LibertyChurch

Sermons

October 11, 2015

Sorrow Not as Others

Dr. David J. Vaughan

Sermon Transcript

The following is a lightly edited transcript generated from the audio; it may contain small errors.

Opening Prayer

Father, we thank you for your presence here. And Jesus, we know that You promised us where two or three are gathered that You are here with us. We ask, Lord, that You would minister to us the Word today. We also ask that you would oversee the rehearsal for the upcoming Christmas program. Lord, we want to see our children honor you in that event. We do pray for the celebration of life service tonight for your presence there. We ask, Lord, that your gospel would be clear. We pray that men and women who don’t know you would be present and come to receive your son Jesus.

We ask that you would also be with the Wilsons now and comfort them, draw near to them.

Minister grace, minister peace, minister Your presence to them. We do pray for any and all here that are in need of your comfort.

We thank you God that you are an ever present help in time of need. We pray these things in your name. Amen.

1 Thessalonians 4

First Thessalonians chapter 4, if you would. I’m going to keep my remarks short this morning. First Thessalonians chapter 4, Paul says in verse 9, “But concerning brotherly love, you have no need that I should write to you. For you yourselves are taught of God to love one another. And indeed you do so brethren who are in all Macedonia. But we urge you, brethren, that you increase more and more. that you also aspire to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you, that you may walk properly toward those who are outside and that you may lack nothing. But I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you sorrow as others who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. Thus we shall always be with the Lord, therefore comfort one another with these words.” I wanted to share from this text in light of Cindy’s passing. If you’re guests here today, you may have heard reference to Cindy or the Wilsons. One of the charter members of our congregation passed away Friday morning. And this evening we’re having a celebration of life service for her. Monday is visitation. And then Tuesday morning is the funeral and after the funeral there will be a luncheon here at church. I want to encourage you all to attend tonight to show your support and love for the Wilsons. Will you be there? Be there. This text tells us a couple things. One, it says here in verse 13, he says to the Thessalonians, he wants to remind them those who have fallen asleep, and this is a biblical metaphor for those who have died, but Paul refers to those who have died in Christ as asleep, because people that go asleep wake up. Those who die in Christ fall asleep, meaning they will wake up, meaning they will be resurrected again with the Lord. He reminds them of this, and clearly he did so because some in their fellowship had passed away. And he says that he’s reminding them of this, lest they sorrow as others who have no hope.

We Do Sorrow

Now the first point I want to make this morning is that we do sorrow, but we just don’t sorrow as others. And this may be an obvious point, but I think that unfortunately in the evangelical church we don’t do real well with sorrow and lamentation and necessarily public displays of grief.

We tend to make church a revival service where everything is joyful, everything is upbeat, everything is positive, when in fact that’s not the way life is. There are many causes of sorrow in life, whether it’s physical affliction, financial setback, the betrayal of a dear friend, the loss of a loved one, and we could go through a long list of causes of sorrow in this world, and the believer is not exempt from sorrow. Many Christians fall away from the faith because they enter the Christian life with a false view of the Christian life, and they are told at the beginning, trust Jesus and all will be well, and you will always be delivered. Trust Jesus and you will be happy. And then they find out the challenges and the struggles of the Christian life. And they find out that Jesus called us to the narrow path. And that path at times can be very difficult. And so they say, I didn’t sign up for this. I didn’t sign up for struggle. I didn’t sign up for rejection by my friends. I didn’t sign up for financial setback. I signed up for prosperity. I signed up for success. Jesus was going to be my life coach and I was going to be the CEO. But it doesn’t turn out that way. For some. And so God allots to us various trials according to his wisdom. And these trials, of course, are designed to refine our character. James says that because we know the purpose of trials, that is to perfect our character, that we be perfect and entire, lacking nothing.

In other words, that’s a phrase meaning we need to grow up, we need to mature. Because of that, he says we can have joy in the trial because we know that it’s working good even though it may be difficult and painful and even sorrowful. [audio unclear]

Lamentation and Jesus Wept

We see in scripture a long pattern of what’s called lamentation. Matter of fact, there’s even a book called Lamentations. Many of the Psalms are Psalms of lament. They are public or expressions of sorrow, grief, disappointment, heartache, confusion, groping in the darkness as faith attempts to find its way in the light of God’s often mysterious providence. And we don’t do this well, unfortunately. Part of it I believe is cultural, and part of it I believe is theological. But we need to understand that as Christians not only are we not exempt from sorrow, we need to understand that it’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to grieve. As a matter of fact, I would argue that it’s healthy to grieve. Being sad is not a sign of unbelief. Being sad is a sign of your humanity. That’s all it means. We see Jesus in John 11. Let’s turn there. We’re going to come back to Thessalonians. We see Jesus in John 11 weeping. You know, it strikes me as just really strange how ideas can blind us to what the Bible says. Jesus, who is called in Isaiah, the man of sorrows, somehow we turn Jesus into this person that’s going to give us a life where there’s no pain. The man of sorrows? So in John 11, we won’t read the long text you know, but basically Lazarus dies, Jesus comes to the grave site, and it says here in verse 33 of John 11, therefore when Jesus saw her weeping, that is Mary, and the Jews who came with her weeping, he groaned in the spirit and was troubled. And he said, Where have you laid him? And they said, Lord, come and see. And in verse 35 it says, and Jesus wept. Jesus wept. And then the Jews said, see how he loved him. So Jesus was not immune, not only from his own trials, he was not immune from the sorrow of others. Matter of fact, repeatedly in the gospels, We see this phrase, and Jesus had compassion. And compassion by its very nature means entering into the suffering of others. And you don’t enter in if you don’t feel it. So in order to be a compassionate, sympathetic people, we have to enter into the suffering of those around us. And that means entering into their sorrow. We could give many examples of the saints in the Old and the New Testament who, encountering various situations, were troubled or were sorrowful. It’s okay to be sad and it’s okay to grieve. And we should not mask it with a false piety. We should not mask it with a false joy, which at the moment is just not true. The truth is it’s very sad when you lose a friend. It’s very sad that, you know, we have a family in our church who has some younger children, not little, but younger children who will not grow up with their mother. We have four daughters who will walk the aisle without their mother. That’s very sad to me. I could give a long list of things that are sad about the situation. But I’m not here to cause you to grieve, but simply to remind you that it’s okay.

And many of you were close to the Wilsons and friends with them, so this isn’t just entering into the family’s sorrow, you have your own sorrow. You have your own loss to deal with. And so it’s okay to grieve.

Not as Others Who Have No Hope

But we don’t grieve, Paul says, as others who have no hope. This is what makes Christian sorrow different. It’s that we’re sad in the light of our loss, but we have to remind ourselves that our loss is Cindy’s gain. Those who sorrow without hope don’t know what’s on the other side. They’re left in darkness. We’re not in darkness. We are in light. We know what’s on the other side and we know where our sister is. And because of that we know we will see her again and we know we will be reunited with her. We know that now she is not in pain and she is not suffering because God has wiped away all her tears. And so this is a bittersweet thing, you know. We lose, she gains. And I don’t say that in a trite, shallow way. It’s really true. It doesn’t mean you won’t miss her. You won’t be sad. It doesn’t mean the children, especially, are going to struggle with their faith because of this. But we do sorrow, but not as those who have no hope. Because we have hope. We have the hope of the resurrection. And we know, you know, when the Bible uses the word hope, we have to remember, it’s not, oh, I hope so, but it’s really a word for expectation. It really means I know so. I know that we will see her again. I know this. So we can look forward to that. And so, yes, we’re sad for our loss. now, but the sorrow is tempered, if you will, by anticipating the joy of our reunion with her.

The Character of God

Secondly, we don’t sorrow as others because we know the character of God. It’s easy for us to say God is good when it’s all going good. It’s easy to say God is good when all of our prayers are getting answered. But what do we say when things don’t go our way? What do we say when there are losses? What do we say when we ask God for something and he says no? What do we say then? Let me tell you what Job said. In the book of Job, chapter 1, Job was informed that he lost his family, lost his children. And it says in verse 20 of chapter 1, Then he tore his robe and shaved his head, and he fell to the ground and worshiped. The tearing of the robe and the shaving of the head, these were public manifestations of grief and lamentation.

He was broken. He was sad. He was grieving. And he displayed that.

But yet he still worshiped and he said, naked I came from my mother’s womb and naked shall I return there. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. The Lord gave him his children and the Lord took his children away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. The Lord gave us Cindy, the Lord took away Cindy. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Job’s wife unfortunately wasn’t in sync with him. Things got worse for Job. After he lost his family, he lost his health. In verse 9 of chapter 2, his wife says, do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse God and die. In other words, God doesn’t deserve to be worshipped because God has allowed all of these losses. God, she’s saying, based upon what I see, God is not good. God’s not good. So curse God and get your suffering over with and die. But Job said to her in verse 10, you speak as one of the foolish women speaks. Shall we indeed accept good from God and shall we not accept adversity? In all this Job did not sin with his lips. So the providential dealings of God in our lives doesn’t change the character of God. Now you may have questions about Cindy’s passing.

You may have questions about other adversities in your life. These are questions that God may answer for you and He may not answer for you. It’s something that you will have to wrestle with. You will have to seek God and attempt to understand in light of Scripture. The book of Job is Job wrestling with God. [audio unclear] It is him coming to terms with God’s dealing with him in ways that were adverse.

And so we each have to do that in our sorrow and in our struggles. We each need to go through that wrestling. And if we do, I believe that God will, whether he gives you answers or not, he will give you something better than answers. He will give you comfort and peace. You will come to a place of understanding God’s goodness, regardless of how He deals in your life. You will have the faith of Job who is willing to accept both good and adversity at the hands of God because he knew who God was and that God was good. So because we do not sorrow as others, back to our main text, Paul says in verse 18 of 1 Thessalonians 4, because we do not sorrow as others who have no hope, he says, therefore comfort one another with these words. In other words, comfort one another in light of the fact that those who have died in Christ aren’t really dead, only sleeping. That is to say, they will rise again. We will meet them again and we will meet them when we meet the Lord. That is our comfort and that is our hope. And therefore, he tells us to comfort one another.

Comfort One Another

I encourage you to comfort one another. You know, there are those here that are very sad over losing Cindy. She was a dear friend. Some of you are dear friends with Dave, and so you’re sad and you have your own sadness and you need to comfort one another. But you also need to comfort the Wilsons. As much as I am personally very sad for my loss, I’m attempting to put that aside for the need to really be there for the Wilsons in any and every way that I can be. So I encourage you to obviously pray for them. I encourage you to text, email, call with your love and support. Don’t try to explain to them the ways of God. Don’t tell them you know what God is doing in their life, because you don’t. All you need to tell them is I love you and I’m here for you. Whatever you need, call on me. That’s all you need. That’s all it is.

Closing Prayer

So let’s pray. I want to thank You—I just thank You for the good example of Job.

All that he endured and yet he held fast his faith because he understood that as Lord you have the right to give and to take away. I pray that you would grace us with that kind of faith, a faith which is submissive to your providential dealings. I also pray, Lord, that you would continually remind us of the hope of the resurrection and continually remind us, Lord, that our sister Cindy is blessed right now, she’s blessed right now. I pray that you would make us instruments of healing and comfort to the Wilson family. I pray that you would grace us with a spirit of prayer for them. I pray that You would grace us with compassion for them. And Lord, that we would truly be Your hands that minister healing to them. We thank you for the body of Christ, Lord. I pray that at this time we would honor you in how we conduct ourselves, how we sorrow, and how we minister. I ask it in your name. Amen.

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