HoHum:
We all want to be good comforters- “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the 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.” 2 Corinthians 1:3, 4, NIV.
We do not want to be miserable comforters like Job’s friends
Job’s friends started out so well- “Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No-one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was.” Job 2:13
Remember this when being there for the suffering- be quiet and listen to them- when Job’s friends opened their mouths that is when they became miserable comforters
WBTU:
As my role as hospice chaplain I am always on the lookout for good resources, books and articles, that help the suffering. Two books tonight:
Larry Barber (wife and young daughter were killed in an automobile accident) has devoted his life to helping the suffering, the grieving. He has a web site griefministerdotcom and he will send out articles through e-mail from time to time. Written a book called Love Never Dies in 2011. Mr. Barber recommended this 2nd book
John Mark Hicks (first wife died not long after married)- Mr. Hicks with his second wife had a child with a debilitating disease and that child died in 2001; Dr. Hicks is a professor of theology at Libscomb University; he wrote a book in 1999 about suffering called Yet Will I Trust Him; both of these are from accapella fellowship
Taken this material from Yet Will I Trust Him- What do suffers need to remember?
The role of the comforter is to be present as the instrument of God’s presence among those who weep. The comforter is not there to explain, theologize about the meaning of suffering or to render a judgment about why something happened. Job’s friends made that mistake. The comforter sits beside the sufferer and shares the suffering. The comforter is there to sit with the mourner, to share the lament, the protest and the questions. Comforters know how to share suffering, to weep with those who weep and to sit silently with the weeping sufferer.
However, when the sufferer speaks and seeks personal engagement with another, the comforter first listens and then speaks. But what should we say to someone suffering, “I am sorry for your loss, “or, “I can’t imagine how painful this must be for you; I am so sorry,” or, “I am praying for you and I want you to know that I love you” or, “I just wanted you to know that I am thinking of you.” These are great in brief moments but what about those times when we are sitting with the suffering and they want some genuine dialog. In those moments, comforters need to remind sufferers gently of things that become blurry in midst of grief. Comforter can remind the sufferer about what is easily forgotten because suffering is so painful. I believe those reminders must be focused on who God is, how God feels about tragedy and what God will one day do about it.
John Mark Hicks says that he reminds himself and others of 5 anchors that keeps him grounded
Thesis: 5 anchors for the suffering (2 tonight and 3 next week)
For instances:
1. The Unrelenting Love of God
Creation was God’s first act of unrelenting love. God created out of his overflowing love to include others in his loving communion. He created so he could share what he already possessed. The Father, Son and Spirit in their eternal nature communed with each other, and they intended to share it with others through creating a people in their image. God initiated creation for the sake of others so that they too might experience the wonder of blissful communion. The love of God is so great that he is willing to risk the bliss of his own communion so that others might participate in it.
Even though we wounded God’s love (through the fall), it could not be quenched. Even when Israel refused to know Him, God would not give up on his people. Even when Israel was an unfaithful wife and had sold herself into prostitution, God pursued her as a husband who yearns for reconciliation with his loved one (Hosea 1-3). Even when Israel committed adultery with Baal, God’s heart cried, “How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I had you over, Israel? My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused” (Hosea 11:8). God’s love pursued Israel from the time he led them out of Egypt till the time he ransomed them from their exile. God’s love meant that he would not give up on his people.
The greatest demonstration of this love is God’s work in Jesus Christ. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). This is how we know that God is love, John wrote, because he “sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10). The unrelenting love of God is expressed in the lengths to which God went to accomplish his goal of fellowship with us. God joined the human race, shared its weaknesses and its burdens, experienced its shame, and died on a cross. God sacrificed himself in Jesus Christ for the sake of others, and his love knew no limits. There was no cost that God would not pay for fellowship with his people, and he demonstrated this at the cross. God sacrificed all for the sake of his people. “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all--how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” Romans 8:32, NIV.
John Mark Hicks- When the doubts creep in and the fears debilitate, I remember the cross of Jesus Christ. I can stand beside the coffin of my wife and doubt God’s love, but I cannot kneel at the foot of the cross and doubt it. Despite all the contrary witnesses that fill a fallen world, God entered history and demonstrated his love for us in the incarnation, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ
2. The Inviting Presence of God
When fallenness invades our life, when pain, disease or death strike our loved ones, our hearts cry out in protest. We sense that something is terribly wrong with the world. We sense that this is not the way things are supposed to be. Indeed, it is not the way God created the world. God created peace, life, harmony, and joy in the Garden, but sin has ruined that world. It has broken the original harmony. Death has entered God’s good creation. Our protests, then, are yearnings for the original harmony. They are a natural response to the fallenness we now experience. We protest against death and we refuse to accept its reality in God’s creation.
The laments of Scripture are filled with those kinds of protests. The people of God cry out to their God under the burden of fallenness. The Psalms provide example after example of faithful lament. The people of God confront their God in anger, bitterness, doubt, confusion, and bewilderment. They ask God, “Why?” and “How long?” They ask God, “Where are you?” and “Why have you hidden yourself from your people?” They ask God, “When will you bring justice to the earth?” they complain, question, and weep. The story of God is filled with the protests of his people because his people have nowhere else to turn.
Yet those laments are in Scripture because God invites us to lament. He invites us into his presence to speak our hearts to him. God seeks communion- real communion. He does not want ritual repetitions or high sounding phrases. God wants to engage us in genuine communion. But there is no authentic communion when God’s people are not honest with their God. Can we deceive God by “putting on a good face” in prayer while our heart is breaking? God does not seek such superficiality. Rather, he years to hear the cries of his people so he can respond to their hurts and share their burden.
God invites us to speak our protests and to voice our laments. God is not offended by such protests. He is patient. He understands lament because he himself has experienced it. God lamented the sinfulness and destruction of Israel through the weeping prophet Jeremiah. Jesus lamented the stubbornness of Israel as he wept over Jerusalem. Indeed, Jesus voiced his lament on the cross in the words of the psalmist, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” God himself in Jesus Christ has lamented. God understands the pain and alienation that causes lament, and he understands how faith must complain because the world is not as should be.
God is a loving father who listens to his children. He does not listen to scold, but to heal. He does not respond in anger to these protests. Rather, he responds in love. These protests do not repulse God. On the contrary, they evoke God’s loving presence. Like a parent who comforts a hurting child, so God wraps his arms around the protesting believer. God absorbs the pain of these protests and his love overwhelms them. God’s presence invades our laments to comfort and reassures us of his love. This is why the laments in Psalms end in praise. The people of God sense God’s presence, his comfort, and his faithfulness. God listens and he responds. God offers his presence to lamenters.
Austin French- Why God?: Why God do people have to die, a daughter or a son, sudden and so young, long before their time? Why God do people fall apart, a promise and a ring, becomes a broken thing, a road that got too hard.
Chorus: Why God I need you, It’s why God I run to your arms, over and over again. It’s why God I cling to, your love and hold on for dear life, and I find, you are right by my side.
Give me a faith stronger than I have. I need to know when it hurts this bad, that you hold my heart when it breaks, and I’m not alone in this pain.
Austin shares the inspiration behind this song- One family in my church began to capture our attention, prayers, tears, and hearts. There was a sweet young family with a 2 year old little boy and a new baby on the way. They were sweet, kind, generous, and loved the Lord with everything they had. The news came in as they were in the late part of their pregnancy that they had lost the baby. A few weeks later, this sweet mom was diagnosed with Leukemia. The church began praying so hard for healing, but a few months later this mom, wife, and friend to so many passed away. This the moment that inspired, “Why God?”
HoHum:
Steven Curtis Chapman is well known for his Christian music. A tragedy happened in his family when his young daughter was accidentally run over by his teenage son and she died. Out of this experience he wrote Beauty Will Rise: It was the day the world went wrong, I screamed till my voice was gone, and watched through the tears as everything came crashing down, slowly panic turns to pain, as we awake to what remains, and sift through the ashes that are left behind, but buried deep beneath all our broken dreams, we have this hope.
Chorus: Out of these ashes, beauty will rise, and we will dance among the ruins, we will see Him with our own eyes, out of these ashes, beauty will rise, for we know, joy is coming in the morning, in the morning, beauty will rise
So take another breath for now, and let the tears come washing down, and if you can’t believe I will believe for you. Cuz I have seen the signs of spring! Just watch and see: Chorus
I can hear it in the distance, and it’s not too far away. It’s the music and the laughter of a wedding and a feast. I can almost feel the hand of God reaching for my face to wipe the tears away, and say, “It’s time to make everything new.” Chorus
WBTU:
We all want to be good comforters- “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the 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.” 2 Corinthians 1:3, 4, NIV.
We do not want to be miserable comforters like Job’s friends
John Mark Hicks give us 5 anchors to remind the suffering when it is appropriate. Talked about 2 last week- The unrelenting love of God and the inviting presence of God. 3 more this week- the caring empathy of God, the unlimited Sovereignty of God, and the Ultimate Victory of God.
3. The Caring Empathy of God
We have all sympathized with others who have experienced the world’s fallenness. We have all sat in funeral homes with friends or written the occasional sympathy card. We sympathize with people when we hurt because they hurt and we weep because they weep. God himself feels this sympathy. Our God is the weeping God who grieves over sin, pain, and death. God is no stoic statue who is immune to our hurts. God does not sit enthroned in an undisturbed joyful bliss. On the contrary, God weeps over our fallenness. He grieves over his corrupted creation. He grieves over the loss of fellowship with his people.
But God is more than sympathetic. He is also empathetic. God does not stand off at a distance and merely pity his fallen creation. He does more. He comes near and enters into our experience, and actually shares the fallenness of the world with us. God not only weeps over my hurt, but he shares the experience of my hurt with me. (John Mark Hicks) God not only weeps over the death of my son, he himself has experienced the death of his own Son. God not only weeps over the rebellion of a runaway child, but God himself knows the pain that rebellious children create in the hearts of their parents. God himself has experienced the pain and hurt of the fallen world. He understands. He not only sympathizes, but also empathizes.
The empathetic event is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. In Jesus, God experienced fallenness. He experienced pain, fatigue, thirst, hunger, grief and death. In Jesus, God wept at the tomb of a friend in John 11- Lazarus. In Jesus, God experienced the humiliating share of the cross. In Jesus, the rich God became poor (2 Corinthians 8:9). In Jesus, God shared our weaknesses with us, experienced our temptations and trials, and endured our shame. God came near in Jesus to sit on the mourner’s bench with us. He understands our pain. He has experienced it in the flesh. God experienced my humanity and my pain through Jesus Christ.
4. The Unlimited Sovereignty of God
Fallenness often makes us wonder whether God really is in control of his world. Perhaps God does care, but he cannot do anything about it. Perhaps God loves us, but he cannot help. The biblical story, however, does not picture God this way. Even when it appears that Satan and his angels have the upper hand, as when the Roman empire persecuted God’s saints, God still sits on his throne (Revelation 4). God is still in control. Indeed, God controls the extent and length of the persecution (Revelation 6:9-10). Satan cannot dethrone God. Fallenness does not undermine God’s sovereignty. God remains in control even when my circumstances are difficult.
Because God loves, because God listens, and because God empathizes, we trust that God has the best interests of his people in mind. God has a purpose for the trials and troubles his people experience. God cares and God is sovereign. Nothing on God’s part, then is malicious and nothing is arbitrary. God is praised for his “love and faithfulness” and for his sovereignty. “Our God is in heaven; he does whatever pleases him” (Psalm 115:3). God intends to bless his people out of his love and to secure those blessings by his sovereignty. God has a goal for his people and everything that happens in the world serves that goal.
But that goal is not necessarily our earthly happiness, but our heavenly fellowship with him. God is more interested in our faith than our pleasure. God’s goal is to establish and enjoy an eternal communion with us. God is more interested in our communion with him than whether we are healthy or wealthy. Whether God permits or causes any event in the world, it is enough to say that God is sovereign over all events, and that nothings happens without his permission. If nothing happens without his permission, then everything that happens serves his goal or else he would not have permitted it. God has a reason for his permission and his actions. That reason is his original intent in creation. He wants a people who share his fellowship. God, then, permits or causes whatever happens for the sake of this original intent.
This is clearly demonstrated in Jesus Christ. God willed the death of Jesus to redeem a people. God was sovereign over all the events of Jesus’ ministry, life, and death. It was by “God’s set purpose and foreknowledge” that Jesus was handed over to death (Acts 2:23). At any moment the plan could have changed because God was sovereign over the plan. Jesus could have called for “twelve legions of angels,” but instead he submitted to the will of the Father (Matthew 26:53). In his sovereignty, God executed a plan for the redemption of a fallen world through Jesus Christ. Yet this plan involved the suffering and death of the just one, God’s own Son. Nevertheless, because God’s goal is communion with his people, God willed the death of his Son out of his great love for us. God sacrificed his own joy so that others might join his fellowship.
God is at work in everything for the good of his people (Romans 8:28). God intends a communion between himself and his people. If discipline, testing, suffering, or prosperity is necessary toward that end, then that is what God will permit or do.
That kind of sovereignty does not frighten me. On the contrary, it comforts me. If God were a malicious tyrant, I would be terrified. I have reason to trust him. God’s sovereignty, then, emboldens my faith, grounds my contentment, and enables me to submit to God’s purposes in the fallen circumstances of my life. God’s sovereignty plus his care means that I trust that whatever happens in my life serves the good that God intends for me.
5. The Ultimate Victory of God
Death covers the whole human race. Everyone, including children, is subject to death’s dominion. This is the reverse of what God intended. God did not create so that his people would die. The opposite is true. God created for life, communion, and fellowship. Death is like an alien invader. Sin created death, and as far as sin reigns, death reigns.
However, God will not let death win. Death will not claim the final victory. Rather, God’s intent for his creation will find fruition in a new reality, a new heaven and a new earth. There God will plant the tree of life by the water of life and there will be no more curse (Revelation 22:1-5). There we will see the face of God and experience he fullness of his presence. There God will fulfill his original intent in creation and dwell among his people. In that place there will be no more pain, death or mourning because God will wipe away every tear (Revelation 21:1-4). Everything fallen will be renewed; everything old will become new. God will dwell with men.
But in the present circumstance, where death has dominion, it is difficult to believe that God will ultimately cause that new reality. When we stand by the coffin of our loved one, it is difficult to envision or even trust in that new heaven and new earth. Death so dominates us that faith is difficult. Death looks like a closed door that no one can open. Death conquers hope.
For this reason God entered history in Jesus Christ to demonstrate his future victory over death. God demonstrates his power over death in the resurrection of Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:12-18). Indeed, the resurrection of Jesus is an event that comes from the future. Jesus is the first fruit of a grand harvest. Jesus is the first resurrection of a resurrection harvest (1 Corinthians 15:21-28). God has given us a taste of the future in the resurrection of Jesus. God has shown us what the future is like. He has shown us what the end of history is. Resurrected life is the end of history. Resurrection conquers death. The only real question about the end of history is whether God will find a people who wait for him in faith (Luke 18:8). God has testified about his future work- he will raise the dead. But what is our testimony to God- will we wait in faith?
Death does not conquer hope in the eyes of faith. In the resurrection of Jesus God has given us eyes to see the destruction of death. We still grieve, but we do not grieve without hope (I Thessalonians 4:13-18). We still experience loss, but we know that we will regain what was lost. We still lament, but we trust in God’s sovereignty over death.
Now do not miss understand, the grief we experience here hurts because what was lost in the present is still lost. The loss is not regained until the resurrection. But the hope of restoration comforts us. God has given us hope in Jesus Christ, and through faith we patiently wait for his eternal kingdom (Romans 8:18-23).
So what?
God loves. God listens. God understands. God rules. God wins. This is the ground and substance of faith. It enables us to endure suffering and it empowers faith. It is the substance of God’s story among his people, and God’s story give faith its confidence. “We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first.” Hebrews 3:14, NIV.
“So do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded.” Hebrews 10:35, NIV.
