually.

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We should rejoice because they're doing better than us. Let me just say right now as I talk to us as a church body, brothers and sisters,

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Jana is good right now. She's good. But when you look at this text in John chapter 11, you see that Jesus actually has the perfect image of God.

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When God becomes man, and we see the full and comprehensive expression of what God intended for mankind.

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When God becomes a man, God incarnate takes on flesh, and He walks among us. Even knowing

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His power, even knowing His identity, even knowing the future, He still weeps and grieves deeply in the midst of death.

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Why? Because it ought not to be the case. Something is entirely broken and unnatural about what takes place when image bearers of God die.

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Now, think about this for a moment in terms of unbelievers who grieve without hope. What is death in a world not created by God?

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What is death apart from Jesus Christ? What is it? It's just random molecules, just random results of evolutionary processes going back into the dirt, ceasing to be animated.

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What's there to cry about? What's there to cry about? What's there to grieve about? If Jesus isn't who He claimed to be, then what is death ultimately?

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There's really nothing foundationally that gives you reason to cry and to hurt.

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No one cries when rocks tumble off of a mountain. It's just stuff moving throughout space.

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But every image bearer of God, unbeliever or believer, feels the weight of brokenness and grief when there's death.

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It's interesting, years and years ago, when I was the chaplain at a hospital,

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I had to do a number of funerals. And I just want to say for the record,

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I love you. I'll do your funeral for you. But if you pick me, I think you picked the wrong guy. I have a hard time.

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But what was interesting is that I've attended so many funerals and I've preached so many funerals that I've forgotten.

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And I've done so many with believers. And I've been at the bedsides of people who have died right in front of me.

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And I've been with the families, believing families, who've been impacted by the death of a loved one.

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And the contrast between the death of a believer and those believers left behind, and the death of an unbeliever and the unbelievers left behind, is

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I was asked to do a funeral for a young man that I had been counseling that week.

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He was not a believer. He had just got into the hospital. He left the hospital. He went and started using again.

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And he died of an overdose of heroin. And the family didn't know who else to call because this wasn't a believer, and they weren't a believing family.

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They needed a pastor, they supposed, to speak at the funeral. And they asked me if I would do it.

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And to be given the opportunity to preach the gospel to a room full of unbelievers in the midst of death was something that I was absolutely ready to do.

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And I remember that moment was very, very hard to witness, but I walked away with so much rejoicing over Christ because I was in a room filled shoulder to shoulder with unbelievers, with this dead body in front of me.

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This place was so tight. The space was so tight I could touch his face. It was an open casket right in front of me, and the room was filled with so much despair.

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It's just over. There was no hope. It was totally broken.

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Believers get both though. Those who know Jesus have experienced

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His gifts of righteousness and salvation. We get both. We get the reality and the depth of grief, and we get the rejoicing over the fact that this person is in the arms of our

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Savior. And though they have died, they live. And this is not the end.

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This is not the end. This is just but a moment in God's plan of redemption in history.

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This is just a moment. She will rise again. There is a resurrection.

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Jesus demonstrated His power over death in His ministry. He would call into the body of a dead little girl at a funeral, and He'd say, little girl, arise, and she would come to life.

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He speaks into the tomb of His close friend, Lazarus. He says, Lazarus, come forth, and Lazarus comes out of that tomb.

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And Jesus said to the Jews of His day, He said, destroy this temple, speaking of the temple of His body, and He says, and I will raise it up again.

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It's interesting because even though the revelation from God of the Old Testament said that the

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Messiah was going to die and rise again, even though Jesus in His ministry said that He was going to die and rise again, after He was murdered on that tree and death was there, they know the consequences, they know what this is, and they saw the brutalization of the

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Messiah Himself. They saw Him dead and go into that tomb. They couldn't quite believe.

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It's not really possible, is it, for someone to endure that kind of brutality, that kind of death, and then to come out of the tomb.

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And so when Jesus is risen again, and the disciples on the road to Emmaus are so confused over what are they going to do now, they thought

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He was the Messiah. Here is Jesus alive from the dead, just as He had told them, because His word is sure and true.

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When He speaks, He creates universes. When He speaks, He creates little creatures and flowers and sky.

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When He speaks, He creates the image of God, and when He speaks into death, life comes forth.

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That's the Savior that we worship. That's who He is. And as believers, we have to learn to face death in a way that is glorifying to God and healing to ourselves.

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And that means we have to face death the way that Jesus did, with hope and grief.

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You have to embrace both. And I want to just say this to minister to you. Pastor James and I both worked as chaplains at hospitals.

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It's some of the hardest work you can ever imagine. It truly is. It'll test your faith in terms of, do

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I really believe these attributes of God? Do I really believe these things?

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One of the things we would say is that you have to go through both.

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You must. You must go, and it seems counterintuitive at times as believers.

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You must go from the deep moment of pain and weeping and grief.

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You must embrace that because it's all true and it's all real. And you'll have this moment that seems counterintuitive where you spring from that moment of deep, deep pain and grief to bliss and joy and delight because it's also true.

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Because it's also true. You must, as a believer, experience both. Jesus did, and he's

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God. When we talk about grief, like a moment we see here with Jesus weeping over the death of Lazarus, we need to unpack this for a moment and talk about grief.

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Death has the ability to focus the mind. If you've been here for a long time, you've heard me say that before.

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Death has the ability to focus the mind. It reminds us of our enemies, sin and death.

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It reminds us that things are not how they ought to be. Now we hide ourselves, and we've emphasized this before as well, we hide ourselves from this really well in our modern day.

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It used to be when you had churches, church buildings, you built the church and you built the grave plot so that you would go into church and you were walking past all the dead saints who had been there before you and laid the foundation, the gospel foundation for that church, and so you were walking in the midst of dead bodies as you went to worship.

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It was a constant reminder of death. Death is all around you. We like to hide our cemeteries far away from things and keep them out of view, and that's something you only go to in those tragic moments, but we don't want to be reminded of it.

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We don't want to see it. We don't want to think about it, and if we're young especially, we like to think, yeah, there's death that happens.

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I might have been to some funerals, but you know what? Not me. Not me.

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That happens to other people, right? We try to sort of push death away from us to not be reminded of it, and death has the ability to focus the mind in a moment like this where we experience a loss of someone that we deeply love and cherish who is such an important part of our church body.

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We can see how a moment like this has the ability to focus your minds, to focus your mind on your own sin and on your own impending death and ask the question, do

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I know him? Have I experienced his life and peace in God?

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What would happen if my eyes closed and I slept and I opened them to the judge of all the earth?

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Are my sins forgiven? Do I know Christ, the Prince of Peace? Have I actually entered into the way of peace with God, the only way, through faith in Jesus?

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Death has the ability to focus the mind, and so grief is actually something that you must experience as a

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Christian. You have to go through that and experience that and taste it and allow that to impact you and let it all come out.

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If Jesus, who is God incarnate, can weep publicly over the death of a loved one, then so can we.

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So can we. Ecclesiastes, famous verse, right?

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3 -4. There's a time to dance and a time to mourn, right? There's a time to grieve.

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It's a fallen world. There is brokenness and sin and tragedy and death and disease in this world, and so life in this fallen world, as God is bringing about redemption, as far as the curse is found, life in this world is filled with moments of dancing and laughter and grief and mourning.

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And it ought to be the case because that's what happens when you have a world filled with sin and rebellion against their creator.

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But Jesus in John 11 -35 actually experiences that very important, necessary human response to death in this world.

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All the while, again, knowing what he was actually going to accomplish, Jesus wept and he knew he was raising

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Lazarus. He said he's going there and he was doing it because God was going to be glorified in the result.

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And what does he do? On the way to Lazarus's tomb, he weeps. Believers, we have to grieve, but we grieve with joyful hope.

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This week, we got word that Jana had gone into cardiac arrest, and so the pastors immediately jumped in our cars and we flew to the hospital.

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We got to the hospital. I'm trying to find some way to get into the hospital. It was actually pretty difficult because everything is still locked down, and believe it or not, pastors don't have any special privileges.

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I've tried to go to the hospital so many times in the last two years. We're constantly rejected.

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I don't know how we got in this time, but we did get to the hospital, and I was trying to get a hold of Lonnie to figure out how we can find out where they were, thinking that Jana, last we heard that she had cardiac arrest.

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And outside the hospital emergency room, that's when Lonnie called me and said she's gone.

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And we prepared ourselves as pastors to go and minister and listen and care for their souls, and we were brought up to where she was behind glass, and we saw the body of our sister that we love there, and Lonnie and Jana's mother and father were there outside of the glass as we all looked in, and we prayed and tried to love the family.

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And it's interesting because you say these two things that don't seem to make any sense together, grieve and joyful hope, grieve and guaranteed assurance, and both take place.

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It seems so counterintuitive. You go back and forth and back and forth, and I got to see this display of it this week.

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I had the privilege of the honor of being able to watch as everything was wrapping up and it was time for us to leave.

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We helped Lonnie up to go to the glass, and I watched for it seemed like it seemed like 10 or 15 minutes as Lonnie spoke about how grateful to God he was that she was such a lovely wife, how grateful he was for her faith in Christ, how grateful he was for her as a mother, and he spoke in a way that made sense with Christ that she's okay.

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And he talked about how grateful to God he was that she was in her

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Savior's arms, and she was experiencing no more pain, and he spoke as though he was going to experience a temporary departure, that he will see her again, and it's a moment filled with deep, deep pain mingled together with so much joy and hope in Christ, and it's interesting because all week we've been experiencing that swing from depth of grief and pain and sorrow and sadness of missing someone that we cherish so deeply.

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She was such an important part of our church, so much a part of this even being here today.

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So many of you, this isn't about the pastors. This church isn't built on us. This church is built on Christ, and he uses his church to build the church, and Jana was one of those pieces that allowed this church to be here.

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So if you're here today, it's in some part because of Jana and her investment in the lives and the people of this church body, but we've also gone this week.

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I was talking to Candy yesterday. We were getting ready to leave the house, and it was interesting because we were talking about the funeral, the service, and how we wanted to bless the family and make sure that we did this in a way that was glorifying to God and blessed people and was comforting, and so we were thinking through what does the family want?

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What do they want to say? What are Jana's favorite worship songs that she loved to sing?

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And so we were thinking through that, and Candy said to me, she said, this is interesting because this funeral service, it's not really for Jana.

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Like it is, but it's really it's about Christ, and it's about glorifying

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God, and the funeral service is really about worship, and the funeral service is really about the people who are left behind while Jana is in pure delight right now.

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It's really about us being left behind, being able to worship God and his truth, and Candy says it's really about Christ and worship.

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She said, Jana's fine, and only

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Christians can talk like that, and I just sort of said off the cuff as she said it.

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I said, yeah, she's fine. That's the hope. Paul says, and we did this last year, a study through Philippians.

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You'll remember one of my favorite sections, probably many of you too, where Paul is talking about he has this desire to depart and be with Christ, right?

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He says, to be with you, it's like fruitful ministry, and it's like it's a blessing, and you know, being here with you and serving you,

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Paul basically saying like, yeah, I'll do that, but I have a desire, I have a longing to weigh the anchor and to sail away to be with Jesus.

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I long to depart and be with Christ, and to be absent from the body is to be present with the

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Lord, and so the moment someone who knows Jesus closes their eyes to sleep, they open their eyes instantly to their

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Savior, and there's the grief and the hope, both parts we have to embrace.

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I want to show you this so you, because this isn't, you don't want, you've heard me say this so many times, you don't want

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Pastor Jeff's tips to success for your marriage or for life or whatever. If I don't give to you something that is truth from the

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Word of God, feel free to leave it out, reject it. But in the light of a moment like this, where we experience the death of someone we so deeply love, who knows the

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Lord and is with Jesus now, I think we want to look to Scripture in terms of what does God say about encouraging one another in a moment like this, and lo and behold, there's

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Scripture specifically about this. 1 Thessalonians 4 13 through 18.

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Paul says, but we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do, who have no hope.

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For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep.

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There it is again, fallen asleep, fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by the word from the

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Lord, that we who are alive, who are until left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep.

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For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.

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Then we who are alive, who are left to be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the

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Lord. Here it is, therefore encourage one another with these words.

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We have divine revelation telling us, encourage one another with these words.

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There's something here from God that he wants for his saints to hear in the light of those who have died in Christ.

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First notice that Paul says here twice, they've fallen asleep, they've fallen asleep.

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Jesus also spoke like that about Lazarus. He's asleep. From God's perspective, this is a temporary moment.

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It's clear he's talking about death because he says the dead in Christ will rise first. Those who have fallen asleep are the dead, right?

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And when Jesus says Lazarus is asleep in that moment, they're like, what do you mean? He's going to wake up again though, right?

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Jesus says Lazarus has died, okay? From God's perspective, let's call it sleep, but it's death.

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And it's interesting when we think about this concept of sleep. Don't you think it's a powerful thing that every single day

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God gives image bearers of God in a fallen world a rehearsal for the big day?

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Did you ever think about that? Every day of your life, God is shouting to you about what his intention is for the end of the world.

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Jesus calls it sleep. Paul calls it sleep. He compares death to sleep. Well, what happens to us every single day?

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We lie down, close our eyes, darkness, and then we open our eyes and we stand up again.

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Every day is a rehearsal for the big day. Every day. You lie down and you rise up again.

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Every day, God has it built into creation. A lying down and a rising up again.

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Every day rehearsal. And Jesus refers to the death of Lazarus as a sleep. And of course, in this moment,

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Paul is talking about those who have died in Christ as a sleep. But what's the encouraging thing to one another?

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Paul says, I don't want you to grieve like those who don't have hope. In other words, there are people who are without hope.

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When John Piper spoke on this, he makes the point, this sort of annihilates universalism, doesn't it?

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Right? There are people who are without hope. They grieve and they're without hope.

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But you, as a believer, are not to grieve like those who are without hope. Why? Because you have hope.

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Why? Jesus died and he rose again. That truth is not just a truth that signifies and screams at you about your own relationship with Jesus that you have peace with God.

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It is that, yes, but it is also a display before the watching world in history that Jesus has overcome our greatest enemy.

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And he promises that he is coming back to raise the dead. And you, if you know

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Christ, will be raised again to eternal life with God. It is not final any longer.

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And if you're a believer, though you die, yet shall you live. And if you believe in him, you'll never die.

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That's the hope we have in Christ. There's the grief mingled together with hope.

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We have this glorious hope that Jesus has risen again and he will return to raise the dead.

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Therefore, encourage one another with these words. It's not over. It's not over.

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And it's truly a glorious thing, mingled pain with hope, to see the body of a loved one on a table and to both be filled with pain and joy that this is not final and she's good.

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She's great. She's doing much better than any of us.

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And it's funny, I think if you were to ask her now, you want to come back? We're really hurting down here. She'd be like, no, thanks.

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There's a verse that Tim read, I'm sure it was hard to read today, in the

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Psalms that I think we need to experience God's comfort because he's the

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God of all comfort. We need to experience his comfort. And how does God feel about a moment like this? We know that Jesus, who is

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God incarnate, when he's faced with the death of a loved one, he weeps. His heart is broken over that. He's deeply moved over a moment like that.

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He weeps over death, even though he conquers it. But in Psalm 116 .15,

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that's a precious verse, isn't it? Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.

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God is intimately acquainted with all of our brokenness and all of our pain. And as your brother and pastor,

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I want to point you to the ultimate hope. There's truth here now, but it is an ultimate hope for the future in moments like this when we reflect on our tears and our pain.

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And you'll probably be familiar with this. It's a famous section of scripture, but it testifies to so much about the heart of our

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God and just his concern for us and our lives and our pain.

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It's from Revelation 21. Verse 1, it says, Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.

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And I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

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And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.

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He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their

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God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more.

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Neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.

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We grieve, but we grieve not as those without hope. We grieve as those with a

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God who is so present, who loves his children so much. He dwells within them, and he wipes away the tears from their eyes.

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He gives us comfort. He gives us his love, and he is intimately acquainted with all of our pain.

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And as a good, gracious Father, he will never abandon us to this pain.

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He cares for our souls. So I'm going to encourage you this week to take your pain to our

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Savior. Let his word be the foundation of your hope. Grieve well, and rejoice well as a church.

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And I want to say, final point, Jana, I know, if she could have ordered a discussion like this,

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I know Jana very well. Well enough to know that she would have said, you had better preach the gospel.

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You had better point them to Christ. She would have. And so death has the ability to focus the mind.

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So I want to speak to you now about where you're at.

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You are also a sinner. You are also an image bearer of God, who outside of Christ, the

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Bible says the wrath of God abides on you. If you don't have

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Christ, you don't have life. Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

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No man comes to the Father but by Me. He is the resurrection and the life, but life is only found in Him.

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And so Christ calls you to come and die and rise again, to come to Him and to trust in Him.

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He is God as man, who lives this sinless, perfect life in the place of His people as their substitute.

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And He dies a death that actually I deserve, you deserve, and experiences the wrath of God and full weight of the punishment of our sin on that cross.

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And then He conquers that death and victory by rising again from the dead. And He calls people to repent and to believe the

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Gospel. So I'm going to challenge you with that today. Do you know

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Him? Is Jesus your Lord, your

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Master, your God? Is He the ruler of your life?

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Have you bent the knee to Christ and are you yielded to Him as Lord and Savior? Do you look to Christ and what

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He's accomplished and to Him alone for forgiveness, for mercy, for salvation?

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Have you come to God with empty hands, with nothing to offer that cling to Christ? Have you come to God to receive

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His living water? Have you come to Christ to live again?

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Because the Bible describes our condition outside of Jesus as dead. A lot of talk today about physical death, but the

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Bible describes us spiritually as by nature children of wrath, dead in our sins and trespasses.

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So the condition of every human being in this world, though they may be animated, if they are outside of Jesus they're actually spiritually dead.

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And the only way out of that death is by resurrection. And the only one who has the power of resurrection is

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Jesus Christ. What we all need is peace with God, reconciliation with God. That is the ultimate because you and I are going to join

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Jannah in death. So, do you know

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Him? Have you turned to Christ in faith to experience

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God's mercy and His forgiveness? My favorite verse in the

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Bible is John 5 24, because I think it sums up so much of Christ's promises about the gospel and salvation.

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It says this, truly, truly I say to you, He who hears my voice and believes

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Him who sent me has eternal life and does not come into judgment, but is passed out of death into life.

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That's what Jannah had before she went home to be with her Savior.

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Eternal life. No condemnation. Gone from death to life.

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And for those in this room today who are trusting in Christ as Savior and Lord, it's true of you too.

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You're never going to die. It's not ultimate. You have eternal life.

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You are not condemned. You've gone from death to life. You know

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God. There is no greater thing than peace with God. There is no greater thing than peace with God.

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There is no more meaningful pursuit in this world than peace with God.

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It is the sum total of all of life, peace with God.

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And there's only one way to have it, and that's through faith in Christ. So repent and believe the good news.

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Turn to Christ and live. Allow a moment like this where we experience the grief of death, the pain of death, to focus your minds.

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I pray that God uses the words today that were spoken about Christ the

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Savior in the light of our beloved sister's death. I pray that He uses it to open the eyes of the blind and to open ears to hear the truth.

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Turn to Christ and live. Let's pray. Lord, thank You so much for Your Word.

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Thank You for the hope that we have in Christ. Lord Jesus, thank

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You for Your resurrection. Thank You for conquering death,

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Yours and ours. Thank You for the gift that You gave us of our dear friend.

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All of those special moments that were gifts, thank You for the gifts You gave to her and You give to us for Your glory and for Your kingdom.

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Please use us. Please use us. I pray,

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Lord, for those in this room who don't know You. I pray that You'd open their eyes to the truth, to trust in Christ. And for those of us that do know

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You, Lord, I pray that especially this week we would minister to one another and bless one another and lift each other up.

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We pray especially for Lonnie and the kids and the family.

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You give them comfort. Lord, You would guard their hearts and their minds, that they'd have their eyes fixed on You and Your truth.