Scars on the Soul | Pastor Chip Parker | Week 1

So back a few years ago in 2023, we did our first Scars on the Soul series.

And in that series, we covered three topics anxiety, depression, and addiction.

And our goal in that first series was to look at the reality of all of those issues from a biblical perspective, affirming the need that many have to seek professional help and medical help in dealing with those issues, while also highlighting the deeper spiritual root of those issues and the cure for them.

Almost every doctor or clinician would tell you that medication alone cannot cure us of these scars that are on our soul.

And what we said in the last series is that the only hope any of us have for a true and lasting change in our life is to turn to Jesus and fix our eyes on him.

Whether we're struggling with anxiety, depression, addiction, we have to turn to Jesus and fix our eyes on him.

And here's the thing therapy and medication, they can't make us turn toward Jesus, but they can and often do help clear away the fog so that we can see him a little bit clearer.

This time around, are our goals the same.

We want you to see Jesus in the midst of whatever it is that you're going through.

And what we're gonna do is deal specifically with three common but often hidden struggles: uh the struggles of grief, loneliness, and estrangement.

You know, for whatever reason, it seems like the church as a whole has far too often shied away from these difficult issues, and that shouldn't be the case with any of these issues, whether it be anxiety or loneliness, depression or grief, we shouldn't shy away, we should lean in.

One of my favorite pastors, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, in the 1800s dealt with a severe case of depression, and he was often ridiculed because of that.

And Spurgeon preaching a sermon on depression and other scars that we bear in our souls, this is what he said.

He said, We very speedily care for bodily diseases.

They are too painful to let us slumber in silence.

They soon urge us to seek a physician or a surgeon for healing.

He said, Oh, if we were as much alive to the more serious wounds of our inner man.

If we were as deeply sensible of spiritual injuries, how earnestly we should cry to the beloved physician.

So these issues that we often ignore shouldn't be ignored.

These scars on our soul are important for us to look at and to deal with.

But I want to address one more thing before we get going.

You see, I understand that as we deal with these issues, that they really are sensitive issues in a lot of people's lives, especially if right now you are walking through any one of them.

They're sensitive issues, that they touch us to our core.

And sometimes I know that when people mean well, when people mean to help, they can often wind up hurting.

And we're not exempt from that.

Though we mean well in this series, maybe we say some things that wind up being more hurtful than helpful.

That's a possibility.

But I believe beyond all of that that scripture addresses these issues, that God, in his word, addresses grief, loneliness, estrangement in some way.

And what we can't do is we can't ever be afraid of doing our best to apply the life-giving truth of God's word even to these most sensitive and painful areas of our life.

And so that's why we're leaning into this series, not as clinicians, as doctors, as psychologists, but as children of God, as students of his word who want to lean in and see what God's word offers us who are struggling with these issues.

And so today we're going to start out by looking at grief.

And let's maybe even start by talking about the reality of grief.

I know I don't have to convince you that grief is a real thing.

You know that it is, but maybe you don't know that studies show us that 57% of people, that's almost two-thirds of Americans, are currently grieving the loss of someone close to them that has passed away in the last three years.

Let me put that in perspective for you.

That means that on average, at least every other person you see is currently grieving.

Because grief never really goes away, especially not inside three years.

And to push it even further, grief comes from far more than just the death of a loved one.

Grief comes from all kinds of losses, the loss of a relationship, a divorce, losing a job, and many other difficult losses in our lives.

So we can experience grief from a bunch of different angles.

And when we think about grief and what grief is, I think our minds often jump straight to sadness.

And I think sadness is a major part of grief, but grief is so much more complex than just sadness.

Um, we have popularized what are known as the five stages of grief.

And those five stages of grief help us understand the complexity of emotions and feelings that someone who is grieving is going through.

The emotions of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and ultimately acceptance, those are all just pieces of what somebody who is grieving will feel in that process.

But we also know that there is not a clean-cut, five-stage process of grieving, that grief is unique to everyone.

It looks different, it feels different for each of us.

And if we go through it multiple times, it can still be unique and look different and feel different because of the situation that we're going through.

Grief is a full-body experience.

It affects every part of our life, including our work, our relationships, our health, and even our faith.

And I think the really devastating side of grief comes in when we try to avoid it.

And I think in an effort to avoid grief, whether consciously or subconsciously, a lot of people try to do a few things.

Psychologists tell us that people try to suppress their grief, right?

It's not a big deal.

We're going to tamp it down.

We're not going to let ourselves experience that.

We try to delay our grief by saying, well, we got so much to take care of now, so many things to look after, people to look out for, we're going to deal with that later, or even ultimately just distract ourselves from grief and avoid it in that way.

And what we know is that when we avoid grief, that grief avoidance can lead to severe issues such as substance abuse, isolation and withdrawal from friends and other loved ones.

It can lead us to become unhealthfully consumed with work or even other ways to stay busy.

We avoid certain people in certain places for fear of being triggered in our grief.

And what we've seen is that unaddressed avoided grief can actually lead to prolonged depression and emotional numbness.

And I think even there's another side of that.

Those people who don't necessarily avoid grief, but people who feel like the more grief they feel, the better.

And they force themselves into feeling what they think is the right way to grieve, and they wind up adding an equally unhealthy burden and difficulty in their grieving process.

What I've seen as a pastor is that one of the hardest, if we would say, side effects of grief is how it can damage and weaken our faith.

Seasons of grief can cause us to question what we believed in the good times.

Sudden loss or even loss after a long-term illness can cause us to doubt the goodness of God and even in some cases doubt his very existence.

I think the simple truth is that most of us, and I would include myself in this, we don't do grief well.

But when we avoid the grieving process or we approach it in an unhealthy way, I think what we do is we keep ourselves from a part of God's working in our life.

What I want you to know is that I believe that grief is biblical, that grief is healthy, and that maybe more importantly, grief is necessary for us.

Pastor and author Rick Warren experienced the loss of a child.

And in writing later about grief, he said it like this He said that grief is God's tool for moving us through transitions in life.

It's how we go from one loss to the next stage.

We move through seasons, we go through transitions.

Grief is the tool that God has planted in our hearts to help us do that.

When we look at scriptures, we find out that Jesus himself was a man of grief.

Isaiah 53, verse 5 identifies the Messiah as a man of sorrow who was well acquainted with grief.

Isaiah 53:5

And even beyond that description of Jesus before he was born, we get a firsthand account of Jesus walking through grief at the death of his friend Lazarus in John 11.

So if you got your Bible, I'd invite you to turn with me to John 11.

And while you're turning, let me kind of catch up on the story.

Jesus was good friends with this man Lazarus and his two sisters, Martha and Mary.

Martha and Mary sent word to Jesus that Lazarus had fallen sick, and it was serious.

Upon getting word that he was sick, Jesus doesn't immediately go to help him.

He stays where he is, telling his disciples that this was going to be a way for their faith to grow and it would not end in death.

Martha comes to Jesus and confronts him and says, Lord, if you had been here, our brother wouldn't have died.

And then later, Mary does the same thing.

And we read that in John chapter 11, verse 32.

John 11:32

It says, As soon as Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and told him, really the same thing Martha did, Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn't have died.

And then we read that when Jesus saw her crying, and the Jews who had come with her crying, he was deeply moved in his spirit and he was troubled.

Where have you put him?

he asked.

And so Jesus wept.

So the Jews said, See how he loved him.

But some of them said, Couldn't he who opened the blind man's eyes also have kept this man from dying?

So as we wind down this first message and scars on the soul talking about grief, I want to narrow in on a few lessons that we can learn from Jesus' grief here in this text in John chapter 11.

John 11 · chapter mention

I think the first thing that I want you to see is that we can grieve to God.

We can grieve to God.

Jesus in this text grieves openly.

Mary in this text grieves openly.

Martha, in what we didn't read, grieves openly.

And then Mary and Martha take their grief straight to Jesus.

Lord, if you'd have been here, our brother wouldn't have died.

And so I think it's important for us to know that when we grieve, we can grieve to the Lord.

You don't have to hide your grief from God.

You can take it to him.

You can take him your sadness, your anger, your doubt, all of it.

Doctor and author Betsy Barber says it like this.

She says, Lamenting to God is a good and holy way to grieve.

It has a virtue of honesty.

When we lament to God, when we complain to him, we bemoan the events and realities of our lives in his presence.

And this is what she says.

But when we speak the truth to him, we give up the pretense that the depth of our sorrow was somehow secret, somehow hidden from his sight.

She goes on to say, lamenting to God is obedient grief.

God invites us to pray to him in this way.

Psalm 62.8 instructs us, pour out your heart before him.

God is a refuge for us.

So the point she's making, I think, is so appropriate for us to hear.

God knows your heart.

He knows what you feel, the hurt you have.

So lay it out to him.

You're not unveiling what's actually happening.

He already knows it.

What you're doing is getting rid of the pretense that he doesn't.

You're getting honest with him, with your hurt, your sorrow, you're crying out to him.

And when you do, he will meet you there.

God desires that we pour out our hearts and we grieve to him.

But not only can we grieve to God, I believe that what we see here in John 11 is that we can grieve in agreement with biblical truth.

Just take a look at the two statements from the people as they saw Jesus weep.

One of them says, Oh, look how he weeps.

He loved Lazarus.

And then the other people say, Well, if he loved him, couldn't he have healed him?

And I think on their face value, those statements seem to run against each other, right?

Well, if he loved him, he would have healed him, but because he didn't heal him, he must not have loved him.

Can I tell you, I don't think that's true.

I think both can be true, that Jesus loved Lazarus and Jesus didn't choose to heal Lazarus.

Both of those are true, even though they don't seem to be.

And I think in our heads we know that.

That God's love for us is not dependent upon the circumstances of our life, our health, or even the survival of our loved ones.

That God's love for us is unconditional, it is unfailing, and that even though we experience hard and sorrowful things, that doesn't mean that He does not love us.

He loves us and He allowed Lazarus to die.

Both of those things are true.

Here's the problem: grief is less about what we know and more about what we feel.

It's not that we don't know the right things, it's that we don't always feel them.

I remember when my mother passed away at a young age, and we were standing in the line at the visitation, and people were coming by and telling me that they were sorry.

People over and over kept saying, Well, the Lord has a plan, the Lord has a plan, the Lord has a plan.

And I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, I know that.

I get that.

You're not telling me something I don't know.

It's just not helping me right now because it's not what I feel.

But I think it is important for us to learn how to fight against that doubt in the dark, right?

It's okay not to feel it, but we can't let our feelings change what we know and what we believe.

We have to fight against doubting in the dark, what we've learned and experienced when we were in the light.

It's okay to feel those things, but they don't have to change what you know and what you believe.

I would encourage you if you're walking through grief to be careful not to trust your emotions too much.

The valley of grief is deep and it multiplies what we feel.

And though what we feel is real, it should not change what we know.

We can grieve while we agree with biblical truth.

So the last thing is this we can grieve with Jesus.

Now don't miss that.

It's not only that we can grieve to Jesus, but we can grieve with Jesus.

The shortest verse of the Bible there in John chapter 11, Jesus wept.

John 11 · chapter mention

There's sadness there, yes, he wept, but there's also anger.

That word in the original language is not just the word for cry.

That's why it's translated wept.

One commentator said it's like the word used for when a horse blows and huffs and snorts in frustration or anger.

What does that mean?

I think commentator J.

Scott Duvall says it best.

He says, I sense that Jesus' anger is directed toward death as the enemy who so brazenly robs us of our precious loved ones.

His indignation is aimed at sin, sickness, suffering, and death.

And what these enemies are doing to the people we love, while overwhelmed with sadness and grief, he's also righteous with rage.

He's fighting mad and furious at these evil powers for hurting the people he loves deeply.

So when Jesus wept, he was grieving, but not just sad, right?

Because anger is a part of grieving.

And Jesus grieves with a righteous anger.

I just think about men in my life, think about myself.

I'm more apt to cry if I get really angry than just really sad.

And that's what we see Jesus doing here.

And so I want to tell you this: you don't just have to grieve to Jesus, you can grieve with Jesus.

Because if you are angry at the death of a loved one, just know that Jesus is too.

He is angry at what sin and suffering and death are doing to this world and to the people he has created in his image.

And his raising of Lazarus is the first taste of his ultimate victory over death through his resurrection for each of us.

That death, though it stings, is a defeated enemy.

Because Jesus, who died, is alive today.

And so I want to remind you as we close out this first message.

Matter of fact, I want to encourage you.

If you are grieving, grieve to Jesus and grieve with Jesus.

Don't isolate this from your faith.

Don't hide it from his sight.

Don't doubt in the dark what you have learned and experienced in the light.

The fact that we can grieve to Jesus and grieve with Jesus, that is our hope and our hurt.

Because we can have hope while we hurt.

And though we hurt, it doesn't mean that we don't have hope, that we don't believe, that we don't trust.

It just means that we hurt right now.

And just because you hope doesn't mean you won't hurt.

If Jesus wept, we will too.

But we can do so again to him and with him.

If you're in the midst of this right now, I just want to pray for you and encourage you to reach out and let us know how we can help.

Let me pray.

God, thank you for the hope that we find in your word.

Thank you for the heart that we see in Jesus and in his grief.

And God, I pray now for those who are hurting and those who are grieving.

That you would help them find hope in Jesus.

That they would grieve to you, not hiding what they feel, but at the same time that they would hold to the truth they know and not just change everything they've believed because of what they feel in the moment.

And God, maybe most of all, I pray that you would remind them that while they are grieving to you, that they can also grieve with you.

Because that sin and death that has hurt us hurts you.

It angers you, it grieves you.

And God, I pray that we would find comfort in that and in your presence with us while we grieve.

So, God, I pray that you would use this.

grief to change us more into your image, to draw us closer to yourself, and to be a help to others who are hurting.

Jesus, it's in your name we pray.

Amen.