Sermon 3 - Into The Warm Arms Of God Series

A. We are in a sermon series called Eternal Questions…Biblical Answers.

1. So far in our series, we have talked about when Christ comes and when death comes.

2. Today, I would like to start with a Winnie the Pooh quote: “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

3. With that statement, we are reminded that the more special a relationship is, the harder the goodbye will be.

4. And yet, how sad it would be if all our goodbyes were easy or meaningless.

B. It has been many years since we dropped off our daughters at college and even many more years than that when we first dropped them off at kindergarten.

1. But even after all these years, I can still remember how hard and emotional it was to say goodbye, even though the kindergarten goodbyes were for a few hours and the college goodbye were for a few months.

2. We just don’t like to say goodbye to those we love, whether its for four hours, or four days, or four months.

3. But what is experienced at schools in August and September is a picnic compared to what is experienced in a cemetery at the time of death.

4. It is one thing to leave loved ones in familiar surroundings, but it is something else entirely to release them into a world we do not know and cannot describe.

5. Try as we might to avoid it, and as reluctant as we are to discuss it, death is a very real part of life, and all of us must at some point release the hand of one we love into the hand of the one we have not seen.

C. Can you remember the first time death forced you to say goodbye? Most of us can.

1. For me it was in the fifth grade when my biological father died of cancer.

2. At the funeral I heard words like: departed, passed on, gone ahead.

3. These were unfamiliar terms for me and I wondered…departed to where?...passed on to what?...gone ahead for how long?

4. Of course, I’ve learned since then that I’m not the only one with questions about death.

5. We all wonder and I still have my questions.

6. What will death be like? What happens to Christians between their death and Jesus’ return?

D. Apparently the church in Thessalonica had asked such a question and the apostle Paul offered them an answer.

1. Paul wrote: “Brothers and sisters, 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” (1 Thess 4:13)

2. The members of Thessalonian church had buried their share of loved ones, and Paul wanted the members who remained to be at peace regarding the ones who had gone ahead.

3. So, as he spoke to them, he speaks to us who have stood or will stand near an open grave that is about to contain the body of our loved one.

4. Paul continued, “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” (1 Thess 4:14).

5. God transforms our hopeless grief into hope-filled grief.

6. How? By telling us that in Christ we will be with our loved ones again.

7. But until then, where are they? Are they safe and comfortable?

E. Bob Russell is a preacher who retired from full-time preaching 20 years ago, he tells of the time his father died and how the funeral was held on a cold, blustery, Pennsylvania day.

1. The snow-covered roads prevented the funeral procession from taking place, so the funeral director told Bob, “I’ll take your dad’s body to the grave.”

2. But Bob couldn’t bear the thought of missing his father’s burial, so he and his brother and their sons piled into a four-wheel drive vehicle and followed the hearse.

3. Listen to how Bob describes the event: “We plowed through ten inches of snow into the cemetery, got about fifty yards from my dad’s grave, with the wind blowing about 25 miles per hour, the six of us lugged that casket down to the gravesite…We watched the body lowered into the grave and we turned to leave. I felt something was undone, so I said, ‘I’d like for us to have a prayer.’ The six of us huddled together and I prayed, ‘Lord, this is such a cold, lonely place…’ I got too choked up to pray. I kept battling to get my composure, and I finally whispered, ‘I thank you, for we know to be absent from the body is to be safe in your warm arms.’ ”