Managing Grief Through Hope

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I want to invite you to open up your Bibles to the book of Genesis.
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I know we have been studying the book of Hebrews and we've been in Hebrews chapter 11.
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We're going to be in Genesis 23, by the way, Genesis 23.
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But we've been studying the book of Hebrews and the book of Hebrews chapter 11.
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And there's there's that great list of faithful people.
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And in that list of faithful people, it talks about how each one exercise their individual faith and they're considered for us to be in some way exemplary and worthy of our attention.
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And the most obvious one on the list, the one that everyone would have assumed would be at the top of any listing of faithful people, was the patriarch Abraham.
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Abraham's faith is legendary, the ability to go and be willing to sacrifice even his son, which is what we talked about last week, and the ability to trust God even in his old age.
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The Bible says that he hoped against hope that he would have a child in his old age.
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And what that means is that he literally he hoped without hope because at his age, there was no earthly hope to have a child.
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But yet he still had hope in God who was able to overcome his worldly condition, his human condition.
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So Abraham obviously is appointed for us as a person to look to as an example of what faith looks like.
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Now, this morning, we're going to look at an aspect of his faith that is not mentioned in Hebrews 11, which is why we're not starting in Hebrews.
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Like I said, we've been studying Hebrews 11.
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But this morning, I want to take an aside.
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I want to take a moment to look at Abraham's response to the death of his beloved wife.
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I have talked about many different subjects from the pulpit, I've talked about faith and hope and joy and love and I've talked about wrath and I've talked about justice and I've talked about various aspects of God's nature, the Trinity and so forth.
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But only once in the last year, a few years of ministry have I really addressed this topic and I felt the need to address it again.
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And that is the issue of dealing with life's inevitable griefs.
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And this is not I had someone ask me this morning and I appreciate the question.
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I think it was a legitimate question.
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And it was asked, well, you know, are you are you are you going to do this simply because there seems to be so much negative that has been going on recently and even in my own life dealing with some of the things that I've been dealing with, with with granny sickness and things like that.
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Is that why you're doing this? No, I'm doing this just because this happens to be where we are in the text.
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But isn't God amazing that it just seems like we're dealing with things, grievous things, and this just happens to be where we are.
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We're at the end of Abraham's life going on into Isaac's life.
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And I wanted to deal with this this most obvious of demonstrations of faith, because I think when we talk about demonstrating faith, the most difficult time to demonstrate faith is when things seem hopeless, when things seem all is lost and everything is over.
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And that's what we see here with Abraham.
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So I wanted to begin this morning by reading Genesis 23, verses one and two.
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We're eventually going to read the whole of the chapter, but I want to just read the first two verses as our opening.
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So let's stand together.
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Genesis chapter 23, verse one says that Sarah lived one hundred twenty seven years.
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These were the years of the life of Sarah.
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Sarah died at Kiriath Arba, that is, Hebron in the land of Canaan.
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And Abraham went in to mourn for Sarah.
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And to weep for her.
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Our Father and our God, as we examine this all too familiar subject, Lord, our hearts are concerned because many are here and need a word of hope, need a word of strength.
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And Lord, we are concerned that we would turn to your word and find that because we believe that this is the source of our strength and our hope.
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So, Lord, I pray that you would meet our concerns and fill them.
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And Lord, I pray that as the pastor and the speaker, that you would keep my mouth from speaking error, keep my heart and mind from thinking wrong things, help me to focus intently on the truth of your word.
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And I pray for the hearts of everyone here.
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I pray that you would help them to see.
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How grief is to be managed by the believer and how it is through faith that we are able to manage our grief.
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We love you, Lord, and we thank you for your blessings.
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We ask you to bless us now as we study together.
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In Jesus name, Amen.
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They say life is made up of important moments and that's sort of how we remember things.
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We don't tend to remember every day.
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We don't tend to remember everything that happens to us every day.
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I couldn't tell you what I had for lunch yesterday.
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But there are moments in life that stick into our mind and stay with us and sort of help define who we are as individuals.
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And this, of course, is the one of the most important moments in the life of the patriarch Abraham.
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When I say important, it is important because this is a time in his life where he is having to come to grips with what is to be the worst loss that he'd ever had to experience.
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And, you know, the Bible doesn't tell us how she died.
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There are some Jewish traditional thoughts as to the subject, but there are no there's there's nothing for certain.
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There are some people who actually there is a there's a Jewish myth that the reason Sarah died, you know, this this story comes right on the heels of Isaac's sacrifice.
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And there are some there's a myth that that Satan himself had gone to Sarah and said that that that Abraham had gone through with the sacrifice.
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And on hearing of the death of her son, she fell dead.
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Now, obviously, that's not in the scripture, that's not anything we can accept is true, but but it is interesting that this story does fall right on the heels of Abraham going to offer up Isaac.
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Abraham has just expressed one of the greatest acts of faith that we've ever seen in all of scripture.
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And now he's having to undergo one of the most difficult losses that anybody ever has to undergo.
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He's just gone through this great moment of victory wherein he was willing to take the dagger.
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And plunge it into his son, obviously, God did not force him to go through with that, but he was willing, we know this, he was there, he had he had bound his son, he'd laid him on the altar, he was ready to go through with it.
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And yet God stayed his hand, saved his son.
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Victory is in his heart.
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His faith has been rewarded.
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And now he must suffer.
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Life is often that way.
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Our life is not made up all of victory.
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Sometimes we go through times of grief.
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And that's important for us to understand, as we talked about in Sunday school this morning, I think that people get this misapprehension about Christianity.
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There's a new book that just came out every day of Friday.
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It's a joke.
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It's a pastor, a Christian pastor said, well, you can live as every day as if it were Friday and never have any problems, never have any have any fears or doubts or concerns and you just live it up every day is a Friday, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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I'm here to tell you.
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And it is the truth.
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Life sometimes hurts and sometimes the hurt can be so bad that we don't know if we're going to be able to get over it.
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And that's what we're going to talk about today.
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We're going to talk about things that most people don't like to talk about subjects that most people don't.
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In fact, polite conversation.
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These things never come up.
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Grief and death.
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As I said, these subjects are usually avoided in polite conversation and are only really brought out when a person has experienced either or both of them firsthand.
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This is probably due to the fact that man was created not to die, but to live forever.
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And it's not naturally in his makeup to accept that life will end.
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We were not created to die.
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We were created to live.
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Death is a result of sin.
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Death is a result of sin having come into the world.
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The Bible says that by sin, death entered the world.
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And had it not been for sin, we would not die.
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I think Mel Brooks, who is not a Christian, but he's, you know, as they say, sometimes theologians come in different forms.
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So we're going to we're going to Mel Brooks said something real funny and telling.
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He said he asked a question.
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He says, why do we have to die? As a kid, you get a nice little white shoes and white laces and a velvet suit and short pants and a nice collar, you go to college, you meet a nice girl, you get married, you work a few years and then you have to die.
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What is this? That wasn't in the contract, end quote.
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But his point is, it's just it resonates with us because, you know, it to be true, it doesn't seem natural.
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It seems like the most unnatural thing in the world, and the more the atheists try to tell us, oh, well, life is just circular and and just accept death because that's the way it's supposed to be, the more they say it, the more it doesn't ring true.
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People say, well, what do you mean death is not natural? Well, it's not what we were created for.
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And because we have to undergo it, it just doesn't feel right.
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And there's something about it, it's just outside of what should be.
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And the result of the death of a loved one is grief.
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It's a feeling of grief because it seems so unnatural.
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So what I want to do today is I want to talk about how we are to manage grief as a believer in Christ.
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We manage grief through hope, that's the title of the sermon, but that really will be the thesis of the message.
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The only way for us to manage grief is through hope.
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And what I want to look at is I want to look at three myths, myths.
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And if you're taking notes, there are going to be three myths concerning grief that I want to deal with this morning, three things that are said about grief, three things that are that are often believed about grief that are not true.
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And we need to know this as we experience grief in our life.
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Number one, and you may have never heard people say these before, but they think then this comes out in the way they behave.
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Number one, the myth that I that I often run into is that if you're a person of strong faith, then you shouldn't grieve.
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This is how it usually works.
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This is how it usually comes in.
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People say, well, you believe God is sovereign.
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So you shouldn't grieve, you just know it's his will.
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Whatever happens is his will just get over it.
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Really? That's how we're supposed to just just, hey, you know, that's how we're supposed to deal with everything, just, oh, God is sovereign, so you shouldn't grieve.
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Let me tell you something that is a fallacy.
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And it is one that has sadly destroyed many people's lives and their hope.
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Because men and women try to put on a veneer of strength when they should be mourning, sometimes they end up buckling under the pressure.
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Have you ever seen somebody do that? They try to be too strong.
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They don't allow themselves to cry.
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They don't allow themselves to hurt.
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They don't allow themselves to grieve.
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And as a result.
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When the pressure finally becomes so overwhelming, they buckle under its weight.
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People of strong faith grieve, beloved, it's all throughout the Bible, anybody who says that people of strong faith should not experience grief, don't read their Bibles.
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If you read through the I mean, you read this text, it says, and Sarah died in the land of Canaan and Abraham went in to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her.
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Now, was Sarah a woman of faith? Did Abraham have a hope in the resurrection? Did Abraham trust in a sovereign God? All of the answers to those questions are yes, but yet he weeps, yet he mourns at the deathbed of his wife.
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And we look through the Scripture and we see David.
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David mourns, he weeps as his infant is ill and dying and he weeps.
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You know, the thing I understand the weeping at the death of his infant child, but then later there's another passage where he weeps at the death of Absalom.
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Now, who is Absalom? Absalom is the is the son of David who rebelled against David and literally tried to take away his kingdom.
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He literally tried to lead a rebellion against David.
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And one of David's main leaders went out and killed Absalom on the battlefield and he brought back the information to David.
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And this is what it says in 2 Samuel 18, 32, 2 Samuel 18, 32.
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It says this.
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And the king said unto Cushi, Cushi is the man, is the young man Absalom safe? You see, he's he knows they're at war.
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He knows they're at battle.
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This is his son who is literally trying to steal his throne, but it's still his son and he still loves his son.
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And he says, is the young man Absalom safe? And Cushi answered the enemies of my lord, the king and all that rise against thee to do thee hurt be as that young man is, which means he's dead.
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Verse 33 says, And the king was much moved and went up to the chamber over the gate and wept.
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And he said this, Oh, my son, Absalom, my son, my son, Absalom, would God I had died for thee, oh, Absalom, my son, my son.
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Was David a man of faith? Was David a man of sincere, genuine faith and a sovereign God? Read the Psalms.
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We know where David's faith lie.
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But yet at the death of his son, he wept and cried.
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Paul, the apostle, he believed in a sovereign God.
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He wrote Romans 8, 9, 10, 11.
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He believes in a sovereign God.
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But yet in his letter to the Philippians, Epaphroditus was supposed to come to him and was near death.
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And this is what he wrote.
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He says, For indeed, Epaphroditus was sick unto death, but God had mercy on him, meaning he kept him from dying.
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And he said, And not only him only, but also on me, lest I should have sorrow upon sorrow.
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God kept him alive not only for his sake, but for mine, because it would have broke my heart.
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And I would have had not only the sorrow of being in prison, but the sorrow of the death of a friend.
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And obviously, there are many other examples of people weeping, people of great faith weeping.
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Who's the greatest one? John 11.
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Jesus wept.
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And a lot of people have questions about that.
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Jesus knew he was going to raise him from the dead.
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Why did he weep? Some people say he wept for the unbelief of those around him.
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But that's possible.
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Or maybe he experienced the emotion that we all experience at the graveside of a friend.
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Well, he's God, he can't do that.
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He can't.
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You can.
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Are you greater than God? Christ showed us it's OK to grieve.
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So, beloved, let me just say is to finish this first myth as this is my point.
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If you have something in your life that is worth grieving over, grieve over it.
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Do not allow yourself the idea that because you believe God is sovereign, that you shouldn't cry, that you shouldn't hurt, that you shouldn't have pain because you should and you will.
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If you try to hold it back, it will crush you under its weight.
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Grieve when it's time to grieve.
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That's the first one.
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The second myth, the second myth comes from the secular world.
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And that is this.
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It is said in the secular world that grief is unnatural and it needs to be fixed.
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Psychological misconceptions on grief portray grief as an irregular element of human experience that needs to be avoided at all costs.
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In some cases, it was even classified as a pathology that needed cleansed, needed to be cleansed from the system.
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Freud, that interesting character from the past, he said that the energy devoted to what is lost must be reinvested into new things or new relationships.
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In essence, you got to get over it.
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You just got to get over it.
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Now, while most people wouldn't say that grief is unnatural, often we treat it like it is because this is what we do when we see somebody who's grieving.
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We go try to fix it.
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We go try to fix it.
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But, beloved, let me tell you something, when somebody is hurting and somebody is grieving, oftentimes our attempts at fixing it, they're just vain attempts.
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People need time to grieve.
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People need time to cry.
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People need time to be down.
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Ecclesiastes three, which we read for our opening statement this morning, our call to worship is there is there is a time to mourn.
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There is a time to cry and people need that time.
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One of the things that I think is so it's so and I see it at funerals, I've done so many funerals, many more funerals than I that I like to talk about a lot because just over the last few years has been so many to have to do.
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But the thing that I often see are these are these platitudes that people put out there.
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And I know we're trying to help, but oftentimes our word, a little girl, her little baby died.
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I remember this funeral.
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I remember doing the funeral and so I thought, oh, she's in a better place.
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For the mother at that moment, the only place that she could imagine being the best place is on her breast, on her chest.
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And those type of words, which we think are helpful, it's just our attempt to fix something that at that moment can't be fixed.
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Sometimes it's best to be quiet and hug and love and cry.
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Provide a meal and just cry with them.
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Why a meal? Why is that? You know, people, people often ask, well, why is meal so important during a funeral? Because sometimes that's the last thing you want to think about and it's what you need.
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You need to put something in your body to give yourself some strength and energy to get you by.
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But you don't want to cook.
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You don't want to do that.
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You don't want to do anything.
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So we help each other, we encourage each other.
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The most natural emotion that we experience is the emotion of grief.
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If somebody, if Freud says it's unnatural, Freud is wrong.
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If the psychologists and the pathologists say it's unnatural, they're wrong because grief is inexplicably tied to one other emotion.
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And that is love.
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The reason why we grieve is because we love.
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If there wasn't any love in life, there would be no grief at the loss of someone.
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But we grieve because we love people.
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We grieve because we hurt when they're gone.
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We grieve because we care for them.
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Buddhism teaches that you're to eliminate all of your holds on this world.
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You just have nothing that you hold on to.
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That way you can move on into nirvana, which is nothingness, and you can be happy in nothingness.
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You know, Steve Jobs died recently.
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Steve Jobs was a Buddhist.
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And as much as I was, you know, very impressed with his life as an innovator and an inventor.
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And I mean, in my pocket, you know, I have a lot of what he put his life's work into in my own home.
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But yet at the same time, if you read his speech to the university.
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His speech was a speech of, you know, this life is all there is and there really is no hope for anything else.
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So do everything you can here.
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Grab for all the gusto you can get.
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You only go around this great big marble once and beloved such a thing.
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To me.
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Is really hopeless.
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Because if that is what it is and love then becomes something that only exists in this life, when we go away, nothing matters.
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As I said, the reason why we grieve is because we love, because we do hold on to things.
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We do grab hold of our wife.
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We do grab hold of our children.
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We do grab hold of our parents and we love them.
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And when the inevitable happens and our parents are taken from us and our our spouses are taken from us and heaven forbid our children, it hurts and it's supposed to because we love them.
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Real love hurts, so grief is not something that needs to be fixed.
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It's something that is inevitable.
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It happens to us because we love one another.
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The third myth, the third myth is this grief is something that you get over.
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I've heard people say this, you need to just get over it.
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The truth is that once you are grieved at the loss of someone.
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You don't ever really stop being grieved at their loss.
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I know some of you have parents who have gone on, some of you have children, some of you have children who have gone on and to this day, there are times in your life, it could be 20 years, it could be 30 years to this day.
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There are times in your life when you think about that person, your heart gets a little soft and you might even shed a tear.
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Maybe it's on their birthday.
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Maybe it's on an anniversary.
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Maybe it's I tell you, the hardest part I've found with people who are grieving is the first time they try to call the person after they die and realize they're not there.
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I always I actually tell people that when I do funerals, I say expect this to happen because this is going to this is going to tear your heart out.
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The first time you go to write a Christmas list and you realize their name isn't on the list anymore, it's going to tear your heart out.
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Be ready.
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It's going to hurt.
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It's not something you get over.
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It's something you learn to manage.
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It's not something that goes away.
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It's something that becomes a part of who you are and you learn to manage it.
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But how how can you manage this loss? How can you manage this pain? How can you manage this suffering? I think Abraham teaches us something in this text.
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So I want to read it with you.
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I want to read the rest of the chapter.
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It's a little long, but I want to show you something in this text that I think Abraham teaches us about grief, because the first two verses, it says his wife dies and he weeps for her.
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And then in verse three, it says, And Abraham rose up from before his dead.
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This is his wife and said to the Hittites, I am a sojourner and foreigner among you, give me property among you for a burying place that I may bury my dead out of my sight.
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The Hittites answered, Abraham, hear us, my lord, you are a prince of God among us.
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Bury your dead in the choices of our tombs.
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None of us will withhold from you his tomb to hinder you from burying your dead.
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Abraham rose and bowed to the Hittites, the people of the land, and he said to them, if you are willing that I should bury my dead out of my sight, hear me and entreat for me, Ephraim, the son of Zohar, that he may give me the cave at Machpelah, which he owns.
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It is at the end of his field for the full price.
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Let him give it to me in your presence as property for a burying place.
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Now it goes on from there to talk about a little bartering that they had, it went back and forth.
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It says now Ephraim was sitting among the Hittites and Ephraim, the Hittite answered Abraham in the hearing of the Hittites of all who went to the gate of the city.
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No, my lord, hear me, I give you the field and I give you the cave that is in it in the sight of my sons and my people.
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I give it to you.
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Bury your dead.
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Then Abraham bowed down before the people of the land and he said to Ephraim in the hearing of the people of the land, but if you will hear me, I give you the price of the field, except it for me that I may bury my dead there.
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Ephraim answered Abraham, my lord, listen to me, a piece of land worth 400 shekels of silver.
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What is that between you and me? Bury your dead.
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Abraham listened to Ephraim and Abraham weighed out for Ephraim the silver that he had named in the hearing of the Hittites, 400 shekels of silver, according to the weights of the current of the weights current among the merchants.
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So the field of Ephraim and Machpelah, which was the east was to the east of Mamre, the field which the cave was in it with the cave that was in it and all the trees that were in the field throughout its whole area was made over to Abraham as a possession in the presence of the Hittites before all who went in at the gate of the city.
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After this, Abraham buried Sarah, his wife, in the cave of the field at Machpelah, east of Mamre, that is, Hebron in the land of Canaan.
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The field in the cave that is in it were made over to Abraham as property for a burying place by the Hittites.
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Now, in regard to this bartering that went on between Abraham and Ephraim, it needs to be pointed out that there's a lot of disagreement as to what was going on here.
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And some people say, well, Ephraim was trying to make a false promise.
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He was saying, well, I'll give it to you.
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You don't have to pay me.
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And it was sort of a bartering, a way of bartering in the ancient world.
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That all doesn't matter for our for our context this morning.
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What matters to me, what I want to show you in this text.
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Is that Abraham is doing everything he can to ensure that his wife is buried in the promised land.
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Why? Well, first of all, why is that difficult? He doesn't own anything.
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He owns no property.
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By the way, Abraham never owned any property in the promised land except this.
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You might say, well, God said it all belonged to him.
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Well, yeah, it all belonged to his descendants.
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But remember, they had to go get it.
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Remember, they had to go fight for it.
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They had to go possess the promised land.
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And Abraham never held anything in the promised land except this one place, which he bought.
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For the purpose of burying his wife, and it would go on to become the burial place of him and his son and his son's wives.
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Why? Because he trusted in the promise of God.
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This is the land of my people.
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God has promised us this land.
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I'm not going to take my wife back to Mesopotamia and bury her there.
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I'm going to bury her in the place that God has promised to me and to all of my descendants forever.
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Why is that important? Because it shows that in the darkest, most deep, hurtful part of Abraham's life, he still remembered and trusted in the promise of God.
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Beloved, that is what gives us hope through our grief, is trusting in the promise of God.
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That is what allows us to look at a person whom we have loved our entire life who has died and say, God gives and God taketh away.
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Blessed be the name of the Lord.
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It hurts us.
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It's not easy.
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Our pain is a very real pain and we suffer and we grieve.
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But we trust that God, who judges the world, does all things well.
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That's all we have.
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There's hope in God.
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And beloved, I don't know how unbelievers do it.
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I don't know how unbelievers are able to cope.
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I do know this.
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I know why people drink and I know why people take drugs, because apart from hope, your pain would be so immense, there'd be nothing else to turn to but something to make the pain go away.
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You imagine that somebody who hurts so bad with no hope.
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Beloved, the Bible tells us this and the Apostle Paul wrote this.
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He says, I write these things to you.
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That you not be uninformed so that you will not grieve as the unbeliever grieves.
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He didn't say not to grieve at all.
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But there's a difference between how a believer grieves and how an unbeliever grieves.
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The unbeliever grieves without hope.
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But the believer looks to death not as the end.
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But simply as the transition to new life.
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Somebody asked me, well, what do we do when we have somebody who dies who is an unbeliever? And it is a hard question.
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And my only answer is this, we do not know what God did in the last part of their life.
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Oftentimes.
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If we have shared the gospel with them, we don't know the thief on the cross gave his heart to Christ right before his last breath.
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We don't know.
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But we do know this.
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Christ is the hope of glory.
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Christ is the hope of all eternity.
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And if we have Christ, we know we will be with him one day.
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And that should give us hope to face even life's most difficult of griefs with that.
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Let's pray.
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Father, as we come to you in Jesus name, the words that have been said this morning, Lord, are easy to say, but yet sometimes hard to apply, because when we are faced with grief, it is difficult sometimes to remember all of your wonderful promises.
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I thank you for the hope of glory.
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I thank you for Jesus Christ.
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I thank you that we can stand confident on the word of God and say that we when we pass from this life will not simply die and go away, but that we will transition.
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And to being in a new life with you, Father, we do pray for unbelievers.
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We pray for our friends and our relatives who don't know Christ.
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We shudder for their souls, oh, God.
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And we pray that we would be instruments used by you to share in the gospel and love them with the gospel.
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And Lord, I pray if there's anyone here this morning who has never heard the gospel before, that they've never heard that they're sinners, that they need to be saved.
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They need to repent and follow Christ, for in him is the only hope for eternity.
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Lord, I pray that those words have fallen on their heart this morning heavy.
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And Lord, that you would use them for your purpose.
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We thank you for the life of Abraham, for the life of Sarah and the many instructions that we get looking at their lives and their victories and in their failures and their happiness and in their grief.
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We love you.
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We thank you.
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We praise you, God, for all that you've done and are going to do in Jesus name.
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Amen.
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Stand with us now and.