This has been a rough week for me. This has actually been kind of a devastating week for me. There has been a lot of sadness this week, a lot of loss, a lot of grief. There’s been a lot of crying and a lot of pain.
I was not particularly productive this week, just because this entire week was really radically derailed by the death of my grandpa on my mom’s side.
In an extremely short window my grandpa started showing really unavoidable signs that he was extremely sick. He fell four separate times on Thanksgiving Day while trying to put up a mailbox sign, and people kept begging him to go to the hospital but he wouldn’t do it.
And finally, in the middle of the night, he fell on his way to the bed and couldn’t get back up, and was slurring his speech, and was unbelievably weak, but he still refused to go to the hospital.
He insisted on sleeping on the floor overnight, and so my grandma just had to put all the blankets and pillows and every soft item she could find in the house around him on the floor, and he just had to spend the night there, until my cousin showed up at their house in the morning and said, “You’ve got two options, either I carry you to my truck and go to the emergency room, or I’m calling an ambulance and they’re gonna come pick you up and throw you over their shoulder and take you to the emergency room.”
And so he finally let my cousin drag him there.
And over the next couple days, he was up and down. It seemed like that hospital bed was going to be his death bed one day, and then the next day, he started showing some positive signs that gave us some hope. And then the next day, he took another plunge that made it seem like his number had come up.
And from there, it just got worse and worse and worse, until on Tuesday we got word that his organs had just started shutting down, and that anything they tried to do to save his life would be too little too late, and by the middle of the afternoon on Tuesday, he was gone.
And so we spent the rest of the day calling up the family and telling them what happened.
We had to tell his brother that he was gone, we had to tell his 100 year old uncle who treated him like a son that he was gone.
I think Tuesday might have been one of the worst days of my life, and it was definitely one of the worst days of my mom’s life.
And I appreciate all of the prayers that you have poured out for us, and all of the support that you have offered us, and all of the ways that you have walked with us through this really dark season of our life. I cannot imagine getting through all of this without you.
Thank you so much. You have been a profound blessing to me and my family as we have gone through this really gut wrenching and nauseating period of loss and grief and suffering.
And that is such an important and valuable thing to have, because loss and grief and suffering is one of the things that every single one of us is guaranteed to have to go through, isn’t it?
Loss, Grief, and Suffering Are an Inescapable Part of Life
Loss and grief and suffering are an inescapable part of life in our fallen and broken world.
We live in a world that is absolutely filled with beauty and is absolutely filled with goodness and is absolutely filled with joy, because our good God created our world good and filled it with so many good things that make our hearts rejoice.
But this good world that God created is also broken because of the fall, because of the way that we rebelled against God in the Garden, because of the way that we took that forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden.
Our disobedience didn’t just break God’s rules, and it didn’t just break God’s heart, it also broke our world.
And the result is that nothing in our world works the way that it was created to anymore, and nothing in our world reflects God’s perfection and beauty and goodness to the full extent that it was created to anymore.
There is a crack in everything now.
There is a brokenness to everything now.
And the result is that, where our world should be filled with unmitigated joy and goodness and love and bliss, instead now there is also loss and grief and suffering.
And if you haven’t already experienced the sharp edges of loss and grief and suffering, it just means that you’ve lucked out up to this point, but your day is coming.
Every single one of us in this room will suffer immensely throughout our lives, because of the way that the fall has ravaged our world.
And we know this not only from our own experience, but also from the way that God’s word repeatedly warns us.
God’s word pours itself out to prepare us for the reality of loss and grief and suffering.
Like a good and loving Father, God sits us down next to his fireplace, and he pours himself into us to prepare us for the day that our fallen and broken world turns its brutality and its cruelty on us.
And we see this as clearly as anywhere in the Proverbs.
Proverbs 14:10 says:
“The heart knows its own bitterness and joy; he will not share these with a stranger.”
—Proverbs 14:10, WEB
Our fallen and broken world is going to inflict its bitterness on us eventually.
Proverbs 14:13 says:
“Even in laughter the heart may be sorrowful, and mirth may end in heaviness.”
—Proverbs 14:13, WEB
Our fallen and broken world is going to fill us with heartache. It is going to brutalize us with grief.
Proverbs 15:13 says:
“A glad heart makes a cheerful face; but an aching heart breaks the spirit.”
—Proverbs 15:13, WEB
Our fallen and broken world is going to crush our spirits. Give it long enough, and it’s coming.
Proverbs 15:15 says:
“All the days of the afflicted are wretched, but one who has a cheerful heart enjoys a continual feast.”
—Proverbs 15:15, WEB
Our fallen and broken world is going to afflict us. It is going to serve us misery.
Proverbs 12:25 says:
“Anxiety in a man’s heart weighs it down, but a kind word makes it glad.”
—Proverbs 12:25, WEB
Our fallen and broken world is going to bring us low. Not all of your life will be on the mountain top. Not all of your life will be on the flat plain. Our fallen and broken world is going to drag you down into the valley and down into the depths and down into the pits. And for a time it is going to suffocate you. That is coming at some point.
Proverbs 17:22 says:
“A cheerful heart makes good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.”
—Proverbs 17:22, WEB
Our fallen and broken world is going to break your spirit at some point. It is going to dry up your bones.
Proverbs 18:14 says:
“A man’s spirit will sustain him in sickness, but a crushed spirit, who can bear?”
—Proverbs 18:14, WEB
Our fallen and broken world is going to make life unbearable for you at some point. That awaits you in your future.
Proverbs 13:12 says:
“Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when longing is fulfilled, it is a tree of life.”
—Proverbs 13:12, WEB
Our fallen and broken world is going to dash your hopes on the ground at some point. It is going to make you sick with a sickness that runs deeper than your body. It’s going to make you sick deep within your soul.
And for those of you who are extremely young, and for those of you who lived an extremely charmed life, what I’m saying might sound morbid or it might sound dark or it might sound pessimistic or it might sound melodramatic, but those of you who’ve lived longer than me, those of you in your 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s and beyond, you know exactly what I’m talking about, don’t you?
Our fallen and broken world is a knife. And every single human being on planet Earth gets a turn being gutted by it.
And because that is true, Solomon—the same man who wrote so many of the Proverbs—says in Ecclesiastes chapter 3:
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven… a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.”
—Ecclesiastes 3:1–4, WEB
Every single one of us is going to go through a season of weeping instead of laughing, a season of mourning instead of dancing, and there is no way to get out of it.
There is no way to prevent it. There is no way to opt out of it. It’s not an elective, it’s a mandatory class. It’s not an extracurricular, it’s part of the curriculum. It’s not like dental insurance that you can go through for something extra, it’s like property taxes—you’re paying it whether you want to or not.
Loss and grief and suffering are an inescapable part of life in our fallen and broken world.
And that isn’t going to change until that glorious day comes in the end when Jesus Christ returns and makes everything right again.
You know what I’m talking about?
That’s not going to end until that glorious day when the Lord comes back and he puts all of his enemies under His feet, and he defeats the forces of darkness, and he puts an end to the brokenness of the world, and he crushes the fall, and he turns everything right side up again as he takes up the glorious throne and brings Heaven and Earth back together, and this age of fallenness and brokenness finally comes to an end as the devil is deposed, and all that we have broken is fixed, and everything we’ve made sick and distorted is healed and restored.
That is going to be a glorious day, isn’t it?
And that glorious day is coming.
But until that day, we are going to suffer, we are going to grieve, we are going to lose so much, as our fallen and broken world takes everything it possibly can from us by force—including the people we love.
We Are Often Taught Terrible Ways to Deal with Grief
And because that is true, we have a major problem.
And our major problem is that most of us grow up being taught terrible ways to deal with grief.
You know what I’m talking about?
Most of us have grown up being taught absolutely terrible ways to deal with our grief.
Like, case in point:
A lot of us grew up being taught to deal with our loss and our grief and our suffering with something called stiff upper lip syndrome.
Know what I’m talking about when I talk about stiff upper lip syndrome?
A lot of us were taught to suppress our emotions, right? We were taught to bury our emotions. We were taught to just kind of lose ourselves in work, or just kind of lose ourselves in endless tasks, or to do list items.
We just put on a straight face, we just kind of put on a brave face, and then go about our business, go about our lives, go about our work.
Just bury ourselves in busyness so that we don’t have to face our loss. We don’t have to feel our emotions.
Anybody grow up getting taught to deal with your grief like that?
Here’s another case in point:
A lot of us grew up being taught to bury our grief in over-medication.
Know where I’m going with this one?
A lot of us have been taught just to medicate our grief away.
We’ve been taught to treat all sadness, all sorrow, all suffering as a pathology that we need to medicate away.
And so we get our doctors to assign us one med after another to keep our negative feelings at bay, to chase our negative feelings away.
Now, I’m not talking about people with chronic depression. I’m not talking about people with anxiety disorders. I’m not talking about people with borderline personality disorder. I’m not talking about people who have legitimate, long term chronic mood disorders, who have a legitimate need for things like anti-depressants or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and stuff like that. That’s exactly what those meds are for. That’s good.
I’m talking about everybody else.
Because what a lot of us have grown up being taught is that we need to medicate every last negative emotion away.
We’ve been taught that there is no such thing as acceptable sadness, acceptable grief.
That’s where you get soccer moms with four separate overlapping prescriptions that they’re not supposed to be mixing with their 6 PM wine bottle.
Right?
A lot of us have us have been taught to over-medicate as a way of keeping these very normal and very natural feelings of anguish and sorrow and pain on the other side of the door.
Here’s another one:
A lot of us have grown up kind of brainwashed into something called toxic positivity.
Ever heard of toxic positivity before?
That’s what you call it when you insist on framing every single thing in life in positive sounding terms.
Every time something bad happens, you say, “Well, you know, look at the bright side.” Every time life dishes out another sucker punch, you say, “Oh, well, you know what? It could be worse.” Every time you get knocked back off your feet, you say, “Well, there’s definitely a silver lining here.” You say, “Oh, well, maybe that’s bad, but I have so much to be grateful for.” You say, “Oh, it could be so much worse.” You say, “Oh, well, this is probably a good thing.”
You literally censor yourself before your emotions even materialize.
You don’t even allow yourself to feel.
This is just like the TikTok girl version of stiff upper lip syndrome. This is the Hallmark card version of your rough and tumble dad who never talked about how he felt.
And this one is especially common among Christians—isn’t it?
But the reality is that there is nothing wise or Christ like about burying your grief under fake positivity.
I love the way Proverbs 25 puts this. I literally think this is hilarious. It says:
“As one who takes away a garment in cold weather, or vinegar on soda, so is one who sings songs to a heavy heart.”
—Proverbs 25:20, WEB
When someone is suffering under the weight of profound loss or sadness or sorrow or depression or grief, and you run in with some out of context Bible verses and say, “Just think positive!” Proverbs 25 is like, “Shut up!”
It says you’re being a curse instead of a blessing.
No.
God’s word tells us to feel our grief. To acknowledge our grief, to embrace our grief.
When you are going through something absolutely gut wrenching, those bad feelings that come with it are exactly what you should be feeling.
It’s not sinful, it’s not a lack of faith. It’s not being negative.
It’s a totally normal response to the nauseating brokenness of our fallen world.
I love the way that Elisabeth Elliot, the theologian and missionary, put it. She said:
“We want to avoid suffering, death, sin, ashes. But we live in a world crushed and broken and torn, a world God Himself visited to redeem. We receive his poured-out life, and being allowed the high privilege of suffering with Him, may then pour ourselves out for others.”
We live in a fallen and broken world where loss and grief and suffering are unavoidable and inescapable, and our calling as we live out our life in this world that inevitably wounds us is not to bury our pain, and it’s not to flee our pain, and it’s not to ignore our pain, and it’s not to spin our pain around in a kind of shallow and paper thin and false positivity.
No.
Our calling is to bring that pain to the Lord, lay it at his feet, give it over to him and allow him to comfort us.
Jesus Comforts Us Through His People
The solution to our suffering is not to deny or ignore it. It’s to turn to the God who is with us in our grief and suffering and allow ourselves to be carried and restored and healed.
We serve and worship a God who is with us in our grief and suffering, and that is gloriously good news.
And as we track through the Proverbs together this morning, what we learn is that God is with us in our grief and suffering in two very specific ways.
Number one:
Jesus comforts us through his people.
Jesus comforts us in our grief and our suffering through the rest of his people.
Once again:
Jesus comforts us through others.
He uses our brothers and sisters in Christ to speak into our lives. He uses our fellow followers of Jesus to enter our lives and do his good, restoring work.
I love the way that Proverbs 12 puts it. We read it earlier, but listen carefully to this.
It says:
“Anxiety in a man’s heart weighs it down, but a kind word makes it glad.”
—Proverbs 12:25, WEB
We start out low, but Jesus comforts us with a good word.
Where does that good word come from?
It comes from the people who love you.
Your brothers and sisters in Christ do not just watch you suffer. They do not just sit there on the sidelines and watch you drown.
They come and pull you out of the water.
They come and share their oxygen with you.
They come and speak into your life.
Or they come and just shut up and sit next to you.
They sit with you.
They share your suffering alongside you.
They carry you because you don’t have the energy to go forward because of the depths of your grief.
The way that Paul puts this in his letter to the Romans is that we:
“Rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with those who weep.”
—Romans 12:15, WEB
We don’t just watch our fellow children of God wither under the weight of suffering and say, “Thank God that isn’t me.”
We go and we make their struggle our problem.
You know what I’m talking about?
We turn their suffering into our suffering.
We turn their weeping into our weeping.
We take their pain onto our shoulders so now they’re only carrying half the weight of it.
And when we do this, the Lord is working through us to comfort our brothers and sisters—and he is working through our brothers and sisters to comfort us throughout this period.
In the aftermath of my grandpa’s death, so many of you have allowed yourself to be tools that the Lord used to comfort me.
And I pray that through the years the Lord has used me to be a tool to comfort you.
That’s number one:
Jesus comforts us through our brothers and sisters in the faith.
Jesus Comforts Us Through His Presence
Here comes number two:
Jesus comforts us through His presence.
I want to say that again:
Jesus comforts us through His presence.
And I want to be as clear as I possibly can be that this is not a metaphor.
This is not just figurative language.
Jesus is literally present with you.
When you go out of your way to spend time with Jesus, He is present with you whether you feel it or not.
Psalm 34 says:
“Yahweh is near to those who have a broken heart, and saves those who have a crushed spirit.”
—Psalm 34:18, WEB
Psalm 147 says:
“He heals the broken in heart, and binds up their wounds.”
—Psalm 147:3, WEB
How does he bind up our wounds?
He does it by pouring himself into us when we go to him.
How does he heal our hearts?
He does it by pouring himself into us when we enter his presence.
How does he restore our crushed spirits?
He does it by pouring himself into us when we come before His throne.
How do we come before His throne?
It’s simple.
Maybe too simple.
It’s so simple that we feel like it can’t be this simple:
Literally, we just stop.
We go somewhere on our own, and we start talking to him.
We start telling him how we feel.
We start laying our burdens at his feet.
You don’t need a list, you don’t need a script to pray from, you don’t need a plan for what you’re going to pray about.
Those things are all fine, and they can be helpful, but you don’t need them.
God is not just an idea.
He is also a Person.
And you can talk to him like a person.
You can talk to him like a friend, because he is.
If you are in Christ, God is your friend.
And he wants to hear you.
He wants to hear from you.
He wants to hear everything you have to say.
He is not going to get tired of you.
He is not going to throw you out.
He is not going to criticize you or judge you because you don’t have the right words or because you say the wrong thing or because you don’t understand everything.
He is the greatest friend you could ever have.
And you consciously enter his presence every time you stop to talk to him, every time you open up his word to learn from him, every time you spend time in silence just to listen for his voice in your spirit.
The truth is that you are always in the presence of God, because God is everywhere.
The old time theologians called him “Omnipresent.”
You don’t need to remember that big theologian word.
But what you do need to remember is that he’s everywhere.
There is nowhere you can go to escape his presence.
There is nowhere you can run to get away from him.
He is always right there with you, waiting with open arms.
So you don’t have to do anything to enter his presence or gain an audience with him.
All you have to do is recognize that he’s already there, and then start talking to him, or listening for him, or sitting with him.
You could call that a million things, but I like to call it communing with God.
When we consciously spend time sitting in God’s presence and enjoying his company, listening for his voice in our spirit, meditating on what he has revealed in Scripture, telling him how we feel, laying our burdens at his feet, we are communing with God.
And when we commune with God, He comforts us through His presence.
He binds up our wounds.
He heals our hearts.
He restores our crushed spirits.
That’s what Paul is talking about in Philippians four when he says:
“In nothing be anxious, but in everything, by prayer and petition with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your thoughts in Christ Jesus.”
—Philippians 4:6–7, WEB
So many of us struggle to be comforted in our suffering even when we go to the Lord because we can’t stop trying to get “a good grade in prayer.”
Know what I’m talking about?
We can’t stop worrying about, “Am I doing it right?”
Am I saying the right words?
Am I feeling the right emotions?
Do I have the right attitudes?
Do I have the right ideas?
Am I praying for the right things?
Is this what God wants me to do?
Right?
But all those things are meaningless.
When you enter God’s presence, none of those things exist.
All there is is you and God, and his overwhelming and unconditional love for you.
Forget all of those things, leave all of it at the door, and just spend time with him.
Just tell him everything.
Share your fear and your burdens and your inadequacy and your grief and your anger.
Just share all of it with him as your closest friend who will listen attentively and give generously and will never leave you nor forsake you.
And let him comfort you through his presence, and let him give you the peace of God that surpasses all understanding.
“It Is Well”
And I think the greatest way to wrap our heads around all of this is actually not with a sermon, and it’s not with a story, and it’s not with a set of five steps to take to grieve and suffer better—it’s with a song.
One of my favorite hymns is the song It Is Well by the 19th century Presbyterian hymn writer Horatio Spafford.
I’ve always been unbelievably moved by the story of the events that led Horatio Spafford to write the hymn It Is Well.
If you haven’t heard it, you’re about to.
Because Horatio Spafford’s life was absolutely filled to the brim with gut wrenching loss.
The world was unfathomably cruel to Horatio.
What am I talking about?
Here’s what I’m talking about.
In 1871 Horatio’s first born son contracted scarlet fever and died.
Then one year later the Great Chicago Fire of 1872 roared through his city and burned everything he owned into ashes. He lost everything.
One year later, as things started to settle down, his family decided to take a trip to Europe as a way to try to start fresh, to finally recover from the horrific death of their son and the loss of all their property, so they boarded a ship and headed towards Europe. But on the way, they collided with another vessel. Their ship broke in half, and all four of his daughters drowned.
Two years later, his wife gave birth to another son, but by the time he turned four, he had also contracted scarlet fever, and he died in Horatio’s arms.
In all, only two of Horatio Spafford’s children survived to adulthood, and he spent most of his life penniless.
And he testified that at so many points his grief was so visceral that he could barely stand to go on living.
Days came when he couldn’t get out of bed.
At one point he had to be institutionalized.
The sheer depths of loss that he experienced nearly drove him insane.
But what got him through all of this was the way that Jesus transforms our grief and suffering through his comforting presence and his people speaking into our lives and supporting us.
And so in the midst of all of this absolutely unbearable loss, Horatio wrote the words to this now-famous hymn, It Is Well.
For those of you who haven’t heard this before, I’m gonna read the lyrics to you.
Horatio Spafford wrote these words:
When peace like a river, attendeth my way
When sorrows like sea billows roll
Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say
It is well, it is well, with my soulThough Satan should buffet, though trials should come
Let this blest assurance control
That Christ has regarded my helpless estate
And hath shed His own blood for my soulMy sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!
My sin, not in part but the whole
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!
Mount Zion Baptist Church - Louisburg, NC 
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