Transcript Aaron Brockett John 11:1-44 Alright, I want to welcome those of you here at Northwest. I also want to say hello to all of our campuses: North, Downtown, our West campuses. Man, we love you guys and are so excited for all that God is doing in and through you. We are one church that meets in multiple locations because we love every part of our city. And I m so grateful for all of you. I want to say hello to our online crowd as well. And if you happen to be a guest visiting with us at any one of our campuses this weekend, we are absolutely thrilled that you are here. I look forward to meeting you sometime soon. A few years ago my wife, Lindsay, came to me and she said that she wanted me to take her to this place in Texas called Round Top. Now I had no idea what she was talking about but she told me that we needed to take a trailer with us. So I thought: This can t be good. Some of you may know what Round Top is. It s located between Austin and Houston and it s just filled with mile after mile of these makeshift tents, old barns, and warehouses filled with all kinds of old furniture that has been reclaimed and repurposed. And it s really pretty amazing. I think that Chip and Joanna Gains from the television show Fixer Upper have served to really popularize Round Top. People are willing to pay a premium for things that are old that have now been reclaimed they maybe even more expensive than things that are brand new. This was all kind of new to me a few years ago, but I m beginning to get it. In fact, what I love about it is that my wife found some furniture that the owners explained to us was made from wood that had been part of an old barn, or an old farmhouse, that had been destroyed by a tornado. And somebody took this wood out of the rubble and they reclaimed it and they made beautiful furniture out of it. I just love that idea. I don t know if you ve ever thought about it this way before, or not. But one of the reasons why our culture loves this whole idea of reclaiming and repurposing old things like furniture is that we wonder if maybe deep down inside this might be possible for our lives. We wonder if maybe God can take some pain, that he can take some suffering, if he can take even our darkest hours and reclaim them and repurpose them and redeem them, using them for something that is ultimately good. You know in Revelation, chapter 21, verse 5 this is at the very end of the Bible and God is giving us a description of the fact that he is a God who reclaims and I love this. It says, And the one sitting on the throne said, Look, I am making everything new!
God is essentially saying: Look, I m going to reclaim things that have gone wrong, I m going to actually repurpose some things that have actually happened in this life, I m going to redeem those things and make them brand new. So last week we started this series called BYOG and what that stands for is Bring Your Own God. What that means is that all of us, to one degree or another, have either invented or inherited a view or an understanding or a perspective of God that isn t entirely accurate, helpful, or true. Maybe somebody said something to you when you were a kid and they made a statement about God that really wasn t entirely accurate and you ve kind of held on to that into adulthood and it s held you back. Maybe one time you did a google search for God and you just found some things online that just scared you and kind of freaked you out a little bit. You know, it doesn t take much to distort our view of who God is. In fact, last week I asked all of us to kind of get this mental picture in our mind: When you think about or you imagine the look on God s face and his body language when he looks upon you, what expression does God have on his face? Is it one of shame? Is it one of judgment? Is it one of disappointment? Man, I ve got to be honest. For a long time in my life that s kind of how I viewed God, that he just looked upon me with a sense of disapproval because I could just never live up. Or, when you think about the expression on God s face when he looks upon you, is it one of love and joy and even delight? Now here s the thing. We don t have to guess about this. You do not have to guess how God see s you. In fact, Scripture is very plain about it. In Zephaniah, chapter 3, which is a book of the Bible that I don t often reference in teaching, but still this is so so good, it says, For the Lord your God is living among you. He is a mighty savior. Here it is, He will take delight in you with gladness. With his love, he will calm all your fears. He will rejoice over you with joyful songs. You know, I m afraid that many of us have developed a view of God that doesn t look anything like this. And maybe as a result you walked away from him. Maybe you said, You know what? I m out. Maybe for some of you you haven t outright rejected God. In fact, I would say that for the majority of us, it s that you re just sort of indifferent toward God, or you don t know what to do with him or maybe you re non-committal. Maybe this is part of the reason why. So what I want to do in this series is that I want to take some of the common misconceptions that we all have about God, and I want to dismantle them and then I want to paint a picture of the one true God of who God really is; his character; his intentions; and the way that he feels about you. This is the question that we re kind of wrestling to the ground in this series. And I want you to answer it for yourself. It s just simply this: Who is Jesus to you? 2
And I m not asking at this point what you believe. I m not asking what religion or denomination you are. I m not asking where you went to church when you grew up. I just want you to answer this question for yourself: Who is Jesus to me? And by the end of this series I hope that you have a clear answer to that question or I hope that you have a greater confidence in your answer to that question. Last week we looked at one of the more common misconceptions about God, which is an on demand God. And we basically said: I want God to respond and to act and to intervene according to my needs, wants, and preferences. And we said on demand God doesn t work because on demand God doesn t exist. In fact, God is way way better than being an on demand God. This week I want to look at another common misconception of God and that s just simply: bodyguard God. And what we mean by bodyguard God is: I want God to insulate me from tragedy. I want God to protect me from some of the terrible things that can happen in this life as well as those whom I love and care about. I ve got to tell you, this is a big one and this is complex and it s just not easy. You know one of the most startling realities, I think, for many brand new believers, many brand new followers of Jesus, is that just because you ve submitted your life to Jesus and you ve chosen to follow him, that does not exempt you and me from pain and suffering, tragedy and trial. I m not going to pretend right now that I fully know what it is that you are going through. I just simply don t. I know that many of you right now are either walking through something incredibly painful, or you have in your past and maybe you don t have any answers or a solution to it. There are just no easy answers to things like infertility or a miscarriage or stillborn babies. There are no easy answers to things like cancer, car accidents, paralysis, hurricanes, or storms that displace or even end the lives of thousands of people. Maybe it s the unexpected death of somebody really close to you that just sent you reeling. And there are a lot well-meaning things that we try to say to others to help them through their pain that just simply don t help. And so the age-old question is why do bad things happen to good people? And if you re trying to logically reason it out in your mind you might think to yourself, Okay, if God exists and he allows pain and tragedy and trial to occur in this world then you conclude that either God desires to do something about it like he desires to stop it but he just doesn t have the power to stop it or God does have the power to stop it but he just chooses not to, which would disqualify him from being a good God. So God is either all powerful or he s all good but he can t be both. So if God allows really painful things to happen to me and those I love in this world, what kind of God is he? And I want us to find out. If you have a Bible app in front of you, and I hope that you do, would you please find John, chapter 11. It s in the New Testament John, chapter 11. I want us to look at this story of this 3
guy named Lazarus, which regardless of how little or how much you know about the Bible; you probably recognize the name of Lazarus. And in this particular passage it paints a great picture of Jesus divinity as well as his humanity. Now what that means is that Jesus was both fully God, divinity, and he was also a human being. He was also a man. And it gives us a picture of how God feels about our pain and suffering and what he intends to do about it. Most importantly, this passage points us to hope beyond it. This passage shows that God is a God who reclaims and repurposes and can redeem anything. It doesn t matter what it is that you might be going through. So let s look at verse 1 together. It says, A man named Lazarus was sick. He lived in Bethany with his sisters, Mary and Martha. This is the Mary who later poured the expensive perfume on the Lord s feet and wiped them with her hair. So John knows that there are a lot of Mary s in the Bible and he just wants us to know which Mary that he s talking about. And then he says, Her brother, Lazarus, was sick. So he really wants us to know that Lazarus is sick and this isn t just a cold, this is a pretty serious situation, his life is on the line. And Jesus is a personal family friend of Lazarus and his sisters Mary and Martha. Now, think about it this way. It s nice to have a family friend in high places, isn t it? Some of you have a family friend who can get you tickets to the game or reservations to that desirable restaurant or maybe a stay at the condo where it s warm. But just imagine that your family friend was Jesus and you get sick. Obviously you re going to have Jesus on speed-dial. You re going to want to get him involved in the situation as soon as you can. That s the point that John is trying to make. In verse 3 it says, So the two sisters sent a message to Jesus telling him, Lord, your dear friend is very sick. But when Jesus heard about it he said, Lazarus s sickness will not end in death. Now get this. He says, No, it happened for the glory of God so that the Son of God will receive glory from this. Now, I want to stop right there because that sentence could be very confusing and it might even cause you to maybe be a little upset when you read that because you read that sentence at face value and it almost sounds like John is saying that Jesus is sort of allowing this to happen so that God will get some applause. That s the glory of God. That God will get some fame and recognition on the back of somebody else s suffering because, after all, that s what we assume glory to mean it is accolades and applause. But that s not what Jesus means. Anywhere you read in the Scriptures where it talks about the glory of God, that is more of a reference to God s identity rather than fame and recognition, the way that we normally think about it. In other words, Jesus is essentially saying this in that verse. He s saying: Listen. I know what 4
Lazarus is going through is serious and I ve got this and I m actually going to let this play out a little bit so that God might be fully known that you would know his identity, his character, his plan, and his purposes the glory of God. In verse 5 it says, So although Jesus loved Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, he loved them, he cared about them this is pretty startling, he stayed where he was for the next two days. In fact, verse 6 can literally be translated that Jesus, although he loved them, stayed where he was until Lazarus died. Jesus was being very intentional about this and this is just a little stunning. I mean, if you ever get a phone call and somebody you love and care about is in the hospital and the caller says you need to rush right over, he doesn t have long to live. I mean you re dropping everything and getting over there. So you would think that Jesus would do something similar. But he delays here to the point that from the perspective of Mary and Martha, they could no longer see how he s going to fulfill his promises. Picking it up in verse 11 it says, Then he said, Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, that s kind of an interesting way to put it, but now I will go and wake him up. The disciples said, Lord, if he is sleeping, he will soon get better! They thought Jesus meant Lazarus was simply sleeping, but Jesus meant Lazarus had died. So he told them plainly, Lazarus is dead. And for your sakes, I m glad I wasn t there, for now you will really believe. Come, let s go see him. And so Jesus right here is referring to their ability to see and to understand who God is and what he is up to in this world especially, especially in the face of pain and despair. And they don t fully see it yet. They think that they are going to a funeral. They think that they are going to view the body. But Jesus has something more in mind. It says in verse 18, When Jesus arrived at Bethany, he was told that Lazarus had already been in his grave for four days. Bethany was only a few miles down the road from Jerusalem, and many of the people had come to console Martha and Mary in their loss. When Martha got word that Jesus was coming, she went to meet him. But Mary stayed in the house. We can t really know for sure, but I wonder why. And my guess is that she was just too emotional. My guess is that she was upset. So, Martha said to Jesus, Here s the statement all of us have maybe been here at some time in our life, Lord, if only you had been here, if you had only been here, my brother would not have died. But notice her faith here. She says, But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask. She s in pain but yet she s holding on to faith even if it s just by her finger nails. Verse 23: Jesus told her, Your brother will rise again. Yes, Martha said, he will rise when everyone else rises, at the last day. And this almost sounds as if she s not fully getting it yet. Maybe she s in shock. This all kind of sounds like the small talk conversation that you have with 5
somebody at a funeral where you just kind of say some of the things that people say at funerals to help people feel better, like, Well, yeah, yeah. I know that he s in a better place. I know we ll see him one day soon. And Jesus is saying: well, you might see him a little sooner than you think. Look with me at verse 25, Jesus told her, I am the resurrection and the life. Now notice he didn t say: I am going to resurrect and bring life he said: I am those things. I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying. Everyone who lives in me and believes in me will never ever die. Do you believe this, Martha? Yes, Lord, she told him. I have always believed you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who has come into the world from God. Then she returned to Mary. Remember Mary stayed back. She quite possibly was too emotional to go out and face Jesus. She called Mary aside from the mourners and told her, The Teacher is here and wants to see you. So Mary immediately went to him. And there s just no way to know for sure but I just wonder if she was trying to avoid Jesus because her emotions were just under the surface. Maybe you ve been there before. She s either going to blow up or she s going to break down probably both. And in verse 32 it says, When Mary arrived and saw Jesus, she fell at his feet and said, Lord, here s that statement again, if only you had been here, my brother would not have died. And you hear what she is saying, don t you? Maybe better yet, you can feel what it is that she is saying. She s like: I m so frustrated right now. Where were you? Why didn t you rush right over? I mean, you either had the power to do something about my brother s sickness and you choose not to, which would disqualify you from being good, or you really wanted to do something about it but you lack the power to do so. So, I just don t get this, Jesus. It doesn t make any sense to me. And without reading ahead. If you had never read this passage and if you didn t know what was coming next Jesus sort of gets put on the hot-seat here for a minute, what do you think Jesus response would have been in this moment? Maybe you think that Jesus would look at her and just say: Mary, I m so sorry. I tried to get here but the traffic in Bethany was crazy. I mean it was just donkey tail to donkey tail and I was trying to get here but I just couldn t. Or: Mary, the disciples are always slowing me down. I mean they set their alarms but then they slept through. Mary, I m sorry. I just over extended myself and my calendar. Or: People wanted something from me before I could get out of town. I do have the power to do something about this. I am good enough to do something about this. In fact, I m going to prove it to you right now. But Jesus doesn t say any of those things. In fact, what happens next is a little bit surprising. Verse 33 says, When Jesus saw her weeping and saw the other people wailing with her, a deep anger welled up within him, and he was deeply troubled. 6
Now, that s surprising to me. That that emotion came from within Jesus because I would almost think that Jesus would see them mourning, he would see their pain, and he would maybe have compassion on them, he would maybe have a great empathy for them, but it s a little bit surprising that it says that a deep anger welled up within him. I ve got to ask the question as to why. See Jesus sees the pain and the anguish that his children are going through and his response is to get angry about it. Well why? Well because this is not what he ever intended for us. Think about it this way. Those of you who have kids have you ever seen your kids go through something painful, maybe somebody picking on them, giving them a hard time and it just sort of angers you? Have you ever turned on the news and you see reports of sex trafficking or child abuse or neglect and just get angry about it? Yeah, that s what this is referring to. We are God s kids and I know that this sounds cliché, but it doesn t make it any less true, sin has really messed up our world and it has broken things. So when sin entered the world, pain and suffering came with it. So when it says that Jesus gets angry about this, what he is getting about is that he is saying: Listen. I never intended for this. I never intended for creation to go through this. I never intended for my kids to face this type of pain and anguish. In fact, I still don t. I want you to know that that is the heart of God. Look with me at verse 34. Jesus asks the question, he says, Where have you put him?... They told him, Lord, come and see. And verse 35, this is the shortest verse in the Bible, it says, Then Jesus wept. The people who were standing nearby said, See how much he loved him! But some said, This man healed a blind man. Couldn t he have kept Lazarus from dying? And maybe you find yourself more in that second part of the equation. You see this and you go, Well, I don t know. I m kind of skeptical. I mean, Jesus could do these other things he gave a blind man his sight. I mean, that seems like a much more minor request. Why couldn t he have healed Lazarus here? Why couldn t he have intervened in this situation? Some of us would look at this and say, Well, this just proves his love here. There will always be different responses to God. And you know, I never really understood why Jesus wept in this passage because I always thought that if Jesus showed up and he knew that he was going to resurrect Lazarus from the dead, I would almost think that Jesus would be standing back for a minute and then he would sort of step up with a grin on his face like: Hey, I m going to blow everybody s mind. I m going to resurrect Lazarus from the dead. Stand back everybody. Watch what I am about to do. But Jesus doesn t do that. This short little verse gives us a description of who God really is. That he would weep with us. That he didn t immediately try to jump in and end their suffering. He didn t try to launch into a sermon or an object lesson. He was fully in the moment and he wept along with them. That s the kind of God we serve. 7
I don t know if any of you can relate to me, but I am personally just really uncomfortable with letting other people struggle. When I see somebody hurting, when I see somebody confused or in anguish, man, I immediately want to say something to fix it. I want to try to encourage them out of those feelings. I want to help them try to see the brighter side of things. And I ve had to learn and I have to be continually to be reminded that that s just not always helpful. So much of the time I want to dry people s tears but I m learning that maybe the healthiest thing that I can do is just to allow them to flow. Sometimes we just need to let people weep and we need to weep along side of them. You know, as Christians I think that we are really good at the celebration thing and we need to get better at the lament. We need to just be more comfortable with it and to know that it is not a bad thing just to let somebody cry and to be there for them and to shed tears along side of them. The author Brené Brown says it this way. She says, You know we oftentimes want faith to act as an epidural that when we are going through pain and suffering we want faith to sort of remove us from it, sort of numb the pain and kind of get us through it. But faith doesn t act so much like an epidural, faith is actually more like a midwife guiding and talking us through the pain, helping us to understand it and to bear it know that there is a great joy on the other side of it. Well, let s pick it back up in verse 38 as we finish out this passage. It says, Jesus was still angry as he arrived at the tomb, a cave with a stone rolled across its entrance. Notice what that seems to be pointing to because there would be another grave with a stone rolled in front of it here in just a few chapters. In verse 39 Jesus says, Roll the stone aside, But Martha, the dead man s sister, protested, Lord, he has been dead for four days. The smell will be terrible. Jesus responded, Didn t I tell you that you would see God s glory if you believe? Didn t I tell you that you would see God s identity, who he really is? Verse 41, So they rolled the stone aside. Then Jesus looked up to heaven and said, Father, thank you for hearing me. You always hear me, but I said it out loud for the sake of all these people standing here, so that they will believe you sent me. Then Jesus shouted, Lazarus, come out! And the dead man came out, his hands and feet bound in graveclothes, his face wrapped in a headcloth. Jesus told them, Unwrap him and let him go! Now this is an incredible story. Yet if you are anything like me, you might read this and you might say, Well, that s a great story, but I don t quite fully know what that has to do with some of the trials and some of the pain that I m experiencing currently in my life. Jesus showed up for Lazarus, Mary and Martha but he hasn t necessarily shown up for me yet. My loved one died and he stayed dead. He stayed in the grave. I m going through it right now maybe some of you are right now in the middle of something excruciatingly painful and you are like, When will 8
this end? and it doesn t seem to end. And you re like, Well, what does this passage offer me, because it doesn t seem like God is responding. You know, that s valid. But I want to point you to this perspective here. This particular passage isn t just about a God who swoops in and protects us and rescues us from all pain and tragedy. This story here isn t just about Lazarus coming back from the dead. You do know that Lazarus eventually expired once again, right? He s not still walking around the earth somewhere. I mean that would be just creepy, alright? He s not a cast member in The Walking Dead. He s not just wandering around the earth saying: Well, God granted me immortality. No, Lazarus eventually died. See, the reason why Jesus brought him back from the grave in this instance is because he is pointing to something greater. In fact, in John s gospel, John always refers to Jesus miracles, not as miracles, he refers to them as signs. And what do signs do? When you see a sign along the road, a sign indicates what is up ahead. A sign tells you what is to come. And so when Jesus does this miracle, it s not a trick, it s a sign. And Jesus is pointing us to something more significant in this life. Maybe I could say it this way. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead to point to the fact that he would one day raise us to life as well. Spiritually speaking that there is hope beyond the grave, there is a purpose to the pain and the anguish that we are experiencing in this life. God never intended for us to go through this but he says: Listen. I will be with you through it. I m going to reclaim some things out of it. And I m going to repurpose it and I m going to redeem it. I promise you that I m going to give you an answer to this. Oftentimes this passage here is referred to as a foreshadowing. It s foreshadowing the promise that is to come, what God intends to do. And through the cross, through Jesus death, burial, and resurrection, he has already defeated death but we haven t yet experienced the fulfillment of it. This is one of those already but not yet promises of the Bible that we ve got to hold on to by faith. So when you or the people you love and care about are going through something painful in this life and you re looking for a body-guard God, I want to offer you just a word of application and a word of encouragement. Three primary things here very, very simple. The first thing that I would simply say to you is: You are not alone. Before we try to rush to provide some kind of answer to this, somebody needs to hear this; you just need to know right now that you re not alone. Maybe you came today alone, by yourself, maybe you feel alone. I mean pain and confusion and sorrow, they are definitely isolating kinds of experience. Man, I ve been there before. When your world seems to be coming apart, you can be in a room full of people but you feel all alone. In fact, David, in the Old Testament had his fair share of pain and suffering in this world. Some 9
of it he brought on himself through his own decisions. Some of it was just part of the reality of life. David writes these words in Psalm, chapter 34, verse 18. He says, The Lord is close to the brokenhearted; he rescues those whose spirits are crushed. So here s what we know about the one true God. Here s what we know about God s identity. It s that when his kids when you are going through just an incredible amount of suffering, when you re going through a trial that feels like it is crushing you, he is right there with you. He is near to the brokenhearted. And I just want you to know that. If you re feeling brokenhearted, then God may never be closer. You may not feel it, but you ve got to hold on to that promise that he s there. The second thing that I would encourage you with is just simply this: God is still at work even though it hurts. Even though it hurts, God is still at work. And while suffering should never be prescribed or celebrated or trivialized, human experience does teach us that suffering can produce good things. It can produce things like endurance and character and hope. You know, those of you who are athletes if you played high school or collegiate sports then you know that you would go through some pain and suffering and practice and conditioning, but you did it so that you could build up your endurance. Some of our favorite inspirational movies like Rudy and Shawshank Redemption and Unbroken are movies where the main characters go through an incredible amount of discomfort and pain and suffering but there is good that emerges from the pain. In James, chapter 1, verses 2-3 it says, Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. James is reminding us here that not all trouble is meaningless. And just because I can t see or understand or imagine a good reason why God might allow me to go through something, it doesn t mean that there isn t one. It just means that I can t yet see it. You know, I ve been told that two of the most painful experiences that a human can endure are giving birth to a baby, and passing a kidney stone. I have never done either one of those things and I hope to never do either one of those things. But here s the thing about that. They are two of the most excruciatingly painful things that you can endure and yet there are women who give birth to kids all of the time. In fact, moms who have had a child or two already, they may say, You know what? I think I m ready to go through that again. They know the pain that they went through. What would 10
motivate them to want to subject themselves to that pain once again? Well, because there is an incredible amount of joy on the other side of that pain. But I have never, ever heard anybody who has passed a kidney stone say, You know, I think I d like to do that again. I ve seen moms show pictures of their kids. I ve never seen anybody show a picture of his kidney stone. That would just be gross. Two of the most excruciatingly painful things. Yet what s different about them? Well the first is pain with a purpose. The second is just pain. So, God will not ever cause us pain, but we need to be reminded that he just might use it. He just might use it to mold and to shape and to develop a maturity and humility in us that maybe we just didn t have before. I m reminded of Joseph in the Old Testament who had been called by God to do some really incredible things. But as a young man he was arrogant and he was immature, he was entitled. As a result of this his brothers despised him so they sold him into slavery and they went home and they told their dad that he was dead. And I would imagine that as Joseph was all by himself in Egypt there was night after night where he prayed to bodyguard God, God, would you please protect me from this, would you please deliver me out of this and it didn t seem like God was listening or would answer those prayers. Yet, from our perspective as we look at his whole story, we can see how his character was being refined and strengthened through those trials. And eventually, Joseph would develop the maturity and the humility to be elevated to the position of prime minister in Egypt and God would actually use him to save thousands of people s lives. And if Joseph was here today and if he was preaching this sermon I d gladly step away and let him do it because he s more qualified than me here s what I think Joseph would say to all of us. In those moments when you are trying out the bodyguard God and God doesn t seem to be responding, I think Joseph would say simply this: God isn t finished with your story yet. Your life is a story. Paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter. And just because you get to the end of a chapter that is pretty dark, just because you get to the end of a chapter that s got some pain and suffering and it doesn t seem to be resolved, it doesn t mean that God has finished writing it yet. Let God continue to write your story and keep your eyes fixed upon him. Here s the last thing that would leave with you. It s just simply this: God suffered so that our suffering would soon end. What this passage shows us, along with so many others, is that Jesus being fully God and fully man knew real pain. God is not some distant and detached God but he is up close and he is personal. And it wouldn t be long after Lazarus resurrection where Jesus would be put to death himself. It would be his darkest hour. And we see the pain that Jesus was going through in Mark, 11
chapter 14 where he took his three closest friends: Peter, James, and John and he became deeply troubled and distressed. So he said to them, My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me. You see where Jesus is going with this? Do you see what he is saying? He s like: Guys, in this moment I m in so much pain and anguish and I just need a friend. I just need you to be here with me in this moment. And Jesus felt all alone. And you can t help but wonder why was it so excruciating for Jesus? I mean, there have been other people in church history who have gone through death; they have been put to death because of their faith and they seemed to have faced it with more courage. One example of this is a couple of guys named Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley who were burned at the stake in Oxford, England in 1555 for their protestant convictions. And you would think that maybe they would curse in that moment. That they would just cry out. But instead, Latimer was heard saying calmly to Ridley; get this, Be of good comfort Mr. Ridley, and play the man. I think that was the 1555 version of man up Mr. Ridley. From his perspective he said this, We shall this day light such a candle of God s grace in England as I trust shall never be put out. In other words he was saying: We may be burned at the stake right now, but from the way I see it, our lives will be a candle of God s grace. How could they face that with such courage when Jesus would find such excruciating pain in his moment? I think this is the reason why. It s because Jesus was beginning to feel the effects of separation from God, his Father that Jesus would be emotionally and spiritually separated from God on the cross. And the culmination of that was when Jesus cried out with deep, deep anguish. In the originally language, Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani, which is My God, My God, where are you? Where are you? Jesus gets it. Jesus understands our pain and our anguish. He would be willing to go through it so that we wouldn t have to. He was pierced for our rebellion. He was crushed for our sins. He was beaten so that we could be whole. He was whipped so that we could be healed. He would be arrested so that we could be free. He would be chained so that our chains could be broken. He would be mocked so that we could be affirmed, rejected so that we could be accepted, wounded so that we could find healing, crushed so that we could be restored, separated from God so we would never have to be. Guys, that is good news. But understand this. That is good news that came through incredible pain and suffering. So by looking at the cross of Jesus, we still don t have a full answer to pain and suffering, but we do know what the answer isn t. It isn t because he doesn t care. It isn t because he is indifferent to our situation or whatever it is that we are facing. He s saying: Listen. I get it. I ve gone through it and I m going to do something about it. 12
In Revelation, chapter 21, the passage that we started with, he gives us this description of heaven by explaining not just what will be there but what won t be there. There will be no more mourning. There will be no more crying. There will be no more pain. No more suffering. And until that day, hold on to the promises of God. I recently have come across this picture. I don t know if you ve seen it or not. But I love the image of Jesus. And the author s perspective here is that you and I are kind of under water, in over our heads, feeling like we are suffocating. And we re looking up to Jesus who is walking on top of that water and he s reaching down to us. The expression on his face is one that says: Listen. I ve got this. And I take delight in you. And I can pull you up. Just reach up to me. Maybe some of you, you really need that image right now because you re in over your head and you re facing incredible pain and anguish. Keep your eyes fixed on the one true God. Let s pray together. Father, we come to you right now and this is such a difficult and complex issue that so many of us face. And today we don t want to give trite and easy answers to this. Sometimes we just need to let people wrestle with it and to let people weep. And God, I pray that right now in this moment that, by your Spirit, you would minister to the hearts and the minds and the emotions of every single person listening to this, sitting in that seat, that you would meet them right where they are and that you would give them the hope that they need and the faith that they need to hold on to your promises. We thank you and we love you and we ask this in Jesus name. Amen. Right now, together, we re going to take communion at all of our campuses, which is just a little piece of bread and some juice that represent the body and the blood of Jesus. If you re a follower of Jesus we just invite you to participate in this meal with us. If you re not comfortable with it, just let the tray pass. That s totally fine. Just spend a few minutes reflecting upon the message and what it is that God wants you to hear from it. And then after a few moments we ll close the service out together. So ushers, you can come now. 13