Lamenting the Death of a Saint

Introduction

The next sermon in our Acts series was supposed to be dealing with the sermon and death of Stephen the first Martyr and in a way it still is. The past couple weeks we have had a couple deaths either in our church family or associated with our church family and the sermon for next week was really pertinent to this situation; so I am skipping ahead one week. We are all familiar with the events that led up to the death of Stephen. Where we left off in the book of Acts chapter 6 details the events of his arrest. Acts 6:10 “And they were not able to resist the wisdom and the spirit by which he spake.” describes how influential this godly deacon was in the church. In his witness, they could not argue against what he said. So what do they do, they bribe some men to lie about him and get him arrested. He was accused of saying that Jesus is going to tear down the temple and change the laws of moses. Most of Chapter 7 is Stephens sermon in defense of Jesus. The end of the Chapter ends with the death of Stephen which I would like us to read together. In a way this is Stephens obituary:

Acts 7:55-60 “But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, And said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God. Then they cried out with a loud voice, and stopped their ears, and ran upon him with one accord, And cast him out of the city, and stoned him: and the witnesses laid down their clothes at a young man’s feet, whose name was Saul. And they stoned Stephen, calling upon God, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And he kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he had said this, he fell asleep.”

I. Godly

Acts 8:2 “And devout men carried Stephen to his burial, and made great lamentation over him.”

As Christians, we assume every funeral, every death must be a happy party and we leave no room for grief. No room for sadness. We go to passages like: 1 Thess 4:13-18 “But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words.”

As Christians we have the privilege of hope because we know will see our loved ones again in the resurrection. But I want to point out to you that Paul is not telling them not to sorrow, but not to sorrow without hope. Back in our text of Acts 8, a godly man has died. A servant of God and the people. I think back over the years to all the things Bob Snyder has done in and for this Church. One of my first memories at HHBC was working at a men’s work day with Bro. Snyder. To pretend like his death didn’t happen would would be wrong if not sin.

Is it a sin to weep for the dead?

1. There are righteous reasons to weep

a. I have spoken with Christians in the past who will make a statement like this: The deceased is in Heaven, I should be happy for them. Or they go a step further and say, the sadness is all about me so therefore the implication is that it is selfish to feel sorrow for the death of a loved one. Such thinking turns the one who grieves into a sinner and I believe it is unjust. Can we sorrow without sin? The answer is yes. Grief cannot be boiled down to mere selfishness. Relationships matter. Grief is sorrow over the loss of a certain relationship. Sure you will see them in heaven, but that time is not know. We don’t pray to the saints.

b. Grief can be sorrow over the death itself. Death is the consequence of sin in us. Romans 5:12 “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:” If it were not for sin, death would not exist. So death is a reminder of how our world has been messed up by sin and suffers the consequences now.

c. Grief can be over the pain of death. For many death is just the beginning of an eternity in Hell because they have not repented of their sins and placed their faith in Jesus Christ. But often the moments leading up to death are painful and it hurts to see our loved ones go through that. As a Christian, the true sting of death is defeated 1 Cor 15:55 “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” That doesn’t mean there is no pain in it, but death is not victorious. Those pains are merely the birth pangs of our new life.

2. We have an example of godly men who wept

a. Jeremiah was known as the weeping prophet. In his day, Jerusalem was under seige from the Babylonian army. Food was running out, soldiers were bing killed, the city was destroyed and many people died. Jeremiah as a prophet didn’t get to sit outside the city fed by Ravens and watch all this happen. Jeremiah was in their midst seeing this horror play out before him. The book of Lamentations is really a set of five poems processing the grief of what he experienced and coming to terms with God. He describes his grief in Lamentations 2:11 “Mine eyes do fail with tears, my bowels are troubled, My liver is poured upon the earth, for the destruction of the daughter of my people; Because the children and the sucklings swoon in the streets of the city.” The book even commands us to weep in Lamentations 2:18-19 “Their heart cried unto the Lord, O wall of the daughter of Zion, let tears run down like a river day and night: Give thyself no rest; let not the apple of thine eye cease. Arise, cry out in the night: in the beginning of the watches Pour out thine heart like water before the face of the Lord: Lift up thy hands toward him for the life of thy young children, That faint for hunger in the top of every street.”

b. God is grieved or sorrow by the things that happen on earth. Gen 6:6 “And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.” Sin grieves God. When we come to the flood narrative, we don’t see a God who stubbornly drowns the world and feels nothing about it. God was grieved in his heart. Obviously God is a Spirit and doesn’t have a body, but in some way the grief we feel is analogous to what God feels.

c. Jesus as God in human flesh wept tears for us. Isa 53:3 “He is despised and rejected of men; A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: And we hid as it were our faces from him; He was despised, and we esteemed him not.” The NT records Jesus weeping three different times: two in the gospels and once in the book of Hebrews. The first instance we see Jesus weeping is in John 11:35 “Jesus wept.” Jesus must not have been weeping over the death of Lazarus because He knew Lazarus was going to come back to life, but it would seem He wept over the sorrow of Mary and Martha, the pain death causes those left behind. The next instance where we see Jesus weeping is in Luke 19:41-44 “And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, Saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, And shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.” In this case Jesus wept over Jerusalem because so many would die who had not received Him as their savior. In AD 70, Jerusalem would be destroyed and more than 1 million residents of Jerusalem were killed. The third time He is mentioned as weeping is in Hebrews 5:7 “Who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared;” In this text Jesus seems to have wept as He got closer to His death on the cross. So here I believe Jesus wept over what it would cost to redeem mankind. Heb 4:15 “For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.” The picture we have of Christ is not an immovable passive person but one who is touched by our grief.

d. Back in our text it says devout men made great Lamentation. This literally mean God-fearing men. They were men who loved and revered God. This were not pagans with no hope. These were not carnal christians. These were godly men.

One thing I appreciate about Pastor Karsies is seeing him weep over the death of loved ones in this Church. He has poured his life into the people of this church for many many years and sometimes people forget his love for them, or take it for granted or even deny it. I am grateful to see these verses in action.

II. Men

I will not spend a lot of time on this point in the text, but I think it is important to mention. These were men, not women. Society has cast women as the soft tender compassionate ones and men as the hard ones who can’t express their emotions. Some aspects of culture actually teach us not to express our emotions as men and the consequence is that when the time comes where we need to express emotions, we don’t know how. Emotion is viewed as weakness. And yet look at the example of our Lord Jesus Christ. Was He weak? How about God Almighty? Is He weak because He is grieved?

It is time for men of God to stand up and be the men God has created us to be. To weep when we should be weeping. It is interesting that in Psalm 103:13 “Like as a father pitieth his children, So the Lord pitieth them that fear him.” God uses a father as an example of someone who pities, shows compassion towards his children.

Masculinity must not be defined by our culture. We must reclaim what it means to be a man from the teachings of the bible and the perfect example of Jesus Himself: the perfect man.

Men there is no shame is weeping over the death of a lost one.

III. Wept

The word in our text is Lamentation. Lamentation at its root is weeping. We must not get past this. It is sorrow. It is crying. But it is more than that. A couple years ago, I taught through the entire book of Lamentations in Sunday school. I believe this study was a healing study for myself and for some in the class. Think about this we have an entire book of the bible dedicated to Lament and yet if I were to ask many people if they have ever practiced it or could even define it, many would struggle. Did you know that 60 of the 150 Psalms are Lament Psalms? That’s huge. For the rest of the message I am going to give you a definition of Lament, explain Lament and then go over one example of a Lament Psalm.

I studied a lot of books and commentaries on Lament before I began teaching through the book and one of the best definitions of Lament that I found was by Mark Vroegop in his book Dark Cloud, Deep Mercy where he defines it as the honest cry of a hurting heart wrestling with the paradox of pain and the promise of God’s goodness. Lament is the struggle to work through our grief and pain in light of the goodness of God. We mentioned Pauls statement about not grieving as those without hope earlier. The world rejects God’s goodness, they deny His existence and they have no eternal home in heaven to look forward to so they cannot process their grief in a fully healthy way. There is not hope at the end for them only self deception. They can numb the pain, but they cannot truly work through it to its logical conclusion without God. This is why any grief counseling that does not turn you to God cannot deal with the grief fully.

Pain and grief don’t just go away because we are Christians and yet we know God is good. In the moments of grief, that paradox may not seem to make sense, but Lament allows us to work through our grief in a way that ultimately leads us to peace and rest in God’s goodness. Since this is somewhat review for some of you, I will not expand on the elements too indept, but I will list them:

Pour out your complaints to God honestly and openly- God already knows how you feel there is no point in hiding it. In Lamentations, Jeremiah says things we would be shocked to say to God, but he was honest.

Ask God to be involved or act

Seek God- don’t shut God out in your grief, but seek after him.

Choose to trust

I have rearranged the elements of Lament because the order does not matter so much especially since you will have to circle back around quite often. I rearranged them to make them an easy acronym for you to remember. CAST C- complaint A-ask S-seek God T- trust Him

Now lets look at one example in Psalm 116. This is a psalm that I have had to come to over and over again the past few weeks to work through my questions and struggles. Honestly, I struggled this past week with the question Why do godly men suffer before death? Why can’t they just peacefully die. I don’t have an answer to that because only God has an answer to that, but I had to come back to remind myself of who my God is.

If you look up Psalm 116 in commentaries some will say it is a Lament psalm and others a praise psalm. The truth is that it is both. The beginning of the chapter starts off with Lament over death.

Psalm 116: 3 “The sorrows of death compassed me, And the pains of hell gat hold upon me: I found trouble and sorrow.” Now I am not going to preach a second sermon on this passage, but I want to highlight for you the elements of Lament and show where the author ends up by the end.

He starts off consumed by sorrow of death whether his impending death or someone near to him we do not know, but this is true grief. But notice where he ends the chapter. He makes a series of vows to the Lord but the last words of Psalm 116:19 “In the courts of the Lord’s house, In the midst of thee, O Jerusalem. Praise ye the Lord.” It is because of his dependence in the Lord even in dark times that He can praise God. Notice vs 1 even starts off with the words I love the Lord.

C- vs 3 is the author of this Psalm describing his sorrow and grief to God. the sorrow of death, the pains of hell or the grave. I am in trouble and sorrow.

A- vs 4 O Lord I beseech thee deliver my soul- the author asks God to intervene.

S- vs 4 Then called I upon the name of the Lord- grief is not a time to shut God out. We often pray less when we are sad. We should be praying more.

T- vs 5 Gracious is the Lord and righteous and merciful- All Lament moves through our grief to an affirmation of God and a dependence on Him. Though it looks dark right now, I find trust in Him.

Conclusion:

The author of this Psalm is able to move through his grief to a position of love and praise because he knows Psalm 116:15 “Precious in the sight of the Lord Is the death of his saints.” God cares about the death of his loved ones. To Him it is precious. Imagine the joy of coming to heaven and not being greeted by some angels and asked why should we let you in as the saying goes. Imagine coming to heaven and God Himself runs out to see you because the death of His loved ones is precious. I don’t know about you but I can praise a God like that.

John 16:20 “Verily, verily, I say unto you, That ye shall weep and lament, but the world shall rejoice: and ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy.”

Let’s go ahead and sing this morning, Does Jesus Care? One of my favorite lines in this song is his heart is touched with my grief. Vs 1-3

If you need someone to pray with you today and just encourage you from his word, I invite you to come forward and let us talk with you.

If you do not know this Jesus as your savior, please come let us show you how you can have a personal relationship with Him.