A Grief Observed.

A hard subject, handled with hope

Well, good morning, everybody. It's good to be with you today. I feel like I need to do a disclaimer this morning. Anytime you talk about the subject of sorrow and grief, we never know who is present for whom it's very fresh and very sensitive. And so for that, I'm sorry. I can tell you I did not choose the subject today. But it's a big subject, and it's an important one for all of us. And what I have come to discover in preparing for today is that this should have been a seminar instead of a sermon. So please forgive me. I'm going to jump right in. I'm going to stay very close to my notes today, because I really want this to end on a note of hope rather than despair.

Christians love a good story of an intellectual atheist who has turned to faith in Jesus Christ, especially when that intelligent atheist has been outspoken about their denial of God. And it's encouraging and exciting when they become even more outspoken about their faith in Jesus Christ. You see, for us lesser intellectuals who've embraced Jesus in a much simpler fashion, it makes us feel better about our IQ when they come forward so boldly.

There are a lot of other testimonies out there, and I thought I would just give you a quick list. Besides brilliant men like C.S. Lewis, there's a gentleman today, Alister McGrath. He was a biochemist from Oxford who was once an atheist turned believer. Anthony Flew, an English philosopher. Frank Morison, who is in heaven now, was a British author who wrote a book with the intent of disproving the resurrection. It was called Who Moved the Stone? And in exploring the resurrection, he became a believer in Jesus Christ.

Then Malcolm Muggeridge, a British journalist. Have you noticed that all of them so far are from England? Very smart people, but didn't believe in God, all right? Muggeridge encountered Mother Teresa, and her love for the less fortunate is what prompted him to investigate a love for Jesus Christ. One I've recently discovered, Andrew Klavan, a novelist, a screenwriter, born a Jew, turned an atheist, became an outspoken believer in Christ. Josh McDowell, who I was very familiar with during my Bible House days, was an agnostic writing his dissertation for college. He was writing to disprove the existence of God, and he ended up writing a book called Evidence That Demands a Verdict. And he became an outspoken, and still is an outspoken, believer.

Peter Hitchens. Most of us are more familiar with his brother, Christopher Hitchens, who was an outspoken atheist. Peter was a Marxist and an atheist too, but he has come to embrace and love Jesus Christ. Dr. Francis Collins, leader of the Human Genome Project. After reading C.S. Lewis and then reflecting on the origin of the universe, he came to faith in Jesus Christ. Dr. James Tour, a scientist at Rice in the field of chemistry and nanotechnology. He was born into a Jewish family, grew up being an atheist, and through personal study of the scripture, he became convinced of the deity of Jesus Christ. And now he's a prolific speaker on the subject of science and faith and bringing those together.

And then there's one who probably wouldn't necessarily make the list of brilliant intellectuals, but who most of you would know. A very famous person that, I've got to be honest, I never would have expected to come to faith in Jesus Christ. You guys need to check out Alice Cooper. You need to investigate that just a little bit. An interview with Greg Laurie sold me that this is a genuine redemptive story.

But I would suggest to you today that in the first half of the 20th century, no one stands above the name of C.S. Lewis, who had a brilliant mind and a high IQ and a drive for the pursuit of truth, who was willing to step away from the dark and godless theories of life and order and morality without God. He did not allow his profession or his pride or his previously strong-held opinions to stop him from admitting his mistakes and the understanding that led to certain unfortunate conclusions in his life. And it brought him to a place where he could admit, just like you and I had to do, that he was a sinner in need of a Savior.

This summer series is not really about a famous author who lived and who died and whose body is buried in a churchyard outside of Oxford, England. It's not so much about the powerful books he wrote, though we're using them as a format, the ones about the struggles of faith and the playful children's books, The Chronicles of Narnia. If you've never read The Chronicles, I've got news for you. You're not too old. Though they were written as children's books, he thought adults ought to be able to enjoy them as well. I didn't read them until I was an adult. But fun, fun books to read, especially after reading A Grief Observed. The Chronicles of Narnia are fun to read.

But this series is about the timeless truths of the Scripture. Remember, folks, we're not to preach anything else but Jesus. And so we are looking at how the Scripture impacted the brilliant mind and the strong-held opinions of a guy by the name C.S. Lewis. And that gives us a clarion call that the truth of the Bible is for all people, whether they are rich or poor, all people from every nation and ethnicity, all people whether they are well educated or not, whether they're smart or ignorant, young or old. It brings us all to a conclusion that there is a God who so loved the world that he created, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever would believe in him would not perish but have everlasting life. We are looking at Lewis and his writings to encourage us in our faith, to challenge us in our complacency, to deepen our knowledge of God's truth, and to embolden us to share the incredible love of Jesus Christ in the times in which we now live, because our world desperately needs the love of Christ.

Lewis, Joy, and the book born of losing her

Let me set the stage for Lewis and the subject that he dealt with in this book called A Grief Observed. When he was in college, one of his fellow students in the same house that he lived in was a guy by the name of Donald Hardman. Hardman had mixed feelings about Lewis. This is what Hardman later recalled. He was a bit of a rebel. He had a wonderful sense of humor, and he was a past master of mimicry. I think he took his work very seriously, but not much else. He never took an interest in games, and he never played any so far as I can remember, unless he had to. I met him in Oxford after the war, and I noticed that he had changed, but I was staggered to find out that he was the author of a book called The Screwtape Letters.

Not as many of you have read The Screwtape Letters. I think The Screwtape Letters is going to be a subject in one of the other sermons, but it's an exchange of notes that Lewis wrote between a demon in training and a more professional tool of Satan, and how they could trick the church and the believers in it so that they would fall in their faith. So very interesting irony in that book, okay? And Hardman said, I was surprised that he had written that. When I knew him, I could only describe Lewis as a riotously amusing atheist who was pretty foul-mouthed about the subject.

At age 25, Lewis had graduated with distinction from Oxford University College with three separate degrees, and he immediately became a fellow of Magdalen College in Oxford. Lewis became a Christian seven years later, at age 32. On September the 28th, 1931, he was in the sidecar of a motorcycle with his brother going to the zoo. Isn't that an interesting place to invite Jesus in your life? I wonder if it had anything to do with the way his brother was driving the motorcycle. I don't know, but it's where he came to faith. Lewis details this whole story about coming to faith in his autobiography entitled Surprised by Joy.

Marriage did not appear to be among Lewis's pursuits. It was in April of 1956, at the age of 57, that he married Helen Joy Gresham in a civil ceremony. Let me pause. Joy, whose first name was Helen, is referred to in this book simply as H. She had come to England from America after a separation and then divorce from her husband. She became a good friend of Lewis's because of similar intellectual abilities and because of one of his writings that she had responded to. They were just good friends. I think Joy probably wanted more, but Lewis thought he was a bachelor for life. She wanted to remain in England, and what would facilitate that better was if she were married to an Englishman. And so they had a civil ceremony simply so she could remain in the country without complications and move about easily. When they left that ceremony, they went their separate ways. They did not live together. They didn't consummate that civil relationship.

It was several months later that their relationship grew closer, as a result of her adversity. She collapsed one day. They took her to the hospital and found out that she had cancer of the bone that started in her thigh. And then they had a faith-based ceremony at her hospital bed so they could release her to go home to die. And Lewis wrote about that moment to his friends, and he said, I might become husband and widower on the same day. The hospital released Joy so she could go home. Christian friends had a bedside prayer with her, and Lewis believed that a healing had actually occurred, and it had. Joy improved, and the newlyweds went on a very belated honeymoon. After being gone for about a month, they returned home to the Kilns. Three and a half years later, the cancer returned. And Joy died on July 13, 1960.

It was in 1961 that Lewis wrote the book A Grief Observed. But he wrote this under a pen name, N.W. Clerk. He didn't put his own name to this book. This book was an outpouring of the deep anguish and struggles of faith that he had on the death of his wife, Joy. A Grief Observed was published two years before Lewis died himself in 1963. Interestingly, when the book first came out, a lot of Lewis's friends thought it might be of help to Lewis, not knowing that he was the one who had written it.

Let me share with you just a couple of excerpts from the foreword of this book. Let me tell you now, this is not a book I would recommend you read while you're going through the deepest, most painful part of your grief. It is not the book you want to read right then. This is a book to read when life seems to be pretty calm, when things seem to be going pretty well for you. This would be in preparation and anticipation of when you may face it down the road. Or it might be a book after you've been through a GriefShare program and you've come to a point of recovery in your own life, and you read it so that you can be prepared for the next time that it happens. Because guys, let's face it, we don't face death once, do we? Throughout our lifetime, we will experience it multiple times.

What I find interesting about the foreword to the most recent edition of this book is that it was written by his stepson, Joy's oldest son, who was just a young teenager at the time that his mom married C.S. Lewis. And this is what he wrote. A Grief Observed is not an ordinary book. In a sense, it is not a book at all. It is rather the passionate result of a brave man turning to face his agony and examine it, in order that he might further understand what is required of us in living this life in which we have expected the pain and the sorrow of the loss of someone in whom we love. What makes A Grief Observed even more remarkable is that the author was an exceptional man. That's a stepson saying that about his stepdad. That's pretty good. And the woman who he mourns was an exceptional woman.

Both of them were writers. Both of them were academically talented. Both were committed Christians. But that's kind of where their similarities end. It fascinates me how God sometimes brings people together who are so far apart in so many ways, and He merges them into the spiritual union that we call marriage.

Helen Joy Gresham was perhaps the only woman whom Jack, that's the name they referred to C.S. by, ever met who was his intellectual equal, who also was well-read and widely educated as he was himself. They shared another common factor. I find this amazing. They were both possessed of total recall. Jack nor my mom ever forgot anything they read or heard. Can you imagine what it would be like for the two of them to have an argument about what the other one said? They both came to Christ via the long and difficult road which leads from atheism to agnosticism, and by way of theism, finally, to a personal relationship with Christ. They both enjoyed remarkable success in their university careers.

This book is a man emotionally naked in his own Gethsemane. It tells the agony and the emptiness of a grief such as few of us have to bear. For the greater the love, the greater the grief, the stronger the faith, the more savagely will Satan storm its fortress. Tough book, but right on point.

So we're going to try to take a difficult subject and hopefully discover grace and hope. I'm going to ask a question in a slightly different way than we're used to hearing it. How do you eat an elephant in one meal? You don't. That is correct. That's kind of the answer to this sermon today. We don't, all right? How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. How do we find victory over grief? One biblical truth at a time, okay? And we'll try to share just a few bites today.

You see, we grieve over the loss or the absence of someone or something in our life. We grieve the loss of a spouse, a child, a relative, a friend, a job, a home, a career, even a regular routine of life that we can no longer engage in. We grieve when our actions hurt another person. We experience a good kind of grief when we come to understand that we should grieve over how our sin abused our Savior. Today, I want to look at four observations about grief.

One: a grief observed, but grace has been offered

Number one, a grief observed, but grace has been offered. To try to put into words what feels impossible to explain is a difficult task. One sentence in Lewis's book just sort of held on. He said, the pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. Even a person of superior intellect can be overwhelmed by their emotions. I find that comforting. At first, this statement seemed very simple and obvious, but the more I sat with it, the more I realized how much truth it held. Because if we've known deep grief, if we've understood grief personally, then we have come to understand that grief and love are connected. They're intertwined. Love that still aches to be given, love that lingers long after they're gone, a love that wants to be received again. The price of love is loss.

The greater the love, the deeper the grief. Think about the cross. That is where love and loss did its greatest work. You don't get one without the other. Nobody tells us that part when we're young, do they? No one warns us that loving deeply means one day we will probably grieve just as deeply. Nobody hands us a contract with a marriage license that says, this will be worth it, but the day will come this will also break you. The same heart capable of holding immeasurable joy will one day have to hold seemingly unbearable sorrow.

And yet here we are. And it would be very easy to resent that. It would be very human to resent that, to wish it away, to long for a life untouched by loss. But if given the choice, would I undo it? Would I erase the love I share with Shelly just to escape the potential pain of the loss of that life? I can only answer for me. And the answer, a thousand times, is no. I would not avoid that love so I could avoid that loss.

You see, because grief isn't just pain, it's also proof. It's proof that something beautiful existed, that we're given something, someone, worth missing. It's proof that someone's presence in our life mattered so much that it left an emptiness in its absence. This proof doesn't necessarily make the pain easier. It doesn't necessarily lessen the depth of the ache, but what it does is reframe it in a way that we can find hope. Because if grief is the price of love, then it means there's something worth grieving.

And I think Paul, under the influence of God, wanted us to understand that when he wrote Ephesians 2, verses 4 through 9. I've always taken this passage as a reference of dealing with my sin, until this last week. And I see it also dealing with my sorrow. Listen carefully. But God, it's always good to start there, right? But God, who is rich in mercy, when we're going through sorrow, what do we need? Mercy. And God is rich in it. Because of His great love, love and pain, God understands that. Can you imagine the love God had for Adam and Eve after he'd created them and put them in the garden? And can you imagine the pain that God felt when he walked in the evening in that garden and they were hiding from him?

This God of great mercy and of great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, even when we were absent from Him, made us alive again with Christ. How? By grace we have been saved. And He raised us up out of our sin and out of our sorrow together, and He made us to sit in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace we have been saved through faith. It's not by any effort of our own. It is the gift of God, not of works, so no one can brag or boast over the outcome. You see, this verse tells us that God's grace redeems us from the burden of our sin and rescues us from the weariness of our sorrow.

Two: a grief expected and hope extended

So not only do we have a grief expected and grace offered, but we have a grief expected and hope extended. Since death is unavoidable with every life that surrounds us, we should prepare our lives for the moments of its intrusion and its invasion. Guys, does death ever give us advance warning? It really doesn't. Even when we have family members and close friends under hospice, that moment of death still feels like an intrusion and an invasion. And just as there's usually a rehearsal for a wedding ceremony, so that the participants in the wedding are prepared with the information of where they're supposed to stand and what they're supposed to do, and the experience and the rehearsal of having walked through the necessary steps so that the bride can walk down the aisle of love, you and I should learn to think through the biblical truths that are here that will direct our steps as we walk through the path of grief. We shouldn't wait until we are in the midst of grief to learn how to process it. We need to discover the truth before we ever need it.

I love the statement that Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church, the church that founded Celebrate Recovery, said, that earth is a rehearsal for heaven. Then you and I ought to be rehearsing in our own lives the truths of God's Word, so that when we need them, they're available to us to rest upon. Paul tells us this very truth in 1 Thessalonians 4:13 when he says, I do not want you to be ignorant. So what's he telling us? I'm giving you information on the front end so that you have it on the back end when you need it. I don't want you to face these situations without the information and the truth that you need.

I would not want you to be ignorant, my family, concerning those who have died, lest you sorrow as those who do not have any hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and even so, God will bring with him those who died in Christ. Therefore, comfort each other with these words.

Paul says in Romans 15, verse 4, for whatever things were written before. What are we supposed to do with things that were written about things that happened before? If they were written, what are you supposed to do with things that are written? Read them. Wasn't that simple? And we're supposed to read them for our what? Learning. Not for our pleasure, not for our entertainment, but for our learning, that we, through patience and comfort of the Scriptures, might have hope. And Peter tells us the same thing in 1 Peter 1:3. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus, who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

You see, we develop biblical muscle and spiritually led reflexes as we study the Scriptures and think about the application of those truths to our lives and circumstances. One way in which we can do that would be through role play. Role-play the stories that we read in the Bible. Don't just read the story of Adam and Eve standing in front of a tree making a decision, do I eat of the tree or do I not. It's great fun to talk about Adam and Eve and how stupid they were, but now put yourself in that position. How would Jesus want you to respond if you are standing at a tree of choice? What process would you go through so you make the right choice and not the foolish choice that they made?

Read the story about David and his infant son who was dying, how David put on sackcloth and ashes and isolated himself in a room in prayer, praying that his son would live. And when the servant comes and tells David that his son has died, he jumps up, he takes a bath, he puts on his best clothes, and he throws a banquet celebration. And people ask him, we don't understand this. And he said, I cannot bring my son back to me, but I know one day I could go be with my son, and that is worthy of a celebration. Is that the way I would respond at the death of one of my children? So when we read the Bible, we don't read it just for its factual implications. We don't just read it for its theological principles. We are to read the Scriptures and ask God, God, how would you display yourself in me in these similar situations?

The way that became even more practical for me was during a time when I was a chaplain, both with Hinds Hospice and with Clovis Police Department. I was called upon to deal with death and dying on a very regular basis. Many of the calls from the PD were to go make a death notification at 12 o'clock or 1 o'clock in the morning, to go tell a spouse that their spouse is not coming home, to go tell a parent their teenage child is not coming home. I remember the worst night I ever had doing that.

It was about a young man who worked for a company in Clovis. He was on a job assignment in a small town 30 miles from here. And he was killed that night before he came home. And so I was given the information that he lived at such and such address with his parents. And I go to that house. It's after midnight. Knock on the door. Wake them up. Ask if I may come into their home. And guys, when they see a police insignia and the name chaplain, you know this is not going to be good news. And I sit down with a mom and dad and I tell them that their son was killed in a wreck. And I ask to pray with them, and I ask who I can call for them.

And then from there they said, Pastor, our son does not live with us anymore. He was married a few months ago. He has a wife. Can you go tell her? So I drive a mile and a half away, and I knock on an apartment door, and a very scared young girl, really barely old enough to be married, answers the door. And I have to ask, can I come in? And I have to tell her that her husband of a few months is not coming home.

In the midst of that, she said, oh, Pastor, my husband was working on a job out of town. His employer needs to know. And I had to go knock on the door of his employer's house and tell her that one of her young employees would not be at work tomorrow.

As I drove home that night, you see, there was sorrow at every address. There was pain at every location. But there's a difference in the way a person of faith handles it. There's a difference in the way someone with no relationship with God handles those moments. And the question was, Tim, what if I was the parent, and somebody knocked on my door and said, Brant or Chad or Ashley will not be home tonight? I tried to imagine what it would be like to be the spouse, to be informed. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be an employer. And Jesus, how would you want your light to be seen in the midst of a dark, horrible moment?

Three: a grief experienced and comfort expressed

Number three, a grief experienced and comfort expressed. 2 Corinthians 1, 3 through 5. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all of our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those in trouble with the comfort that we have been comforted with. For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our comfort abounds through Jesus Christ. God does not want to waste the things that we go through. And Psalm 34 says, the Lord draws near to the brokenhearted, and He saves those who are crushed in spirit. This is not a vague promise. It's grounded in the character of God. He is our strength. He will carry us through.

Four: a grief transformed by truth believed

Number four, a grief transformed by truth believed. Mark Vroegop wrote a book, and this is one I would recommend to you at any time to read. It's called Good Grief, Expressing Grief and Finding Grace. He asked Joni Eareckson Tada to write the foreword to his book. If you've never heard of Joni Eareckson Tada, you need to Google her. She was a teenage girl who dove into a lake. She hit her head on a rock that was submerged just below the surface, and she's been a quadriplegic ever since. She's just a little over a year older than I am, and she still has a ministry and outreach today called Joni and Friends.

She wrote in the foreword of his book, she said, when a broken neck ambushed my life and left me a quadriplegic, I felt as though God had smashed me underfoot like a cigarette. At night, I would thrash my head on the pillow, hoping to break my neck at a higher level and end my misery. My paralysis was permanent, and inside, I died.

She continues, you don't have to be in a wheelchair to identify. You already know that sad situations sometimes don't get better. Problems don't always get solved. Conflicts don't get fixed. Children die. Couples divorce. And untimely deaths rock our world and shake our faith. Joni says, after weeks in bed, I got tired of being depressed. And I finally screamed out to God, God, if I can't die, show me how to live. If I can't die, show me how to live. It was just the prayer God was waiting for.

Corrie ten Boom. If you've never heard of Corrie ten Boom, it's okay to read, all right. Google her. She's in heaven also. But she witnessed most of her family being killed in Nazi concentration camps during World War II when she was just a girl. She wrote a book called The Hiding Place, a book I would recommend you read any time. And in that book, she often spoke of the sufficiency of God's grace in painful places and hurt-filled times. And her classic line was this. We can never learn that Christ is all we need until Christ is all we have. You can never learn that Christ is all we need until Christ is all we have.

The difference between grief and mourning

Grief in the Bible is not considered a sign of weakness, but a temporary reality that will one day be replaced by joy. But how does this happen? It happens when we understand the difference between grief and mourning. The Scripture tells us that God comforts those who mourn, and He calls on us to surrender our grief. There is a difference between feeling sorrow and living under sorrow. There is a difference between mourning in the presence of God and being held hostage by our grief. A lot of believers have never been taught the difference, so they either suppress the pain and call it faith, or they sink into sorrow and they call it healing. But God has something deeper and cleaner for us. He does not ask us to pretend that we do not hurt. He invites us to bring our pain to Him in a way that leads to comfort and cleansing and restoration.

Grief is that deep pain of loss that comes by death, betrayal, disappointment, shattered expectations, trauma, lost relationship, missed seasons, things you thought would be different by now. Grief itself is not a sin, because the pain is real. The loss is real. And the tears, they're real. Even Jesus wept. So they're important. Feeling grief does not make us weak. Feeling grief does not make us carnal. Feeling grief does not mean that we lack faith. But grief becomes dangerous when it stops being something that we bring to God, and it starts becoming something that we allow to shape our identity, to filter our vision, and to rule our inner life. It becomes a problem when it prevents the light of Christ's life being seen in us and through us.

And so what is mourning? Mourning is grief that has been brought to the presence of God. It's not just pain. It's pain that's been turned over to heaven. It is sorrow that bows. It is sorrow that is honest. It's sorrow that doesn't hide. It's sorrow that says, Lord, this hurts. I don't understand. I cannot carry it. Meet me here in the midst of this. This is why mourning is holy in a way grief alone is not, because mourning is grief that surrendered itself to the presence of God.

Remember the words of Christ himself in Matthew 5, verse 4. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Notice that Jesus did not say, blessed are those who stay broken forever. Blessed are those who build their identity around the pain. He didn't say, blessed are those who refuse to let go. He said, blessed are those who mourn, and I will comfort them. What we open in the presence of God, God can now touch. Grief must be surrendered.

Grief that is not surrendered becomes a heaviness. It becomes self-protection. It becomes numbness and anger and cynicism and hopelessness. It becomes the fear of never loving again. It's the resistance of trusting. It's an identity built around pain. Unsurrendered grief starts saying things like, this is just who I am now. I'm never going to feel really alive again. I can't open my heart anymore. Nothing's ever going to change for me. That is where grief moves from sorrow into a place of agreement with death and loss and hopelessness. And God does not want His people to live there. Yes, we may be wounded, and the loss is real, and the pain is deep, but we were not made to camp forever in sorrow. We are to walk through the valley of the shadow under the guidance of a good shepherd.

Mourning invites comfort. God comforts mourners because they've turned to Him. Mourners still come to Him. They cry out to Him. They make room for God to touch the wound. Psalm 34, the Lord is near, and He saves such with a contrite heart. Isaiah said in 61, He will comfort all who mourn, console those who mourn in Zion. He will transform their ugliness to a beauty for ashes. He will give them the oil of joy for their mourning, and He'll give them a garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. That's powerful. God doesn't mock our mourning. He ministers to it. He comes near to it. He brings oil to it. He exchanges ashes. He lifts the heaviness. That is what He does when we mourn before Him.

What surrendering grief does not mean, let me be clear. It doesn't mean that we pretend the loss does not matter. It does not mean that we force ourselves to move on too quickly. That's why we have a ministry here called GriefShare, to help you walk through it at your pace and God's pace. It doesn't mean we act cheerful when we're still bleeding, or we deny the tears, or avoid lament. Surrender is not denial, but it's saying, Lord, I don't want to worship this wound. I don't want this pain to define me. I'm not going to build my life around what has me broken. I place this sorrow in your hands.

Five steps for surrendering grief

And so let me try to wrap this up pretty quickly with five quick steps. They are not quick in terms of processing through them, but they're quick in simply me saying them. Number one, be honest before God. Stop hiding the pain, even from God. Psalm 62:8, trust Him at all times. Pour out your heart before Him. God cannot heal the version of you that is pretending.

Number two, name the loss out loud. Sometimes grief stays muddy because it's never been named. Say it plainly. Lord, I have lost trust. Lord, I have lost hope. Lord, I have lost something that I deeply love. Name it.

Number three, refuse agreement with hopelessness. Pain is real. Hopelessness is not the covenant we have with God. 1 Thessalonians 4:13, that we may grieve not as others who have no hope. Believers grieve, but we are comforted with hope.

Number four, invite Jesus into the wound. He's familiar with wounds. Not just into your theology. Invite him into the real place of pain. Ask him, Jesus, where were you in this? Where are you in this? What are you saying to me in this moment of loss, and what do you want to do to heal me?

And number five, release the right to stay hidden in sorrow. Sometimes grief becomes our shelter, a painful one, but a shelter nonetheless. We think if we stay in grief, we do not have to risk hope again. But healing requires our trust in God, and trust requires surrender to Jesus.

Let me give a quick warning. Some people are not just grieving. Some have partnered with grief. They feed it every day. They rehearse it continually. They protect it fiercely. They interpret everything through their sorrow. And after a while, grief is no longer an emotion. It's an identity. That is not where God wants His children to live. You may have walked through loss, but you're not called to have a permanent dwelling place in the valley of sorrow. God has a heart for you, and it's not harsh. He's never harsh with the broken. He is present, he is gentle, and he is compassionate. He has sent Jesus into the world to heal the brokenhearted. Our sorrow is not beyond his reach. It is not beyond his touch. It is not beyond his ability to meet us there.

A father who does the carrying

Let me wrap this up. Max Lucado tells a story in one of his books. It's called Team Hoyt, H-O-Y-T. It's the last name of the family. This team consists of two people, a father and a son. I did not make this up. The father's name is Dick. The son's name is Rick. That's the team, okay? This father and son team, they race, and they race a lot. They have been in 64 marathons, 206 triathlons, six triathlons at Ironman distance, 204 10K runs. Since 1975, they've crossed over 1,000 finish lines. They've even gone across the United States in 45 days.

Team Hoyt loves races, but only half the team can run. Only the dad, Dick, can run. Rick's legs don't work, nor does his speech. At birth in 1962, the umbilical cord wrapped around Rick's neck caused him brain damage. Rick's body didn't develop as it should have, but his brain was bright. In fact, he entered public school and even graduated from college. He couldn't bathe or dress or feed himself, but Rick wanted to feel what running was like. And at age 15, he asked his dad if they could enter a five-mile benefit race. Dick was not a runner, but he was a father. So he loaded his son in a three-wheeled wheelchair, and off they went. And you know what? Thirty years later, they were still running. Rick Hoyt relies on his dad to do it all, to lift him, to push him, to pedal him, to tow him. Other than a willing heart, Rick makes no contribution to the effort. Rick depends entirely on the strength of his father.

Do you realize our father wants to do the same for us? God says, whoever believes in me shall not perish but have everlasting life. Our Father wants to do all the hefty lifting. We bring to the spiritual race what Rick Hoyt brings to the physical one. We have no strength. Our morality has no muscle. Our good deeds cannot carry us across the finish line. But Christ can. Will we let him?

A community prayer

I want to close with a community prayer today. I don't do this often, but I'm going to ask everyone to say this prayer after me, even if you don't feel it. Maybe you haven't been touched by death in years, and you don't see it coming for a long time. You don't see a need for this prayer. But guess what? There could be somebody sitting in front of you or behind you or next to you that does need it, and they might need the encouragement of hearing your voice along with theirs in order to get through it. But this is a moment for us to bring our grief and our sorrow and to turn it into mourning, so God can exchange it for beauty and joy. So I'm going to give you a line, and just repeat it out loud after me.

Our Father in heaven, in the name of Jesus who lives in me, I bring you every place of pain and loss, disappointment and sorrow.

Please teach me the difference between grief that weighs me down and mourning that opens me up to your comfort.

I refuse to live hidden inside pain.

I refuse to build my identity around who or what I lost.

I refuse agreement with hopelessness, heaviness, and despair.

Jesus, meet me in my wounded place.

Comfort what is mourning.

Heal what is broken.

Teach me how to surrender every grief into your hands.

Give me beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. In Jesus' name, amen.