On Tragedy and the Comfort that Comes from God Part 2

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Abdullah of the UK on Textual Claims, Part 3

00:11

And I had to accompany a policeman, most of the police had come code three all across the city to see if there was anything they could do.

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There wasn't anything they could do, but they were all thinking about their kids. And I had to accompany a policeman, the head nurse, who herself was crying.

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First time I had ever seen emotion in that woman. And grandma and grandpa, to see that lifeless little six -month -old body.

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I never learned the trick on how not to cry in those situations. Some people can do it,

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I couldn't. And I just went home that night, and all

00:55

I could do was hug my four -year -old daughter at that time and be thankful.

01:03

That's all anybody can do. And the pain in that grandmother's face, you know,

01:16

I was raised as most people, death was something you saw on television and at the end of a half hour, an hour program, everything was resolved.

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I had not seen a lot of death until I, I had not seen any death actually, my grandmother had died,

01:32

I knew her, but I wasn't there when she passed away. And so you are changed when you see that.

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And it's a good thing to be changed by that. The scriptures say it's better to spend a day in the house of mourning than a day in the house of feasting.

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There is a reason for that. It is good to know our mortality. So it's a good thing to be changed, but it can actually be a bad thing as well in this sense if the people around you aren't changed.

02:08

They may not understand why you have been. And once you've seen things like that, you start to understand what

02:16

Paul meant when he talked about the cycle of consolation, the cycle of comfort.

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Because when we go through things like that and we're changed, we're comforted by God, then we are used by God to comfort others.

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And until you become a part of that cycle, you can't understand it. You can't understand it.

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And everyone's going to want to come up with reasons why tragedies like what happened to little

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Maria, why they happen. And you know, sometimes

02:53

I admire God's patience that he puts up with us because he's told us the secret things belong to him, the things revealed belong to us and to our children, but the secret things belong to him.

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There is such an attitude of arrogance, even amongst Christians, when we demand of God answers for things that he has never promised to give us answers to.

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But the wonderful thing about being a Christian is that while we grieve, and that grief does not take just two weeks, that grief honestly will go on the rest of Stephen Curtis Chapman's life, and appropriately so.

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While we grieve, we are not to grieve as those who have no hope. We grieve, but we do so in hope, and that changes all the parameters.

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That changes the outcome. That's the blessed hope of being a

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Christian. We grieve, but we grieve in the hope of the resurrection. That doesn't mean we put it all off to heaven.

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We'll someday in heaven know there are things that are going to change in our life now, but we grieve in hope because we know him who has conquered death.

04:15

That's what I learned. I haven't learned it the way that Stephen Curtis Chapman will have to learn it and is learning it even now, but I have learned it in some ways, and we all then, because we learn it in different ways, share with one another, and that's what the body is all about.

04:34

And so for him and for his family, we pray for them, we mourn with them, and we pray for God's comfort, because there is no greater comfort that can be had.