When life is bitter....

…trust promises, not providences.

This week I've had multiple conversations with people who have family or friends who are walking through the valley of the shadow of death. And the shadow is dark and foreboding, filled with more questions and uncertainties than just the matter of death.

One writer says that when the bitter experiences of life emerge, trust promises, not providences.

That is, don't come to conclusions about the love of Christ for you based solely on the circumstances of your life, but base your conclusions on the absolute promises of God.

It reminds me of the hymn written by poet William Cowper:

God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;…

Judge not the lord by feeble sense,
But trust him for his grace;
behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face.

Into our lives, God regularly brings darkness, affliction, and even the sins of others to shape us into His image. No matter the harshness of the darkness, He is working a gracious plan to effect His grace in our lives. That is a truth I need to hear and heed when death is interjected into my life — and when any form of "discomfort" afflicts me.

Sunday Leftovers (12/2/07)

I had been pastoring for just a couple months when the funeral home called and asked me if I was available to do a funeral for a woman who had died and didn't have a church home. I agreed to do it, met with the family, planned the service with them, and at the appropriate time went to the funeral home and got in the car to drive to the cemetery with the funeral director.

In planning the funeral, I had been struck by how much the family wanted to minimize the service — no church or chapel service, no music, "does it have to be 20 minutes long?" Curious, I asked the director for his perspective — why such a short remembrance for someone this family loved? "What they're doing is not unusual. People are uncomfortable with death and if they can minimize the time at the funeral, it's less time they have to think about the reality of it."

While many people may attempt to minimize the time they are forced to think about death, apart from the return of Christ, death is something that will have to be considered and endured by all men. So how shall we think about it in Biblical ways?

In preparing for this sermon, I came across a number of statements about death, particularly the death of believers, that I found helpful. Among them:

• Noting that the death and difficulty in the life life of the believer does not mean the absence of the love of God for that believer, Jerry Bridges writes,
  

"When we begin to question the love of God, we need to remember who we are. We have absolutely no claim on His love. We don't deserve one bit of God's goodness to us. I once heard a speaker say, 'Anything this side of hell is pure grace.' I know of nothing that will so quickly cut the nerve of the petulant, 'why did this happen to me?' attitude as a realization of who we are before God, considered in ourselves apart from Christ."

Though God is under no requirement to love anyone, He does in fact love His own with an amazing, infinite love: "We usually find within ourselves reasons to think God should not love us. Such searching is…unbiblical. The Bible is quite clear that God does not look within us for a reason to love us. He loves us because we are in Christ Jesus. When He looks at us, He does not look at us as 'stand alone' Christians, resplendent in our own good works, even good works as Christians. Rather, as He looks at us, He sees us unified to His beloved Son, clothed in His righteousness. He loves us, not because we are lovely in ourselves, but because we are in Christ."

[ASIDE: I put this book by Bridges in my top 10 of "must read" books for all believers.]

• While the salvation of a believer is eternally safe (1 Pt. 1:3-9), that does not mean that the believer's earthly life is always safe:
  

"We have no promise that mortal danger shall never plunge us into death merely because we are Christ's own. In the counsel of God it may be his will that we die; we should then die with the mighty assurance that God's will sends us what is best." [R. C. H. Lenski]

• That life on earth is merely a foreshadow of life to come in heaven is evidenced by the words of John Owen as he lay on his deathbed. His secretary was writing to a friend of Owen [in his name], saying, "I am still in the land of the living." Owen interjected, "Stop. Change that and say, I am yet in the land of the dying, but I hope soon to be in the land of the living."

• Reminding us that death also is from the hand of God, R. C. Sproul writes,
  

"When the summons [of death] comes we can respond in many ways. We can be angry, bitter, or terrified. But if we see it as a call from God and not a threat from Satan, we are far more able to cope with its difficulties."

• And commenting on the relationship between death and fear, John Piper says,

"Death is a threat to the degree that it frustrates your main goals. Death is fearful to the degree that it threatens to rob you of what you treasure most. But Paul [in Phil. 1:20] treasured Christ most, and his goal was to magnify Christ. And he saw death not as a frustration of that goal but as an occasion for its fulfillment."

Sunday Leftovers (8/26/07)

"If we understood Hell even the slightest bit, none of us would ever say, 'Go to Hell.' It's far too easy to go to Hell. It requires no change of course, no navigational adjustments. We were born with our autopilot set toward Hell. It is nothing to take lightly — Hell is the single greatest tragedy in the universe." [Randy Alcorn, Heaven.]

It has been statements like that that have caused me to contemplate the reality of hell far more in recent months. Few people like to think of death in general, and fewer still are willing to give serious consideration of hell's realities. And when most people do, they think of it in unreal terms, as Ted Turner did several years ago when he said, "Heaven is perfect. Who wants to go to a place that's perfect? Boring, boring. [In hell] we'll have a chance to make things better because hell is supposed to be a mess."

Is that really a possibility? What will hell be like?

• In Hell (Alcorn suggests capitalizing Heaven and Hell as one would any proper noun, since they are literal places), the restraining influence of God the Holy Spirit, the Word of God and believers will be fully removed, resulting in a fullness of sin. All sin will be "fully mature," so that there will be no rest from it. All sin in all its forms (think of any sin and it will apply — anger, fear, hatred, anxiousness, selfishness) will be unrelenting and unceasing and never abated.
• In Hell, there will be the complete absence of anything good. The capacity to perform even the simplest act of kindness is a result of the common grace of God. Such grace from God will not exist in Hell, so there will be no ability to perform even the tiniest modicum of goodness. There will be no friendship (only hatred), no fellowship (only selfishness), no peace (only anger), and no comfort (only unrest and regret).
• In Hell, there will be eternal (i.e., they will always know it) knowledge of the reality of God and Heaven. It seems possible that not only will there be an understanding that God and Heaven exist, but that in some measure and form, it will even be able to be seen (cf. Lk. 16:22ff). Yet they will never be able to cross over from Hell to Heaven. Which leads to my last observation…
• In Hell, there will be no opportunities to ever change a decision made on earth. They are eternally condemned. (Think on that for a time.) In Hell, there will be full awareness of guilt, full awareness of sin, full awareness that Christ was rejected, full submission to Christ, with no opportunity to ever repent. I've made more than one decision that I've regretted. But none with the same kind of eternal implication. This will be the great anguish and horror of hell.
  

Hell is and will be a terror which we have no scale to measure. And people we know and love have gone, are going, and will go there. Which means two things for parents (which is what this sermon was about):

1. We must train our children to have a compassion for those who are lost that spills over into clear gospel articulations to the lost. May the training of our children produce in them grief and sadness for those who are unregenerate and headed for Hell, rather than haughty criticism.
2. We must train our children to exist in the world (be influencers for Christ in the world), while at the same time maintaining hearts that are separate from and unstained by the philosophy of the world.
   

Hell is terrible and eternal. Train your children to understand its deadliness. And train them also to have compassion for those who are going there.