Ways We Get Grief Wrong
Following God in Hard Times • Sermon • Submitted
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Good morning, everyone. For those of you who may not be aware, our church is hurting right now, so we’re going to shift gears on the sermon direction for a short while. For a few weeks, we’re going to look at “Following God in the Hard Times.” I strongly sense the Holy Spirit guiding me in this direction. Some of y’all really like the verse-by-verse preaching, and we’ll certainly continue that, but for right now and the next few weeks, this is where we need to be.
1: Limit It
1: Limit It
We think grief is just about losing a loved one. The truth is, grief happens any time there is a change in our lives. Any time we lose something, we must grieve the death of a certain future, or a certain plan, or anything that has changed. There are two primary ways we limit grief. The first way we limit grief is that we confine it to one definition, and we just leave it there. We say, “Grief is about this, so therefore I can only feel it when this happens.” The second way we limit grief is by trying to make it optional. But let’s look at these two and see what the Bible has to say.
The fact is that grief isn’t just about death.
Grief is about loss.
Grief is about loss.
Any time you lose someone or something, you feel a similar sense of grief and sadness. Don’t just limit grief to what happens after you lose a loved one to an untimely death. When we limit grief to death, we fail to properly move through the markers of healing that we all need in every situation that involves us losing something dear and precious to us.
Grief is necessary.
Grief is necessary.
Church family, it’s okay to grieve in our current season. As a matter of fact, it’s not just okay. It’s necessary. Grief is necessary because when we refuse to acknowledge it or experience it, we refuse to release it. And our bodies carry those wounds. It’s kind of funny, because we think we can control what wounds us.
In these situations, godly grief is the key to inner peace.
Let’s put it this way… If you get in a fight and someone punches you in the eye, you don’t just get to pretend that you don’t have a black eye. Everywhere you go it is evident that, hey, guess what… Your eye is messed up!
So why do we try to act like spiritual and emotional wounds don’t hurt? Or why do we try to pretend they’re not there? Or that we can just ignore them and not seek care and treatment?
You see, to look at a different kind of injury…
Kitchen Knife Cut ---> Stitches
The truth is, if you don’t get the proper medical treatment, you could get an infection and what started out as a bad cut could become the loss of your thumb. And you’d live the rest of your life disabled because you refused to get it seen about.
Guys, it’s the same way, spiritually. You cannot ignore when you receive spiritual and emotional wounds. Sometimes they will heal with time. Other times, you need to seek help. You can’t let that wound hang out in the open, or it’s gonna get infected, and it could severely disable you.
Perhaps some of us live with the infection and just think, “Well, this is the way it’s gonna be.” Sorry. That’s not how Jesus works. You’re just being too stubborn to allow the Holy Spirit to work in your life through the wise counsel of a mature Christian. Some of us would rather walk with a spiritual limp than find healing.
While God certainly has room in the Kingdom for those with a spiritual limp, I’m not quite convinced that He’s all that interested in leaving us in spiritually poor states. What does the Bible say?
He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, and they will bring offerings in righteousness to the Lord.
Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
God isn’t just interested in getting you fire insurance and moving on. He desires to make you more and more like Christ through the gift of His Holy Spirit. That’s not spiritual limp talk. That’s healthy and holy talk. And that means when there are spiritual wounds, God doesn’t just expect you to “toughen up, buttercup.” Sometimes a tough exterior masks a very sad child on the inside, wondering why his daddy never approved of him or gave him the time of day.
Which moves us into our next point. Sometimes we…
2: Ignore It
2: Ignore It
Listen, we have a real temptation to ignore grief. To just pretend it doesn’t exist. This isn’t what the Bible tells us to do with grief and sadness. As a matter of fact, the Bible assumes that our grief is public:
Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.
I think it’s all too tempting to ignore grief. To just pretend it’s not there, or to believe that we’re way too busy to grieve. Too many things to do! Can’t stop and feel sorry for myself, I’ve got to do this, or do that.
Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Jesus doesn’t say “come to me when you have it figured out.” He says, “Come, and bring your burdens too!!”
“God meets us where we are, not where we pretend to be.” -Larry Crabb
You ever think about the fact that you can’t fool God? So when we try to approach God acting like we have it all together, that’s actually sinful. We’re trying to lie to God. And how ridiculous is that? He sees your pain. He sees your grief. Don’t act as though He doesn’t see it.
The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.
Christian, if you are brokenhearted, God is nearer to you than you realize. Ignoring that brokenheartedness is a surefire way to ignore how God wishes to speak to you, and ignore how He wishes to deliver you from your brokenheartedness. Don’t ignore grief. God doesn’t ignore your grief. Dig in.
3: Speed Through It
3: Speed Through It
The third way we get grief wrong is to try to speed through it. This is one that we’re all guilty of… My goodness. Some of us have been through grief and someone has told us something ridiculous like, “Oh, don’t be sad,” or something really trite like, “Just pray about it.”
What these things tend to do is minimize grief, or speed through it. Or maybe we tell ourselves, “Okay, I get that this hurts, but let’s do what we can to get through it really fast.” We try to put a band-aid on it and move on. Sometimes we try to use the Bible, not to do the surgical good it can do… Instead, we just try to use it as a band-aid.
The Bible is not a Band-Aid for our struggles. It gives us a pathway to closeness with God in the midst of trying times. God did not give us the Bible as some kind of tool to ignore pain, or as some form of powerless therapy. God gave us His Word so that we could grow closer to Him and grow in our understanding.
When we attempt to speed through grief, we find ourselves unable to fulfill a scriptural command. That scriptural command is
Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.
Your translation may say “burdens” in place of anxieties. That’s a good choice. It takes time to cast our anxieties upon the Lord. It’s not always a smooth process. As much as you say, “Lord, here’s my anxieties,” we find ourselves later feeling those anxieties again, don’t we?
And you know… I don’t think it’s God’s fault that we continue to hold those burdens and anxieties. I think that’s on us and the fallen world we live in. Our fallen bodies have trouble releasing anxieties over to the Lord. It takes a process, it really does.
The Fruits of Grieving Poorly
The Fruits of Grieving Poorly
Unfortunately, when we refuse to grieve, or neglect the process of grief, it tends to, as my wife always says, “come out sideways.” Grief, if not treated by the love of God, will manifest in sinful behavior.
You could be unable to be present with people. You can lose your confidence. You can have outbursts of unexplained anger. You can even become clinically depressed. Other times it comes out in some form of unhealthy addiction.
But worst of all… Failing to grieve can create great distance between you and the Lord.
If you refuse to accept that something or someone is lost, you fail to accept the situation in which God wants to meet you. So how do you expect God to meet someone who’s just faking it? Sorry. God isn’t into faking it. He’s not into meeting someone with a mask on. He doesn’t care about the pretense.
So when you try to act as if everything’s okay when it clearly isn’t, or try to distract yourself from the feelings of grief, you are doing long-term emotional damage to yourself. You are building concrete barriers between you and the Lord. You are telling the Lord, in essence, “God, you don’t get to see what I’m really like.” That’s not a relationship of trust.
So this all begs the question… How do we grieve well?
Grieve Well
Grieve Well
We grieve in the presence of the Lord.
The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.
We grieve with the people around us.
Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.
We grieve with the End in mind.
He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”