Christians Grieve Too! (Part 2 of 2)

The writer of Ecclesiastes says it's good for us to go to the house of mourning, although that's a place none of us would naturally want to go.

Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg reminds us that as Christians, when we grieve, we grieve differently because we have hope. We're in 1 Thessalonians 4, but we begin today in Luke's gospel. Luke chapter 23.

And you can study these passages for your homework and at your leisure. Luke 23 and verse 43, you know where I'm going. The man on the cross addresses Jesus and says, Remember me when you come into your kingdom. And Jesus answered him, I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise. My kingdom's coming real soon, and you're going to be with me there immediately. You find the same thing in the expression of Paul in relationship to death in Philippians and chapter 1, where he says, For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain. And then he says, I don't really know whether I can choose staying alive or dying and going to heaven because I'm torn between the two. I desire to depart, notice, and be with Christ, which is far better. But it is more necessary for you that I remain in this body.

Now, we could say more concerning that, but that probably is enough for just now. He wants to address, then, the ignorance of these people in relationship to this matter of falling asleep. He also wants to provide them with instruction concerning the issue of grief. Paul is not here suggesting that the believer is to be free from grief altogether, but rather that he is to be free from the grief which marks the pagan in the face of death. For the unbeliever, in death there is only the dreary wail of despair that is covered up with small talk and finery, far too much plastic and fake flowers, and a deep emptiness. For the believer, there is the exulting, tear-stained psalm of hope. There is genuine grief, but it is not the grief of unbelief.

It is the grief attached to the nature of loss. So then, there is a distinction which the verse contains between those who are in Christ and those who are the rest. There is instruction, which the verse is pointing us to, regarding the matter of ignorance over the nature of death itself and concerning the issue of grief for the believer.

And so, thirdly and finally, there is an application which this verse commands, calls us to. First of all, it demands that we face the question, each of us, regarding the issue of belief and unbelief. Am I, you may say to yourself as I sit in this building this evening, am I in Christ? Have I responded to the kindness and love of my Savior? Have I been brought from death to life, from darkness to light, from the broad road to the narrow road, from the sinking, shifting sand of my own ingenuity to the rock-solid basis of Christ and his atoning work? That is a question which you as an individual must answer, as must I.

It is not a question that may be answered by your parents who sit around you, nor by your spouse who sits next to you. It is not a question which finds an answer in our religious interest, nor finds a solution in our concern for the things of God. We are either dead in our trespasses and in our sins and in our unbelief, or we have been brought from that death unto life. We have believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, and like the Philippian jailer, we have been saved.

Where do you stand tonight in relationship to the distinction between faith and unbelief? Secondly, that we need to apply the distinction as it relates to ignorance and knowledge. It may be that as a result of our being together in this day that God has spoken into our lives concerning the rather fatuous way in which we have been dealing with the Scriptures. We have not been daily reading them.

We have even in reading them, perhaps not been studying them. And we've felt the kindly prompting of the Spirit of God to say, How long do you plan living as a relatively ignorant Christian? And again, our response must be, Lord Jesus, help me to become a student of the book, to become one who resides in your company. Help me to know the passion of Paul as he expresses it in Philippians 3, that I might know him, the power of his resurrection, that I may enter into the passion of his sufferings, that I might know him personally and progressively and intimately.

There is a distinction in this verse between those who wander as kind of clueless Christians, always hoping that somebody else will have the answer, and those who are committed to a study of the book. Where are you? Where am I in relationship to that? There are many things in life that I, quite frankly, pay no attention to at all.

Because I know that I am surrounded by people who are paying attention to it. And so I don't need to know what it is, because I can turn here and say, What was that? And they'll tell me. And what are we doing next? And they'll tell me. It is wonderful.

But in the issue of the Bible, that will not do. I need to know for myself. Now, thirdly and finally in applying it, what about this matter of realistic grief as opposed to abject hopelessness? What is grief? We use the word grief with frequency. Charlie Brown has popularized it in good grief, and there is a sense in which grief is good. I thought of entitling this this evening Good Grief.

I thought it was more clever than it was helpful, and so I let it go. J Adams says, This is grief. It is a life-shaking sorrow over loss. Grief tears life to shreds. It shakes one from top to bottom. It pulls a person loose.

He comes apart at the seams. Grief is true nothing less than a life-shattering loss. Now, in that designation, it is clear that grief is not only related to death. We may experience something very close to that in the breakup of a personal relationship. We may experience grief in relationship to the parting with loved ones even on a human plane. We may experience that in the loss of a job.

And it is important for us to be able to define it and to understand what's going on. The idea of bereavement is another helpful word, because bereavement emerges from the verb to reave. And it is an uncommon word—it was common in earlier English—but to reave simply means to ravish, or to forcibly deprive, or to take captive by force. And that is exactly what happens in the experience of bereavement. Because in being bereaved in the loss of loved ones, we are broken up, we are ravished, we are invaded.

And it is an intensely personal experience. Now, the fact that our loved ones are with the Lord—which is what Paul is pointing to here as he's going to go on in verse 14 and following—the fact that our loved ones are with the Lord lightens but does not remove the experience of loss and loneliness. The fact that our loved ones are with the Lord mitigates our experience, but it does not dispel the hard-to-face reality. That in this experience of loss, great joys are now irretrievably gone. And we're not being particularly Christian to deny that.

Indeed, we're actually being sub-Christian to deny it. The idea that to walk around saying, I don't miss my loved one, or I really am compensated for in all these ways, has more to do with piosity than it has to do with biblical reality, I believe. Paul, in chapter 1 of Philippians, has got such a view of death that he says he's not sure whether he fancies dying or staying. That's his view, his personal view of death. Also, you would say to yourself, then presumably, when any of Paul's friends would die, he would be able to handle that in a snap. It would be a breeze to him. It really wouldn't faze him very much. After all, he's such a solid awareness of what death means for the Christian.

Absolutely not. And you can see this in chapter 2 in relationship to his buddy Epaphroditus. Philippians chapter 2 verse 25, this gives us a real insight into the apostle's heart concerning death. He says, I think it's necessary to send back to you, Epaphroditus, my brother, fellow worker, fellow soldier, who is also your messenger, whom you sent to take care of my needs.

You're beginning to get a picture of the intimacy that he feels with Epaphroditus. He says, For he longs for all of you, and is distressed because you heard he was ill. He says, You're right he was ill.

He almost died. But God had mercy on him, and not on him only, but also on me. Notice the phrase, To spare me sorrow upon sorrow. The thought of losing Epaphroditus broke his heart. Sure, he understood about heaven. Yeah, if I depart and be with Christ, that's far better.

If I stay, I can do your work. But if Epaphras goes, I will be overwhelmed by sorrow. Well, we don't want to take this to an extreme and start celebrating requiem masses on a twenty-four-hour basis and have faces as long as a dreadful-looking donkey. But it is realistic to recognize that in the experience of loss there is genuine grief and realistic sorrow. Jesus at the grave of Lazarus wept. John 11 and 35, he wept at the grave of his friend. You read the commentaries on this as to why Jesus wept. Goodness gracious, two words and commentary that would fill the back of a donkey, and all kinds of ideas as to why Jesus wept. You know, when we've plummeted the depth of it, the fact of the matter is he wept because he was sad at the loss of Lazarus. The mystery in that encounter is not that he raised Lazarus from the dead. That was easy for Jesus. The mystery in that is that he so identified with our humanity that he shed genuine tears at the loss of his friend.

And when Isaiah, six hundred years before Christ, pictures him coming over the horizon of history, he says of him, And he is a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And although the Bible introduces us to the reality of Christ's victory over death and the grave, it doesn't call us, loved ones, to some kind of glossy, heartless triumphalism. And I am personally unaware of how it is that dear folks in the loss of dear ones to them are able to tell me, within moments of it all happening, that it's really not a problem at all. That, I've got to tell you, is spiritual geography into which I have never entered. I'm not denying the reality of their experience. I'm simply saying, I haven't entered into that kind of spiritual geography.

I haven't been on that latitude and longitude. Loss, for me, has been grief. And the experience of bereavement is such that every tearful memory actually wants to be replaced by another tearful memory. And every sharp pang of loss is succeeded by greater.

You want to tell me that because you have some great experience of faith that the pangs of human sorrow mean nothing to you? Be careful. You may be in a more dangerous predicament than you even understand. Sue and I had lovely friends in Scotland, Mark and Margaret Beaumont. He was a student with me in London for three years.

He had previously graduated from the University of Glasgow. He was a bright fellow, capable in many ways, and he, along with his wife and children, went off to serve in Morocco. And in 1982, I received this letter from him. Written generically because of the nature of the event, dear friends, as most of you are aware, Margaret gave birth to our little son Benjamin at 4.45 a.m. on the 25th of March. Just after the successful delivery of a lovely, healthy boy, Margaret began to hemorrhage profusely. I was involved in a race for blood to save her life.

Being all rhesus-negative, there was but little at the blood bank. The British Consul General not only notified potential donors but came to give his own blood at the clinic. By nine o'clock the surgeon assured me that the bleeding was coming under control and that it would be possible for me to see Margaret at noon. Just after eleven o'clock I was awakened. Having helped Margaret to deliver Benjamin all morning, I hadn't slept. I was awakened to be told by the doctor, Sefini. I looked up, and he repeated himself to make sure I understood.

Later I found out that though there had been plenty of blood donated, it had not coagulated, and Margaret steadily weakened until she faded away. So the children had to be told. Alone in the living room with the three of them, I started to tell them the great news of their baby brother.

Kirsten said, Daddy, why are you sad? As I cried, I tried to talk, but as I got the word dyed out, a howl like that of a wolf pack went up from all three. With the girls safely stowed away with friends, we proceeded to the British section of the cemetery, where Canon Green gave us the deeply moving burial service from the Anglican prayer book. He came to the section for as much that goes to ensure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life. I looked at Canon Green and thought of the funerals I had taken. I had so much wanted to give the mourners a hope for the future and the promises of Jesus.

Now he was doing the same, and I was being filled with the power of that new creation. God had given me bereavement to unveil the power of the gospel in a dynamic way. Alec Matea writes, Tears are proper for believers.

Indeed, they should be all the more copious. For Christians are more sensitively aware of every emotion, whether of joy or of sorrow, than those who have known nothing of the softening and enlivening grace of God. And tonight we face our own death with triumphant assurance.

But don't tell me you face it without a pang for all that we enjoy in this life, and which will then be lost to us forever. I followed—Sue and I followed Ron and Tina, who had previously been at this site. It so happened within days of one another, and we went to the grave of James Miller, down in Holmes County. And as we stood there and thought of James, I recalled this letter, which I pulled from my files just this evening.

And I read it in relationship to what I've just said. We face our death with triumphant assurance, but not without a pang for all that we enjoy in this life, and which will then be lost forever. This was written on the eighteenth of June, in ninety-three, to his wife, my dearest Lynn. Only God's love through Jesus Christ to man exceeds by infinity, of course, the love held between a woman and a man. And yet, in my marriage to you, I feel I've experienced at least a sign of that highest love from you. You were instrumental in bringing me to faith.

You were always there as we grew together. Know now, dearest Lynn, that as my keeping in the hands of God seems about to take me to eternity in his goodwill, your keeping in the hands of God on this shore can be no less firm. Know that I will always love you, dear Lynn, that all the hosts of heaven, of whom I shall be one, will always be looking to comfort you and protect you.

Read the Word, dearest Lynn. Let it speak to you. We shall one day be gathered together around his throne. I do not want you, says Paul, to be ignorant concerning those who fall asleep or to grieve like the rest of men who have no hope. Grieving with hope. A comforting message today from Alistair Begg in our series, My Times Are in Your Hands. You're listening to Truth for Life. Alistair will be back in just a minute to close our program with prayer, so please keep listening. Well, today I want to take just a minute and tell you what a privilege it is for us to come alongside you every day on Truth for Life to help you understand God's Word better. Especially during the past year, we trust you have seen evidence of God at work in your life as you've listened to Truth for Life. Our program comes to you by way of a remarkable and collective partnership. Our team is based in Cleveland. You're listening all around the world, and together our talents and resources help to fulfill the instruction given by the Lord Jesus to take the Gospel to all of creation.

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Box 398000, Cleveland, Ohio 44139. Now here's Alistair to close with prayer. Our God and our Father, we thank you for the clarity of your Word, and we pray that all and anything that is introducing notes of confusion to our mind may be lost sight of in the centrality of the truth which is here emphasized. I pray, Lord, for those who tonight halt between two opinions, who vacillate between faith and unbelief, whose hearts are stirred, and yet who remain defiant before your grace. Soften their hearts.

Draw them to you. I humbly pray. For those of us who are living in ignorance which is harming us, and who desire to resolve with your enabling to make progress now in the things of God, grant that this day may be a genuine step forward in our Christian pilgrimage. And then, Lord, in the matter of grief, teach us what it means to grieve, and yet not like the rest of men who have no hope. We do pray that the words of our mouths and the meditation of our hearts this day may be found acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Amen. I'm Bob Lapine. Hope you can join us again tomorrow as Alistair deals with the biblical truths that stem from the foundational principle that our times are in God's hands. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.