Christians Grieve Too

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This is the Dividing Line broadcast. The Apostle Peter commanded all Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.
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Your host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha and Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.
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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 in the
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Metro Phoenix dialing area, or toll free across the United States at 1 -866 -550 -3915, that's 866 -550 -3915.
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And now, with today's topic, here is James White. And good afternoon. Welcome to the Dividing Line this afternoon.
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My name is Rich Pierce. Sitting in for Dr. White one more time while he is out in New York, speaking at some churches out there and some other events that Chris Arnson has got him for, for a period of three weeks.
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And we expect to have him back here in about ten more days, and we'll certainly be welcoming him back and getting an update on what's been going on back there.
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In the meantime, we're substitute hosting here on the Dividing Line, and I was unable to get a live broadcast put together for today's show, but I have something in store for you here that I think is a little bit off the beaten path.
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In fact, this tape was done about three and a half years ago, to my recollection. I believe it was about the middle of 1996, maybe 1997.
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I was trying to kind of place this when this was done, but this topic today is, like I said, a bit off the beaten path for the
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Dividing Line. It's not apologetic in nature. James, a lot of people are aware, has written a book called
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Grieving Our Path Back to Peace, and a lot of what this stems from is
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James's time in the two and a half years as a hospital chaplain here in Phoenix, and his experience that he went through while he was there.
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And I have to tell you that this is perhaps one of the most powerful messages
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I have ever heard James give, and I will warn you up front, gather up your heart strings and hold on tight, because this message will touch you in a way that seldom messages do touch you.
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And I have to tell you that I did the recording for this when it was live, and there was not a dry eye in the room at the end of this message.
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So hang on tight and gather up those heart strings and listen as James gives the presentation,
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Christians Grieve Too. Hopefully this evening we will provide you with a study that will be of great use to you in regards to the subject of grief.
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You do not have to be grieving to get something out of this study. You simply have to be a human being who loves other human beings, because in the experience of life, grief is an emotion, an experience that all of us experience at one point or another.
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And so hopefully we will all be blessed by what we have to say this evening. But before we begin, let's ask the
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Lord to bless our time in a word of prayer. Father, we are thankful for the freedom to gather, the ability to have such nice surroundings to open your word and consider these important things of what you say about life and death.
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And Lord, we ask that by your spirit you would help us to concentrate upon your word. Lord, I would seek your assistance in opening your word.
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And Father, we pray that your will would be done this evening, and in all things you would be glorified. We pray in Christ's name.
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The past two and a half years I have served as a staff chaplain at Thunderbird Samaritan Hospital up until January 17th, just a little over a month ago.
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And for those of you who knew me rather well before then, you can probably imagine that that experience would make a fairly hefty impression upon me.
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The concept of being a chaplain, of visiting people in their rooms. If you know me well, you'd know that was one of the most difficult things
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I've ever done in my life. I am not good at walking into situations where I don't know people, and just all of a sudden being there and just having conversations, so on and so forth, it is a whole lot easier for me to stand outside of the gates of the
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Mormon temple and pass out tracts to people I don't know than it is to walk into a room where a person is dying of cancer, or walk into a room where a mother has just lost a baby in a miscarriage or whatever else it might be.
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It's a very difficult thing. One of the things that I initially learned the very first night
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I was there was something called code calls. I didn't have any experience when
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I was hired, in fact the very fact that I was hired was somewhat of a providential miracle in and of itself, but the people who hired me had attempted to explain to me what a code call was, and they had done their best to try to mimic the sound that I would hear when a code was called, but it's a sound that even to this day when
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I hear it in any other context, if I'm in a department store or something and there's a sound similar to that, my pulse just starts racing, there's a sound that you hear in the hospital, and it's a code, and what that means is somewhere in the hospital or coming into the hospital, there is a person full cardiac arrest, and you hear the chimes, and then there is an announcement of the location, and my job was, wherever I was, whatever
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I was doing, I dropped it and I got there. And basically what would happen is if I came running into, for example, 3B, which was where we had the cancer patients, or 3A, where you had telemetry, so you had a lot of heart patients there, as soon as the nurses saw me, they were very happy, because now they would pass the family off on me so they could concentrate on the patient.
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So my job was to comfort the family, get them into a place where they wouldn't be in the way of the doctors who were trying to work on the patient, and then work as the liaison between the nurses and the doctors and the family and try to get information back and forth, and of course, rather frequently,
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I would be the one who would then inform the family of the passing of their loved one, and this was a rather difficult thing to do.
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The very first night I was there, I was sitting there, I had just taken a break to eat a bag of cheese doodles, and all of a sudden
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I heard this strange noise, and all of a sudden it struck me, that's a code, and it was up in 3A, and the very first night
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I had to work with a husband who had just walked out of the room with his wife, had walked down to get a candy bar, and as he came back, it was just like it's shown in TV, when they have a code, it's just like you've seen it on emergency or whatever else you've watched it, all the nurses and doctors running all over the place, all the equipment coming in, the exact same thing, but she didn't make it, and the very first night
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I got to deal with that situation, the man was not a believer, and we'll talk a little bit more about some of the struggles that that brought up.
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So you had the ones that took place in rooms, but you also had codes that took place, for example, in the
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ER. That was the most commonplace. The ER or CCU were the main places where codes would take place.
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And certain of them stick in your mind. There are many that don't, because, you know, we would have a – we'd have various retirement communities nearby, and unfortunately, very commonly, you'd have someone brought in, you know, 78, 86 years of age, no family, no one there, long history of heart attacks, et cetera, et cetera, they're not able to revive them, and eventually you sort of got used to seeing how the nurses in the emergency room would react to these things.
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And at first, it was very frightening, it was very, very disturbing to be in the room and to recognize that most of these people are talking about the
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Sons game, they're talking about this, that, or the other thing. You eventually learned that it was completely a defense mechanism.
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It was something that they see so much death on every day that it's a defense mechanism.
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It's the only way that they can hold on to themselves. And it's – for someone like myself who had not been around that previous to this experience in my life, it was a strange thing.
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But some stick in your mind. I remember a Sunday afternoon, a 30 -year -old man was brought in.
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His wife and three young boys, I'd say about Summer's age – 5, 6, 7 years of age – came in.
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They had just bought their first home. He was mowing the lawn and fell over.
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And of course, when you bring someone in that young, that strong as he was, they worked for a long, long time.
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But they weren't able to bring him back. He died. And again, the woman was an unbeliever.
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And if you've seen some of the – like, in Islamic countries, where the wailing over the loss of someone – if you've never been in that situation where you're attempting to try to comfort this person, to be with that person, when they're informed that their husband has just passed away, it's quite an experience.
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But the one that sticks most in my mind took place last summer. And that was a code for the emergency room,
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ETA, you know, five minutes, something like that. You go down to the ER. And as soon as I walked into the ER, I knew something was different.
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Because everybody was gathered around the radio room. If you remember Emergency, the program back in the –
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I'm dating myself, aren't I? What was it, the late 70s? Something along those lines. Rampart.
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This is whatever. There's a radio room. The same type of thing. And they're communicating with the paramedics in the ambulance.
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And the first indication we have is a 9 -month -old girl is being brought in.
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And she's in full arrest. And so automatically, it puts a completely different – it's just different.
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It's not a 78 -year -old. It's a 9 -month -old. 9 -month -olds are not supposed to be brought in in full arrest.
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That's just – there's something unnatural about this. And what I would do is, is we have sliding doors there with the sensor -type things.
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And I would stand right at the door. And when they would bring the person out and the gurney would be coming up to the door,
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I would carry a legal -type pad, notebook -type thing. And I'd stick that thing out there to get the door open so they wouldn't have to wait for us.
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They could just come straight on through it. It's just one of the things that I did. And I'll never forget this little girl.
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We found out very quickly. She wasn't 9 months. She was 6 months. And just a beautiful little girl.
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And there's this big, huge fireman up on the gurney. And they're pushing – and he's standing on the gurney.
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And he's this huge, huge man. And he's doing this little – you know, this little CPR on her like this with the – doing the thing over her face doing the air.
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And very quickly, Grandma and Grandpa came in. Mommy and Daddy are at the lake.
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I'm not sure exactly which lake it is. And this is the very first time Mommy and Daddy have let Grandma and Grandpa take care of the baby.
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And what happened was, Grandma put the baby down to sleep, and somehow the baby rolled off of the mattress, and the mattress was right next to the wall.
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And when she rolled off, her head got trapped between the wall and the mattress with her face in the mattress, and she couldn't breathe.
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And I expected – I expected them to be working on her forever. I mean, 6 months old, you – you know.
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But they could not get even the first bit of reaction. And it was very quickly that they were in to inform the grandparents that she had passed away.
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And I had to go in with the head nurse when the grandparents went in to see the baby.
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And, of course, it's tough enough when children come in and it's parents and they hold the hands and so on and so forth.
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But now it's the grandparents coming in for the grandchild. And, of course, they pick the child up, and the nurses are crying, and the cops are crying.
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I mean, the place was crawling with people. I talked to some of the police later, and as soon as they heard what it was, there were
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Glendale cops that were halfway across the city that did 90 miles an hour across the city to try to get there first because all they could think of was their own kids.
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And it was – it was a very, very, very difficult night. I can guarantee you that – to experience that.
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And you just don't – those are things you don't forget. And we also had them in CCU. We – of course, the critical care unit is where you expect to have a lot of them.
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And in opposition to the young child, the best experience I had, if you could call it that, with death, took place in CCU.
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There was a very elderly, 93 -year -old Mennonite man who had had a pacemaker for quite some time.
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I guess he had had a pacemaker put in when he was in his late 60s, and he had lived another, like, 20 years or more on this pacemaker.
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And he had come in, and his health was failing. And he didn't have any immediate family, but there was this woman who was taking care of him.
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And the testimony that this man had in CCU was amazing. When people would come in – and I don't know about the rest of you, but before I started working at a hospital,
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I hated shots. But I can guarantee you something. If you want to get over your fear of shots, work in a hospital.
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I am immune to everything. I've had more shots in the past – there is no disease known to man that I haven't gotten immunization for by now.
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But I still would not enjoy laying in a hospital bed and having people have to give me shots and draw blood and all the rest of this stuff.
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And if I didn't feel well, Kelly will tell you, I probably wouldn't be a whole lot of fun as a patient in a hospital room in that situation.
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And most of us, I think, could probably say the same thing. But this man, when the nurses would come in and they'd give him a shot or they would draw blood or something like that, when they got done, he'd say, thank you.
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And he was never impatient, and he'd talk with the nurses. And when the doctor said, you know, it just doesn't look good, the nurses would come in, and he would say, why should
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I fear death? I've talked with the Lord for 93 years. Why should I fear visiting with Him?
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Why should I fear being with Him? And the nurses were just like, you know, it was night and day.
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And it just so happened, I think it was of the Lord, that I was on my rounds, I came in, and the lady who was taking care of him was there.
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And we were just staying there talking because it just so happened that she knew some people in the church that knew my mother and I knew them and all the rest of this stuff.
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As we were staying there talking, I looked at him, I said, something's happening. And right then, he began to go.
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And so when the nurses came in and I stood there with my arm around the woman as she held his hand as he flipped into eternity.
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And that type of thing happened more than once, but not quite in that context where there was such a strong testimony to the
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Lord's grace and in death itself. But of course, beyond all of that, as some of you who know me well know how difficult this was, on Sunday afternoons at 2 .30,
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the staff chaplain had the responsibility of leading a lost support group. And some of you who know what
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I used to do on Sunday afternoons regularly know how difficult that was for me to adjust to working
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Sunday afternoons at the hospital. But there was probably nothing more difficult than sitting for an hour with a group of people from every background under the sun who were grieving, who were going through loss.
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I had no experience in anything like that. And the single toughest thing
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I had to learn was how to direct that group, was how to give meaningful advice in regards to how to handle loss.
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And all of this within a primarily secular context. Samaritan is not a religious organization.
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And even though they have chaplains, there are limitations, shall we say, to the context in which you can be placed.
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And so that lost support group on Sunday afternoons was, especially for the first year because the other chaplain was out looking for a new parish to be a minister in,
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I had about 48 out of the first 52 Sundays all to myself. And it becomes difficult after a while because you have to put so much of yourself into it.
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It's these experiences that prompt this study this evening. I wished many times
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I had had the opportunity of doing a lost support group in a totally directly
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Christian environment because I think there's a lot of things that could be said, and I'll say a few of those things tonight.
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But these experiences that I've gone through, that's what caused me to think, you know, I learned a lot.
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And as I look back, I realize that I was not prepared for those experiences because these are some things that we don't talk about.
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Christians generally do as the world does, and that is we are not open in speaking about death.
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Oh yeah, we may sing when the roll is called up yonder, I'll be there, but it's not quite the same as really being open in discussing death itself.
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And Christians should be free to speak about death. For example, when we look in the scriptures in 1
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Corinthians 15, we read these words, which we're all familiar with, when the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true, death has been swallowed up in victory.
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Where, oh death, is your victory? Where, oh death, is your sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law, but thanks be to God, he gives us the victory through our
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Lord Jesus Christ. Christians have this promise that death has no victory, and death has no sting to those who are in Christ Jesus.
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And so we should be able to discuss death in a way that a person who still is under the sting of death, under the victory of death over them, cannot.
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And yet, as I said, it just doesn't seem that we are that open in discussing it and being prepared for it.
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The Lord Jesus Christ has experienced death. He has emerged triumphant from death.
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Death is but the transition into his presence for those who are his. And yet Christians do not often speak of death and seem to fear it in the same way as those who are lost.
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And yet when you look through the scriptures, the scriptures speak often about death. For example, it's certainly not a passage that gets preached very often, but Ecclesiastes chapter 7, verses 2 through 4 say, it is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for that is the end of all men, and the living will lay it to his heart.
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Sorrow is better than laughter, for by the sadness of the countenance, the heart is made better. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of the fools is in the house of mirth.
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Now, I don't think that that is to be understood to mean that we are to walk around with sad faces all day long, but I certainly think that there is something that should be understood that is contained in that passage.
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And that is, I think that we would enjoy, for example, I'll use this,
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I can guarantee you that the first thing that was on my mind when that little child was brought into the
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ER was what I was going to do when I got home that night.
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And that night when I got home, I was going to hug my little girl who's upstairs right now, because I remembered when she was that big.
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And every time that I saw a child who was sick, a child who had cancer, or in the other way around, one of the things that came out of my being a chaplain was that within a few months of my starting that,
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I took the time to spend time with my father, with my mother, asking them questions about their parents, and their parents' parents, and their getting to know each other, and all the rest of those things, and spent a lot more time with my dad, because it was very firmly brought home to me that someday
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I won't have him. And it isn't necessarily when he's 70 or 80 years old, it could be this very night.
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And I think that's what the writer of Ecclesiastes is pointing out, is that when we recognize the reality of that, it changes our perspective.
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It doesn't mean that we have to be long -faced all the time, but I certainly, I think, gain more enjoyment out of shooting hoops with my son in our little teeny tiny backyard than I would have, because I recognize the transience of life.
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And I recognize that someday either he will be mourning my loss, or as tragically happens sometimes,
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I may have to mourn his. And hence, I'm going to enjoy the time that I have.
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And I think an attitude that does not recognize the reality of the shortness of life steals from us some of the greatest joys.
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But this evening's study is not about death itself, though we can hardly avoid the discussion of it.
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Death is a part of the human experience, and that's why every one of you here this evening can benefit from what we're going to talk about tonight, because no matter who you are, unless you're the first one to pass away, you will experience the loss of a loved one.
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Many of you already have. Grandparents, parents, friends, even children. It depends on who you've lost and how close that person was to you.
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But everyone will experience death in one way or another. Scriptures do not gloss over death.
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They do not ignore it. They in no way lessen the harsh reality of death and the experience of the believer and the non -believer alike.
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But this evening I wish to focus not so much upon death itself, but upon how
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Christians face death. There are many myths prevalent in the church about how Christians should react to death.
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I remember very plainly, in fact, Miles and Carol, you'll probably remember the situation.
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I remember very plainly, I don't remember what the year was, but a deacon at North Phoenix, his wife was killed in a car accident after a
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Sunday morning service. You may recall the situation. And I remember even back then, there was a thought in my mind that the husband who had lost his wife, there was almost a thought among some people that, well, look how brave he's being and look how strong he's being.
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And I even remember thinking way back then, that man's being put under pressure he should not be put under right now.
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It is a myth that a Christian does not grieve. A Christian is going to grieve. And in point of fact, my experience, and I have a lot of experience now in grief counseling and law support, is that normally the darkest, most difficult time will take place approximately, and I'm going to talk about this later, but you cannot put absolute times on anything.
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But normally about six months after the loss is when some of the most difficult times are encountered.
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And in our society, you just don't think that way. In our society, you get over a loss in a couple of weeks and you're expected to be back on the job doing your thing.
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I mean, just get over it. Life goes on, you need to continue on and all the rest of this stuff. And that's not the way
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God has made us. But some people would say, well, Christians aren't to grieve.
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Christians have the promise of the resurrection and Christians aren't to grieve. In fact, doesn't the
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Bible say the following in 1 Thessalonians 4, verses 13 through 18, and if you've ever been to a funeral, and boy,
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I've not only been to them, I've done my share of them of late, but if you've ever been to a funeral, you've heard this.
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Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep or to grieve like the rest of men who have no hope.
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We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.
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According to the Lord's own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left till the coming of the
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Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep, for the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a loud command of the voice of the archangel with a trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.
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After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.
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And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore, encourage each other with these words.
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And so there seems to be some, and maybe it's not emphasized and taught this way, but it seems that especially sometimes
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Christians will get into their mind, well, if I am to really demonstrate my spirituality, if I am to be strong in the face of this, then
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I need to somehow not grieve. I need to somehow not express the emotions that I'm experiencing.
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And in point of fact, if I do experience these emotions, maybe something's wrong with me. Maybe there's something that isn't right with me as a
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Christian. But please notice something. Paul does not say that Christians are not to grieve.
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Listen to that verse again. This is verse 13 of chapter 4. Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men who have no hope.
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Paul is not saying that you are not to grieve. Paul is saying that you are not to grieve like the rest of men.
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Why? Who have no hope. Christians grieve. But Christian grief is marked by one important, vital word.
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Hope. Hope. We are not to grieve as the rest of men who have no hope.
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Indeed, Paul spoke of experiencing grief. For example, in Philippians 2 .27. Indeed, speaking of the
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Paphras, he was ill and almost died, but God had mercy on him, and not on him only, but also on me, to spare me sorrow upon sorrow.
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Paul knew that he would experience deep sorrow at the loss of his friend, but God spared him at that time from that experience.
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Paul knew that there was no promise of a life free of sorrow and mourning, but the key to the
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Christian is one word, and it's hope. And that is the one thing that I emphasized over and over and over again in the
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Lost Support Group. And that was to those individuals, and I more than once had individuals who had lost all hope, who were absolutely stuck in a cycle of grief they could never get out of.
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They had no desire to look at the future. The future was nothing but blackness and darkness to them. They could not make any plans for the future.
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They had no hope. And the main thing that I emphasized over and over again is the necessity of having hope.
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For example, Romans chapter 15 .13, May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the
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Holy Spirit. Romans 15 .4, For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope.
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Ephesians 2 .12, Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.
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Notice that from Paul's perspective, those who are outside of Christ do not have hope.
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Those who are in Christ have hope. And what is the embodiment of hope? Titus 2 .13,
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We are awaiting our blessed hope. What is it? The appearing of the glory of our great
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God and Savior, Jesus Christ. 2 Thessalonians 2 .16, Now may our
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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.
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This concept of hope is central to Paul's message. And to Peter's as well.
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1 Peter 1 .3, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, by his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
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Christians are a people marked by the hope that is theirs. And I believe that hope is the key to working through the experience of grief.
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What about the experience of grief? Well, I firmly believe that God made us to grieve.
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Anyone who can love will grieve the loss of a loved one. Anyone old enough to love another human being will grieve at the loss of that human being.
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I do not believe that that is an abnormality. It's not something that is wrong.
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It is the way that we are made. The Scriptures plainly show that grief is a common experience of saint and sinner alike.
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For example, Genesis 23 .2, And Sarah died, and Abraham came to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her.
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Abraham was a great man of faith. You would think that, well, he's taken
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Isaac up upon the mount, and he's walked with God, and he's talked with God, and he's had the promises of God, and yet when
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Sarah died, what did Abraham do? Did he put on a stoic face? No. He cried.
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He mourned for his beloved Sarah. We all know, Ecclesiastes 3, there is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn, and a time to dance.
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There will be times of mourning in our life. The psalmist said, I am troubled, I am bowed down greatly.
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I go mourning all the day long. Here's the psalmist, the man used by God to pen inspired
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Scripture, and yet God in his grace has revealed to us that even this person who is used by God in that way, in this particular instance, records for us the deepness of his mourning, of his difficulty that he was going through.
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And of course, the people of God in lamentations, the joy of our heart has ceased. Our dance has turned into mourning.
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The crown has fallen from our head. Woe unto us that we have sinned. Frequently our own sin brings us into a state where we mourn.
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In this case, of course, it was mourning because of the judgment of God that had come upon them. Christian and non -Christian alike experience grief.
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Now, there are many commonalities between the Christian and non -Christian experience of grief because we're human beings.
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What are some of them? Well, first of all, and if you're taking some notes, there will be nine of these.
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Number one, grief takes time. Grief takes time.
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It's a process. It is a process. It takes time. It cannot be artificially shortened.
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I believe that each individual due to the relationship that was born to the person who has been lost, to the various complications that can take place.
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I had some people in the lost support group that had lost like five people in one year. They were all close to them. You want complex grief?
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That's complex grief. They had never finished grieving the last person. They lost the next one, and then they lost the next one.
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That takes time to work through. And given the relationship, given the individual, given that person's personality, let's say that for person
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X, it's going to take this long to work through their grief. That does not mean that when you get to the end, you are no longer a bereaved person.
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Once you're a bereaved person, you're always a bereaved person. You're a person who's experienced death. You're a person who's experienced the loss of a loved one.
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That always changes who you are. You never stop being a bereaved person. 20 years down the road, on the anniversary of the loss of your mother or your father, you may shed a tear, and that's perfectly fine.
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Nothing wrong with that at all. That's the way we are. Once you've lost someone, you're a bereaved person. But you're going to have to grieve at least that long until the point where you feel that you can now live your life in its fullness again without that constant feeling, that constant reminder of that loss.
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Some people though, by the behaviors they engage in, and we'll talk about some of them, they can stretch it out to here.
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But if for you it's going to be this long, you can't make it that long. It won't happen. It cannot be done.
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That's just the way that you're made. That's what's going to happen. It takes time. Frequently well over a year until a person really feels that they have worked through their grief and accepted the loss, and they're now able to experience the full range of emotions yet once again.
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It's not the first thing on their mind in the morning, last thing on their mind when they go to bed, so on and so forth. It takes time.
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Grief is also individual. You cannot sit there and pick up a book and go, ah, well Kubler -Ross says these are the stages
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I'm going to go through, and so I must be in the denial stage now, or now I'm in the shock stage, or I'm in the anger stage now.
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There are definitely identifiable stages, but for each individual person, they last for different periods of time, they go in different orders, and it's not something you can look at somebody else and say, well, my brother grieved in this way when he lost his wife, and so I just lost mine, and hence
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I'm going to grieve the same way. No. You're a different person. Your relationship was different. It's going to be an individual thing.
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No two relationships are identical. But it does follow a pattern. Not a pattern you can necessarily chart out, but there is a pattern that we see because we're human beings.
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And for example, I think that depending on the individual, for the first week, sometimes up to a month, we experience shock.
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And I think it's a very merciful thing when you think about it. In fact, most of the time when you see people who've just experienced a loss, and they're handling their affairs well, and a lot of times, they'll have to have lots of relatives into the home, and they're cleaning, and they're cooking, and I just can't believe how good she's doing.
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Look how strong she is. I think it's a mercy of God that we sort of go numb initially so we can get through that period of time.
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We can get through the difficulties of the funeral and the burial and so on and so forth. But it doesn't last forever.
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It eventually wears off, but there is this numbness. And there are other things that people experience.
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There's periods of confusion and anger, and there's, of course, periods of loneliness, depression that can set in.
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And they, of course, will vary from individual to individual. Grief is not always understood by others.
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In point of fact, one of the most common things, and I never would have thought about it had I not spent as much time as I did with people who had experienced a loss.
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But when you think about it, if you're planning on going out on a Friday night with some friends, is the first person you think about going out with someone who's recently experienced a loss?
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A lot of people who are going through grief, who are mourning the loss of a loved one, report that they feel like they've all of a sudden become ugly, unpopular.
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People who once were around them a lot, all of a sudden don't want to be around them. And there's a reason for that. There's a reason for that.
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When someone has experienced a loss, the simple fact of the matter is, when we're around them, we ourselves are reminded of our own mortality.
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And we don't like to be reminded of our own mortality. And, frequently, relationships become strained or even broken.
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We don't react well to people who are grieving. They don't react well to us.
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They are in an emotionally vulnerable state, as I'll mention in the very next point. But grief is not always understood by others, and hence frequently results in the disruption of relationships that we thought may have been lifelong.
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But sometimes they're not. I'd already mentioned in the next point, grief makes us emotionally vulnerable.
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It sort of ties into the previous one, in that there are a lot of things that once would not have bothered us, now bother us to no end.
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We are very, very frequently, when we grieve, we are offended by things that never would have offended us before.
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And that's one of the things that sometimes people back away from us because they don't know how to handle us.
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They don't know how to speak to us. People who used to be just proud of the fact that emotionally they wrote a flat course.
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They weren't somebody who was up and down and up and down all the time. All of a sudden find themselves up and down, up and down all the time, and it bothers them to no end.
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That they don't feel like they have control over themselves any longer. They don't know where these feelings are coming from.
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It makes us very emotionally vulnerable. The sixth one is grief tells us to remain isolated.
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Grief, I'd say that the primarily, the primary thing in grief that could be described as sinful, the aspect in which our sinfulness grafts hold of grief and twists it, is that grief frequently turns us in upon ourselves.
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Now there is a proper attitude to that, at least in the initial stages, is that we do need some time to ourselves just to grab hold of things because they're spinning so fast and think about what has happened.
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So I'm not saying that a period of aloneness to consider these things is bad.
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What I am saying is that grief turns us in upon ourselves. We start to see our own hurts as the greatest hurts in the world.
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We stop looking out for the needs of others. Grief frequently isolates us, causes us to build walls.
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Frequently a person who's experienced the pain of separation, of loss of a loved one, will say
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I'm never going to experience that again. And so they build up a big old wall and no one's ever getting that close to me again. No way.
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I ain't going to let that happen. I've been hurt too badly once, that's it. And they build this wall and some people never ever get out of it.
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Some of the most miserable, crotchety people you'll see at age 60 are people who experienced a loss at age 40 and never properly grieved that loss.
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They became isolated, they built walls, and now the majority of their emotional energy is dedicated to maintaining that wall.
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That has become the focus of their existence. We see such people around us all the time.
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it's important that we get back to where we came from. We'll talk a little bit more about that later. Seventh, grief tells us we must get back to where we were rather than accepting inevitable changes.
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This is probably the single thing that I saw most often, especially amongst widows. Especially women who lost a husband when they were still young, in their 20s, 30s, and 40s.
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And even in their early 50s. Where they hadn't had 50 years of marriage. I had some people who had been married for 55 years.
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But many of them got into this cycle of thought that the only way
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I'm ever going to be happy again is if I get back to the way things were. And you know, you think about it, even if you hadn't experienced the loss, six months down the road, you're a different person than you were six months ago.
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Growth takes place. You can never get back to where you were six months ago. And so grief deceives people into thinking that the only way they'll ever be happy is if I'm like I was before and if things are like they were before.
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And things can never be like they were before. And yet you wouldn't believe the people that invest so much time and so much energy into trying to make things like they were.
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You've probably seen one of the main ways this plays itself out. This frequently happens in divorce situations.
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Rebound marriages. Boom. Replacing the person you've lost.
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What an unfair thing. Because frequently what happens when there's not counseling involved, when it's
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I've lost somebody, I need to get back to where I was, here's somebody else that's willing to get married, boom, what they're really doing is they're not marrying this person, they're marrying the other person again in the person of somebody else.
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It happens when loss takes place. I cannot possibly think of my life with that void in it, so I'm going to fill it up before I've finished thinking about and working through the feelings that I have about that initial loss.
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And of course we know the divorce rate amongst such situations like that, it can be very, very high.
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So that is a thing that I think, especially in talking with widows, I remember this one woman who came in and she just put her heels in and she said, it's not fair,
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I didn't choose this, he was a DPS officer, he had just retired, we had all of our dreams, we had all of our life in front of us,
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I'm not going to accept this. She realized that the only way for her to work through her grief and to continue on with life was to accept it and to deal with it as it had actually taken place.
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But this feeling that I've got to get back to where I was, things have got to be the way they once were, very important, very strong desire.
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Those who grieve, the eighth one, those who grieve often experience confusion. And boy did
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I get examples of that. We had an elderly fellow last year who came in and he had lost his wife and a few weeks earlier he had all of a sudden sort of like woken up and his truck had just run out of gas about 25 miles outside of Las Vegas and he started driving here and he doesn't remember any of the trip from here to outside of Las Vegas.
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His mind just, all he was thinking about was what had happened and his wife and so on and so forth and he just drove all the way past Las Vegas, which given the road he must have had to have traveled is a frightening thing indeed to think about.
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But other people, this one woman, she broke down the group crying because she's a tax preparer and since her husband died, she cannot even do her own taxes.
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She cannot concentrate on the numbers well enough to do her own taxes and it just, you're a numbers man and you can imagine what it would be like to not be able to add up the same column of numbers and get the same doggone answer two times in a row no matter how hard you tried.
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That's the type of frustration that she was dealing with and so many people report just confusion.
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All of a sudden they, and especially the women, this was one of the most common experiences, they'll find themselves standing in the grocery store in the aisle staring at some cans on the thing and they have absolutely no idea what they're doing in the grocery store.
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They have no idea what they're supposed to be getting and all they can do is stand there and cry and then of course feel completely embarrassed by the fact they're standing in the grocery store crying but this confusion and it's real easy to understand, well now it's real easy for me to understand why that is.
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The reason that there is a lot of confusion in grief is because, let me put it this way,
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I'll pick on you again, you just got news today that for the third or fourth year in a row your service department has been number one and it's great news.
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It's such great news that Nissan is going to do a nationwide commercial for you, okay,
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I mean and they're not going to do it for anybody else, in fact at the end they're going to put a ABC at the end, okay, and you're just so pumped you don't know what to do.
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What's the first thing you do? Who do you tell? Who do you pick up the phone and call? You call
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Chris. It's a natural thing to do. You pick up the phone, you call somebody and you say, isn't this great, isn't this wonderful?
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Well, a person who's lost that person, they're going through life and something really neat happens at work and what do they do?
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They grab the phone and sometimes they're halfway through the number before it even hits them and what was once, for a moment, a very positive thing becomes the biggest bummer of the week and they put the phone down and one of the things at least
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I felt I was very helpful with was, and the law support group I think was very helpful, was we warned people these things were coming and we said it happens to everybody.
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It happens to everybody. You've just got to realize something. You have certain patterns of living and certain people are a part of the pattern of your life and the day after they pass away, the patterns of your life are not going to be different and what's happening during the grieving process is the old patterns and the old habits are breaking down and you're having to replace them with new ones and it's like Rich here.
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Rich likes to reorganize things. Rich likes to move things around. Rich has always designed new ways to put my office.
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Now, if you've ever moved things around, you know, like say, switched bedrooms, or something like that, it all starts, everything's nice and neat and then you start getting into it and we all know there's a point at which you look around and go,
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I'm never going to get all this stuff back. It all gets all jumbled up and it's all a mess but if you keep working, slowly things start getting put in their new positions and eventually everything's back the way it was, right?
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Same thing in grief. You start with your patterns of life that include this person.
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The person is taken away from you and slowly those old patterns begin to break down.
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New patterns start to be built but there's going to be a period of time in between where everything is an absolute mass of confusion.
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But if you keep going, eventually the new patterns begin to take hold.
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People experience this in all sorts of different ways and unfortunately some end up getting blown out. A lot of people experience being on the bus, driving down the road in the car, you see somebody out of the corner of your eye and you are certain for a second it's the person you lost.
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Why? Because in your mind that person's picture is still there. It's a common experience that people have had.
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You look, you feel foolish, you feel dumb but if you're told ahead of time this happens, it's not as much of a downer.
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You can understand why these types of things happen but that's what's going on during the grieving process is you're taking a relationship that was once flesh and blood,
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I can touch you, I can speak to you and it's transitioning into a relationship of memories.
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A relationship of memories. And initially that is so painful that I remember very clearly this one man.
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He was, if I could have any quote -unquote success story in the law support group, it was this one gentleman. It was
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Easter Sunday two years ago, it'll be two years ago this coming Easter Sunday that he came to the law support group and he was the only one there because nobody figured we'd have a law support group on a holiday.
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We did, whether it was Christmas, whatever it was, it was there every Sunday. And his wife had died two days earlier of leukemia in the hospital there on 3B and he had spent the last seven months in that hospital with her.
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Well, what do you do? I can't talk about a lot of the feelings that he's going to have because he hasn't experienced them yet.
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I could talk about some of the things he's going to experience two months down the road but he hasn't experienced them yet. I remember those first two weeks, oh, he thought he was, you know, he's,
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I've already done all my grieving, I knew it was coming and it's like, no, you haven't, you haven't.
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So we try, I tried to prepare him. I tried to say, I realize right now some of these things may not strike you as being really applicable to where you are right now but these are some of the things you're going to experience.
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Six months later when he moved to California, the last day he was there, he talked to me after the group and he said, if it hadn't been for this group, if it hadn't been for what you said, he said, there was one night that I had a 38 in my mouth and the only thing that kept me from pulling the trigger was
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I remembered what you had said. About holding on to hope. And that's why
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I'm here today. And he was like 62 years old and he was going over, he was moving over to California and he was going to be competing in karate tournaments.
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He wasn't any black belt or anything like that but he had found something he wanted to do and that's what he was doing.
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But he hadn't gone through all those things yet but I knew they were coming and we were able to warn him ahead of time that you're going through this grieving process, these are some of the things that are going to happen and the simple,
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I saw so many people helped by simply finding out, you mean, these feelings that I've had, other people have them too?
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Because people don't talk about it. You're supposed to be strong, you're not supposed to experience these things.
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I preached more than once in that law support group. Think about our media.
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Think about television. Think about how many thousands of people you have seen killed in television.
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How often does anyone ever grieve? How often is the strong star of the program, he loses his entire family but within half an hour he's great, he's fine, everything's cool.
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There's never any grieving, there's never any confusion on his part, he never gets sick, he never gets depressed.
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Half an hour, one hour, it's all taken care of. And that's what we're all supposed to be like, right?
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Only once and Kelly will tell you. Well, I haven't seen
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Shadowlands yet. Has anyone seen Shadowlands? The C .S. Lewis thing? That's supposed to be real good in regards to the experience of grieving.
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But a rather popular program, a rather popular movie that we saw, when did we see it?
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Last August, fall of last year. Sleepless in Seattle.
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Do you remember, have you ever saw it? Right at the beginning, Tom Hanks has lost his wife. And there's a whole dialogue and somebody who knew something about grieving had been involved in writing the script because it was one of the few times that I've ever seen someone and that was one of the main reasons
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I wanted to go see it was because someone had come and lost the program and said you've got to go see this thing because it's blah, blah, blah. Someone knew because he was walking right down the path.
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It was a realistic representation of what it would be like for a, say, 30 -year -old man to lose his wife suddenly and have a young child.
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I mean, it was accurately done. Despite the fact, you know, that it was a movie.
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But it was still, it was accurately done. In fact, one of his co -workers came up to him and mentioned a loss support group or something to him.
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And he blows up and opens up a drawer and pulls out a stack of cards this big and starts going through all these loss support groups, psychiatrists, psychologists, you know, all the rest of this stuff, just throwing them on the thing.
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And the whole point was, that ain't helping me none. And the whole, in fact, the very title,
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Sleepless in Seattle, a lot of people who are grieving don't sleep. Their sleep patterns are deeply disrupted.
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Deeply disrupted. And so that is a common tendency. And so like I said, someone who has had experience in the subject was involved in writing that thing.
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And finally, the ninth thing. Rather than a circle or a straight line, grieving often follows what
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I would call a spiral pattern. And that is people who are going through grief, they'll go through a stage where, for example, they're very angry.
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But then they'll feel like they work through that and it's like they get into their mind, well, you know, that was a part of it, but I'm through that now.
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And two months later, they find themselves in the exact same spot again. And they feel like they're trapped in a circle.
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Well, it's not really a circle. It's more like a spiral. And that spiral can either be going down and getting tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter because they have no hope.
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They're becoming isolated. They're cutting themselves off from other people. Or it can be a spiral that's getting larger and larger and larger because they do have hope.
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They do have a support system. They do have friends, brothers in Christ who can encourage them, etc, etc.
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And so you can see this in people's experience where instead of being trapped in a circle, it's more like a spiral type thing.
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And that can be encouraging to some folks who do seem to feel like they're going through the same emotions over and over again.
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Instead of feeling like they're trapped in a circle, no, it's more of a spiral. And you can influence whether that spiral is going up or going down by, again, that key word.
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And I honestly feel the key word is hope in regards to that. Now, in each of the grieving experiences, the
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Christian will feel the pain of separation, but by grace can be upheld if he or she will focus upon the truths of faith.
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For example, the loneliness of separation from a husband or wife can be impacted by the presence of Christ and his promise never to leave or forsake.
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Now, we're talking nitty -gritty here now. This is pie in the sky.
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You can't possibly know what this means because you've never lost your wife. This is pie in the sky, meaningless drivel to anyone who does not have a vital living relationship with Christ.
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This doesn't work for nominal Christianity. Getting dunked in a church and being dragged by your parents there for a while and not having any heartfelt commitment to Christ and 20 years later you're in a lost situation, what
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I'm saying does not have an impact for such a person who's just simply religious.
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But for those who truly believe in Christ, the separation of that loved one can not be taken away, but can be impacted by the presence of Christ and his promise never to leave or forsake.
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Christ has died and risen again, never to die again, and he will never leave those who are his.
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The tendency of grief to make us look inward, for example, can be balanced by the upward look toward Christ.
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The call that Christianity has over against the world's religions which tell you to look inside yourself,
01:00:00
Christianity does not tell you to look inside yourself, but to look at Christ. To look at him who is seated at the right hand of the
01:00:07
Father, that's where our life is. When grief leads us to focus upon self, serving others in the body of Christ is a perfect counterbalance.
01:00:16
And in fact, one of the things that we brought up over and over again as a practical thing to help a person through the grieving process was volunteer work.
01:00:25
When people would ask, what can I do? One of the main things that would be suggested is volunteer work.
01:00:32
Why? Because when you are out helping someone else, the very fact that you are serving someone else reaffirms your own worth as a person, and no one can help but receive some type of joy and fulfillment and happiness in serving someone else and helping someone else.
01:00:51
And experiencing that kind of happiness, that kind of fulfillment, is the opposite of what grief wants you to think the rest of your life is going to be like.
01:01:01
And so it's an excellent counterbalance. If you want to share something real practical with someone, let's say you know a widow who has lost her husband and she sits around the house all day, if she's physically able to do so, doing volunteer work can be one of the greatest things.
01:01:19
But for the Christian, who is called into service of others in the body of Christ, this is the perfect counterbalance right from the beginning.
01:01:27
Right from the beginning. Even though it may be very difficult to drag yourself out of that bed to do it, it needs to be done.
01:01:38
And when the future looks black and frightening, and oh, so many people experience just that, just a total lack of desire to look into the future at all.
01:01:49
When the future looks like that, the believer can claim the promise of Colossians 3, 3 -4
01:01:56
For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
01:02:05
The future of the Christian is not dark and black. Even if the immediate future looks dark, there is a brightness beyond that that can dispel any darkness between you and that future glorious appearing with Jesus Christ, where our life truly is tied up in Jesus Christ, as Colossians 3, 3 says.
01:02:27
And then, to be honest, and I've only got a... Well, I'll try to finish up here in about 10 -15 minutes.
01:02:37
The strongest emotion faced in grief is anger. One of the strongest emotions that humans experience is anger.
01:02:50
And I saw people in that lost support group who were consumed with anger.
01:02:58
That anger can be directed toward a lot of folks. Think about some of the people it could be directed at.
01:03:05
There were people who were tremendously angry with doctors, people tremendously angry with hospitals, people tremendously angry with God, people tremendously angry with family members, people tremendously angry with themselves.
01:03:26
And then the one that I got some of the most amazed looks when
01:03:31
I brought this one up, it was like people thought I was hiding under their bed at night.
01:03:41
But this is a very common thing. Not everyone experiences it, but it's more common than you might think.
01:03:49
And people, no one ever brought it up unless I brought it up first, and they were so relieved when
01:03:54
I did because then they could talk about it. But many people are angry with the person who died.
01:04:05
They are angry with the person who died. Wives feeling like their husband had abandoned them, not taken care of them.
01:04:16
And it's not rational. We're not talking about logical feelings here, but they're emotions all the same.
01:04:25
And when I would bring that up, I would get people would look at me like, and sometimes people just react so defensively like, but then as they thought about it, they realized, yeah,
01:04:44
I am. We had all these dreams. He and I used to sit around and we used to dream about how we're going to retire.
01:04:54
We're going to do this and we're going to do that. And my dreams don't have two people in it anymore. I don't want any dreams.
01:05:00
I've lost all my dreams. How could you do that? Not rational, but real nonetheless.
01:05:08
Anger. A lot of people experience it. And this was the point,
01:05:15
I remember this when it would come out and it was a frequent topic of conversation.
01:05:26
This was where I do not even begin to understand how a non -Christian grief counselor can handle this.
01:05:34
Because I could talk about forgiveness. And when people would say,
01:05:40
I can't forgive. I can't forgive. You know what
01:05:47
I talked about. Christians forgive upon what basis?
01:05:55
What does the book of Colossians say? I'm sorry? As Christ has forgiven us, so we are to forgive one another.
01:06:04
We are forgiven people. We have experienced forgiveness, hence we can forgive others.
01:06:12
And that is the only way that anger can be dealt with, is through forgiveness. And oh, there were so many people in there, unbelievers who consumed with anger and no way of releasing that anger because they themselves were not forgiven and would not forgive others.
01:06:30
Wouldn't do it. There's also anger toward God. And I think that's probably the one thing that most
01:06:37
Christians would be deadly afraid of ever admitting they had. No, me?
01:06:45
Angry with God about taking my child away from me? No, of course not. God's big enough for our why's, our questions.
01:06:59
In fact, if you have time sometime, you might want to read the 88th Psalm. The 88th
01:07:06
Psalm is a very interesting psalm. It is a complaint. Crying out to God for an answer.
01:07:14
You know what? The answer is never given in the 88th Psalm. Most of the psalms, an answer comes by the end of the psalm.
01:07:24
Not in Psalm 88. It doesn't happen. Psalm 119, verse 82.
01:07:30
My eyes fail with watching for thy promise. I ask, when wilt thou comfort me?
01:07:38
You think that psalmist had gone through some difficulties in life? God's big enough for us to ask the questions of why.
01:07:49
But he's also big enough to expect us to accept his answers. And his answer sometimes is,
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I am God. And sometimes we don't want to accept that. Like I mentioned, we want to be honest with God.
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And we want to be honest with our brothers around us. That's what we need to do. If God has not brought us to the point in our sanctification where we can just love
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God no matter what happens in our experience, then we need to be honest about that. We shouldn't act like something we're not.
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But we should recognize the standards to which we are called. I've shared this with a number of you before, but Sarah Edwards was the wife of Jonathan Edwards, the great
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American Puritan. And when Edwards died at Princeton, Sarah had not yet moved to Princeton.
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And she learned this by mail, basically.
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And even though she was very ill herself, she managed to scribble out a few lines to her daughter, who, interestingly enough, never saw them because her daughter died about two weeks later.
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But she wrote the following when she heard about Jonathan's death. What shall
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I say? A holy and good God has covered us with a dark cloud. Oh, that we may kiss the rod and lay our hands on our mouths.
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The Lord has done it. He has made me adore his goodness that we had him so long. But my
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God lives, and he has my heart. Oh, what a legacy my husband and your father has left us.
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We are all given to God, and there I am and love to be. When I read those words and studied the life of Edwards, I recognized, and recognize to this day, that that is a high calling.
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And that I would not in any way, shape, or form be an honest person if I said, well,
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I know that's how I'd respond. I'm sure that's exactly how I would do it, too.
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But I wish it were. And I would hope that God would continue to guide me to work in my life that it would be.
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Now, the role of God in death must not be dismissed. I'll cover this, a couple passages on comfort, and then
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I'll close. I don't want to keep you all too long. But when I first found out that I was going to be working at the hospital,
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I started going, I've never done this. What am I going to do? And so I went to the
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Christian bookstore, and I picked up some books. That's what you're supposed to do, right? You have to paint a house, go pick up some books on painting.
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So I went to the Christian bookstore. I remember picking up this book, interestingly enough, published by Bethany House Publishers.
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Some of you realize the significance of that, since that's who is publishing my book, Laird's True Moments and Elders at the moment.
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But it was on comforting and counseling those who experienced a loss. And I started reading this book, and every situation that came up, they said to do the exact opposite of what
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I would have done. In fact, they identified what I would have done as the exact worst thing you could have done. And so you're going, oh, man, what in the world?
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So I finally found a thing where they said, all of this is based upon this particular theology.
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And I read this thing of theology, and I went, oh. Basically, the author suggested a book written by a fellow by the last name of Rice.
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Some of you who've ever read my book, God's Sovereign Grace, you know that I wrote an appendix on Clark Pinnock and Rice, ripping their books apart because they present processed theology, the concept that God's growing and advancing, and all the rest is wonderful, fun stuff.
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And the whole book was based upon the premise that the best way to comfort someone in a religious situation is to assure them that God will do everything in his power now to comfort them, but he had nothing to do with his death.
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He had nothing to do with his death. God can't be blamed for this.
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This is a sinful world. God had nothing to do with his death. We need to protect
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God from being accused of having something to do with any type of death. Now, you've got to realize,
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I realized within a day or two, I would probably be staying in an emergency room with people who are going to be asking me about these issues.
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And I remember one night, this is when we lived down at the house at Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church, and we were taking care of the grounds there.
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Kelly managed to get to sleep really easy that night, and I didn't. I was sitting in the front room thinking about a lot of these things until quite late.
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And over time, I worked through the issue, and here's what eventually the conclusion that I came to.
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It certainly is easier on the chaplain or maybe on you. You may be called to be in this situation someday.
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Any one of you who names the name of Christ and is open about it may find yourself in a hospital sometime.
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Especially people in a leadership position like you, and someone's going to turn to you, and they may blast you right between the eyes, this question.
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So don't think that, well, as long as I'm never a chaplain in a hospital, I'll never have to answer this question.
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You will. You may. It's a lot easier for us to do what, interestingly enough, becomes the inclination of our heart.
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When you see someone going, why, why, why? It's so much easier to take a step back and protect
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God in a sense, and say, well, it just happens.
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But I came to this conclusion, and it's how I did my work the rest of the time that I was there.
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It cost too much to do that. It cost too much, and this is what I mean. If you say to someone,
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God had nothing to do with this death, there was no purpose to it, it just happened, what you have just done is made it absolutely impossible to ever say that there was any purpose to that person's life either.
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Think about what I'm saying. If you take
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God out of the person's death and say there was no purpose, God wasn't a part of it, it's not a part of God's will, it's not a part of God's plan, it was just a random event,
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Babies just roll off mattresses, there's no purpose to it.
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Upon what basis can you ever say then that that little baby ever had any purpose at all?
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You can't, you can't, the price is too high.
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You're basically joining the atheists in regards to death, but hoping that you can stay with the
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Christians in regards to life. It doesn't work. If you ask
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God to leave the room at death, you're basically putting yourself in a situation that when that initial shock wears off and the big questions of life begin to be struggled with by that person, you've put yourself in a position where you can no longer speak the truth.
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You can no longer talk about God's purpose in that person's life. If God had no purpose in my loved one's death or in my loved one's life, how can
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I say I have a purpose in mine? It costs too much. Well, some of you might be saying, the biggest reason is it's not biblical.
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Well, it just so happens that what is biblical and what we find experienced in our lives, they seem to come together, don't they?
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It's an amazing thing. The Bible proves itself true that way. You're right. The Bible is very plain that God has a purpose in these things.
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But I'm telling you, if you get put in that situation, you will be amazed at how fast and how vociferously the temptation to take the easy road is going to hit you right between the eyes.
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It never stopped hitting me. No matter how many times I fought it off, every single time, it hit me.
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That does not mean that I sat everybody down and gave them a lengthy discourse in regards to the sovereignty and providence of God. What I am saying is
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I purposely never attempted to say to someone, there is no purpose.
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There is no reason. God wasn't involved with this. I always affirmed my belief that God does have a plan and that we can trust him even if we don't know what the outcome of that plan is right now.
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Because then later on, and there were times later on, I got a chance to talk to those folks. They'd end up in the law support group. They'd ask me to do the funeral, whatever else it might have been, and I would have the opportunity to talk to them.
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But if in that moment of the most extreme expression of grief, when they first discover that loved one's gone, if I had compromised then,
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I would have had no basis upon which to speak later on. It's not the easiest way.
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I'm not saying it's easy. Believe me, I know it ain't. But I think it is important.
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Well, one last thing in regards to grief is the fact that Christians have comfort.
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And I would say probably the single passage that I have, and I had a bunch of passages here that I'm skipping because I've prepared a lot more information than I have time to present, but the single passage
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I've probably shared the most often in funerals and with those who are
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Christians in regards to this is 2 Corinthians 1, verses 3 -7.
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Vitally important passage. Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the
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Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.
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For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.
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If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation. If we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer.
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And our hope for you is firm because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort.
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Beautiful words, but they require a theology that unfortunately is not prevalent in the church in the
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United States today. What do I mean by that? Verse 4, speaking of God, who comforts us in all our troubles, why?
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So that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.
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God comforts us, and because He has comforted us, then we can take that comfort and comfort others.
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You mean I experience many difficulties in my life merely so that I am made an instrument in Christ's hands to be the instrument of comfort to others?
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Boy, does our American mindset go, no way, dude, don't give me that.
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Come on, I have rights, you know. God can't bring distress and difficulty into my life just simply so that I can turn around and minister to others.
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There's got to be more of a purpose than that. Oh, we bristle.
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We bristle at the very idea that I could go through such deep pain and agony so as to be comforted by God, so that then when
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I can come alongside someone else who's going through the same thing, I can comfort them. What foolishness, what foolishness.
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The idea that the ultimate purpose is the glory of God and that God is glorified when we are what?
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Conformed to the image of Christ. And think of the sorrows.
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What's he called? Man of Sorrows? What a name for the
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Son of God who came. Was he not experienced? Did he not experience sorrow?
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Was he not familiar with suffering? And yet he ministered to those who suffered.
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He stopped the funeral possession in name and he raised the child. He ministered to those who were suffering.
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He touched the leper. God is glorified when we act like Christ.
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And so rather than the worldly attitude which should be I should be sealed off from all the suffering in the world and I should experience health and wealth and prosperity and I should never suffer and I should never have difficulties, rather than that worldly concept which has not only infiltrated certain churches but has become the theology of certain churches, the
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Christian prayer should be I want to be like Christ, whatever that takes.
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Now the American way of doing that is ZAP! One big zap and all of a sudden we're like Jesus.
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And there is no suffering and there's nothing like it. In fact we're already to the post -resurrection glorified state and we're just walking through this world just naming it and claiming it.
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That's the American way. The biblical way is you experience things wherein
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God comforts you. Maybe through others. Maybe others come along and this is part of their sanctification.
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But you experience distress and sorrow and difficulty and troubles and you are comforted and you come alongside others then and you share with them the comfort that you yourself have received from God.
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That's the biblical way. And so you can see how that ties into the why question and why
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I can't just simply say to someone well God doesn't have a purpose in this because God does. And the problem that most people have is that the idea that I could experience difficulty, that I could go through hardships in my life just so that 20 years down the road
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I can help somebody else doesn't seem fair to me. But that's not our position to judge those things.
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So God does comfort us in all of our troubles. The sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives so that also through Christ our comfort overflows.
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The promise of Scripture is when the sufferings of Christ flow over into your life something else overflows too and that's
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God's comfort. There is no promise in Scripture that we will not suffer.
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In fact the promise of Scripture is that we will. But the wonderful promise is that just as much as those sufferings overflow the comfort of God even more abundantly overflows into our lives.
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So, just some thoughts, there's so much more. I hope,
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I really honestly hope that something that I've said this evening will be of assistance to at least some of you sometime in the future.
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Like I said, anyone who names the name of Christ and is open about it is liable to be put in the situation of needing to address these very issues.
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And the one thing that you can count on right now is that you probably won't have much time to prepare.
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You probably won't have much time to prepare unless you do your preparation now. What I'm talking about is it happens suddenly. You get a phone call in the middle of the night and you hardly have time to wake up before you're at the hospital.
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And so these are things that, yeah, you know, not the most popular things to talk about.
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They don't make everybody have good, warm, fuzzy feelings. But we need to think about them.
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We need to think about them before we have to think about them while we're driving down the road in the middle of the night trying to keep from running into everybody else.
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That's not the time to be thinking about them. The time to be thinking about them is now. You can find hope in the midst of hurt.
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James White shows you how in his book Grieving Our Path Back to Peace. People in grief wonder if they will ever feel okay again.
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Not only do you face overwhelming emotions of loss, you can feel discouraged or even ashamed when your grief doesn't disappear quickly or happen in neat, orderly stages.
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For all people who have experienced loss, moments of joy and normalcy mix with moments of sadness and anger.
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Being moved once again by painful emotions you thought you had tamed isn't a setback. It's part of an upward process of healing.
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And when you allow your grief to be accompanied by hope in God, grieving can be your path back to peace.
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Order James White's book, Grieving Our Path Back to Peace by going to our website at aomin .org.
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Indeed, God is sovereign and his purpose and plan is over every aspect of our lives, including our times of sorrow.
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Again, this is Rich Pierce. I'm sitting in for Dr. White today. And we've been listening to his message entitled
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Christians Grieve Too. I hope you've enjoyed The Dividing Line today and we'll see you next week right here on The Dividing Line.
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The Dividing Line has been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries. If you'd like to contact us, call us at 602 -973 -0318 or write us at P .O.
01:29:34
Box 37106, Phoenix, Arizona 85069. You can also find us on the worldwide web at aomin .org.
01:29:42
That's a -o -m -i -n -dot -o -r -g where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates, and tracks.