God Will Not Abandon You

Has there ever been a time in your life that you felt like God had abandoned you? This is not a matter where God's not hearing me, or I feel distant from God, or I need to get close to God. We all have times we say, you know, I really, I'm sort of slipping. I need to get close to God. But you actually feel like God has abandoned you. Usually when we have that great feeling, and that can come for a number of reasons, but one is because we're suffering a great sense of loss. You know, a couple who find out that they're never going to be able to have a child, and they desperately want a child. And it's a great sense of loss. This feeling that I've lost something irretrievable in life. When God allows a young person to die tragically, and some of you have been going through that because of what had happened here a couple weeks ago with the young man who died, that many of you knew. Many people from here in Murfreesboro even went clear to Florida for the funeral last week, last weekend, because of just the impact of the loss of that person was on their lives. A sense of loss. What do you do? I mean, the loss is there. You can't sort of just pretend it's not there. You can't just fill it up with something else. And the tragic sense of loss that comes through the death of someone can come into your life from a lot of different directions. I mean, I've said and I've heard this so many times, it's an interesting statement when the person makes it because it's so tragic to them. And it's a person who's been, was maybe abused as a child or abandoned as a child by their parents. And they'll make the statement, I just feel like I lost my childhood. I never had a childhood. And sometimes they just sit and they cry. I lost my childhood. It's gone. I can never get it back. Just like I can never seem, I feel like, how do I get a friend back? Now we know about the resurrections and that's some comfort, but they're still in the sense of loss. You know, that can happen in life, later in life, when you get to the place where, and I've seen this happen, where a person has a great career, nice house, nice job, lots of money coming in. And one day basically they're just told, you know, it's time, you're 50, we're bringing in younger people, they're cheaper than you, and you're fired. And overnight they lose everything. I mean, they lose their jobs, they lose what they see as their status. Sometimes they lose their homes, they lose their car, and there's this incredible sense of loss. How do I feel that in? Divorce will leave a person with this incredible sense of loss. It is all grief. There's this grief, I am lost, and I can't regain back what I've lost. Mr. Walker was talking about, as you get older, you know, you reach a certain age, you realize physically you've lost certain things, and you're not getting them back. And sometimes that can be difficult. You want to do something you used to do just five years ago or ten years ago, and you can't do it anymore. You physically lost something. And for some people, they can grieve over that. And it's a deep grief that can lead them into depression. I've lost the ability to do certain things because I'm losing my health.

And so we struggle with, why has God abandoned me? Many times we say, life isn't supposed to work out this way. Things aren't supposed to happen this way. These things aren't supposed to happen to me or other people. And we get sort of fatalistic. Well, you know, God's in control of everything. I have no control over anything, so I just have to sit here quietly and take whatever happens to me. It's just the way it is. You have no control. You're just, you know, you're just a piece of straw blown in the wind. But that's not what God wants us to do either. Fatalism leads to resentment of God. You know, I thought about, and I gave the sermon in Murfreesboro last week, I was thinking about giving a sermon on the resurrection. But then I thought, no, because as people are grieving over the loss of the young man that died, there's more than that. Many of you are suffering a sense of loss over a lot of things in your lives. And that is a real grief. The death of a loved one, the loss of a job, the loss of health, the feeling that you lost your childhood, the feeling that you're alone and you're never going to get married, the feeling that I can never have a child. Those are all feelings of loss and are a grief. And they can overtake our lives because it's, why won't God fix this? Or why did God allow this to happen? He has abandoned me. What I'm going to do today is I'm going to look at two biblical examples of people who God was working on their lives and they felt absolutely abandoned. And let's look at what God did in their lives and the lessons we can learn when we feel abandoned. Because there are times when you will feel abandoned by God. Because this physical life that we live, this physical life is so limited in our abilities and our understanding that there will be times when we feel that way. What do we do when we feel that way? What helps us? The first example I want to go to is in Luke 24.

The two examples we're going to go through today are two of my favorite passages on this subject. Because the people, I mean, you can see, they're such real people, they're acting like we would act. And what God is doing is something they can't even see or understand. But God understands them. They don't understand God, but God understands them. Which one is the great lessons of what's going on when we feel abandoned? Let's start at verse 13. Now let's set the stage here. These are a couple of Jesus' disciples. They're not part of the 12, but Jesus had more than just the 12 disciples. And they have gone through an earth-shaking experience. Their faith was that God had finally sent the Messiah. They believed it. They lived it. They dedicated their lives to the fact that Jesus was the Messiah.

And they were waiting for Him to set up God's kingdom on the earth. And the Romans tortured Him to death. Now you can imagine the sense of loss. Not only did they lose their teacher. I mean, one thing, you can imagine the grief. Just their teacher had died. But it was more than that, as we'll see. Their whole religion has been shown to have some kind of crack in it, some kind of flaw in it. Their whole faith now is weakened. They feel abandoned by God. Verse 13, Now behold, two of them were traveling that same day to the village called Amazes, and they were seven miles from Jerusalem. That's actually in Sammias. And which was seven miles from Jerusalem. And where they were together, and they talked together of all the things which they had happened. And so it was, while they conversed in reason, that Jesus Himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were restrained, so they did not know Him. Now this is after Jesus' resurrection. But they have gone three days now of feeling abandoned. They've gone three days of just intense grief. And these two disciples are walking along, and as we'll see, they're trying to figure some things out. They're confused, and they're grieving. But what's interesting here is that Jesus Christ, the resurrected Jesus Christ, shows up, but they don't know it. There's some real important lessons here. They don't know He's there, but He is. And this conversation takes place.

Let's pick it up in verse 17. And He said to them, now this is what Christ says to them, what kind of conversation is this that you have with one another as you walk along, and are sad? So He sees them, and He's, you're noticeably sad. Now you can imagine you're walking along, you're discussing this, you both are saying, what are we going to do? I don't know. I don't even know how to pray anymore. I thought Jesus was the Messiah. I don't know what to do. What? How much of His teachings were right? How much were wrong?

And someone shows up and says, well, you both of you guys look really sad. What are you talking about? What's going on here? I love verse 18. The one whose name was Cleopas answered and said to him, are you the only stranger in Jerusalem that are not known to things which are happening these days? He says, you don't know what's going on. This is what everybody's talking about. Everybody in all Judea is talking about this. Jews, the Romans, everybody. This was a huge event. You must really be a stranger here not to know this. And he says to them, what things? They don't know who He is. What things? What things? So they said to Him, the things concerning Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet, mighty indeed, and word before God and all the people, and how the chief priests and our rulers delivered Him to be condemned to death and be crucified. So there was a great prophet here. This was like having Isaiah or Jeremiah right here, Hosea, right among us. He was a great prophet. But we're grieving not just because of that, but notice verse 21. But we were hoping that it was He who was going to redeem Israel. But we thought, we thought He was the Messiah. He was a great prophet. But so much of what we believe now, we have to question. Because He didn't do what the messianic prophecies say He will do. He didn't set up God's kingdom on earth. He didn't restore Israel. He didn't do any of that. He was killed by the Romans, by pagans. We had hoped so much. Understand the absolute depth of loss that statement is. We had hoped. This is what we had believed. This is what we wanted so much. And it's not true. And now they're really confused because they said, indeed, beside all this, today is the third day since these things happened. Yes, a certain woman of our company, who arrived at the tomb early, astonished us. When she did not find His body, they came saying that they had also seen a vision of angels who said He was alive. And certain of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the woman had said, but they did not see Him. So now we don't know. It looks like somebody stole His body. We're just grieving over this. The sense of loss gets worse and worse because now they've even taken His body. One of the women said she received a vision, but nobody else has seen it. Other people went there. Nobody else saw it. We're just hopeless here. At least we know He was a great prophet. He was of God. But our whole hope of life centered around Him for such a long time. Now it's gone. It's not real. When we talk about a sense of loss, we understand the depth of grief we go through. It isn't just when someone dies. There are other things in life that bring this incredible sense of, just, I have loss. I can't get it back.

And of course when someone dies, I mean, my dad died in 2010. There are still days I went to call him. There's still a sense of loss. There's certain things you lose in life that you carry a little sense of loss with you for the rest of your life. You just do. That doesn't mean you're not happy. It doesn't mean you're overwhelmed with it. But it means you carry it. And here they were carrying that sense of loss. Now what I find so fascinating here is that they don't know that God has already taken an action to help them in their feeling of abandonment. They're talking to Christ. They just don't know it. It's like so many things in our lives where God is working, we don't know right away that He's working. We don't perceive it. And it's only after time that we begin to perceive, wait a minute, God is doing something. And God says, yeah, it took you a while to figure that out, didn't it? They don't perceive this as Christ. They're just lost in their feeling of abandonment. Notice verse 25. So now here's what Jesus says to them, O foolish ones, as slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken. Not that Christ also have suffered these things to enter to His glory. And notice what He does. And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, He expounded to them all the scriptures, the things concerning Himself. In their abandonment, and we're going to see this very interesting when we go on just a little bit farther, the effect this had. What did Jesus do? First of all, He did not expose to them who He was. He took them to the scripture. We talk to God through prayer, and God talks to us through the scripture.

We must be in the scripture to have God talk to us. In a time of abandonment, we must go let God talk to us. What did Jesus Christ do? He took them to the Bible. He said, don't you remember? Now it's seven miles the distance between Jerusalem and this town. We don't know how far they had walked when Jesus came along and started talking to them, but it says they walked the rest of the way. It might have been the whole seven miles. It was at least some distance. Hours go by as He talks to them about the scripture. He explains to them, and they listen, and they ask questions. This guy knows the scripture. He takes them there. There's no way to downplay the importance of understanding that when you and I are dealing with a sense of loss, which is so difficult for us, you know why? Because life is so small. You know, when you're dealing with a child, and a child loses their teddy bear, and they're just heartbroken, and an adult will say, oh, come on, that was just a teddy bear. To that child, the sense of loss is overwhelming, because why? I've only lived two years, and that teddy bear has been with me the whole time. That teddy bear has a reality to that child. This is an adult, we might say, it's not that important. I can get you a new one. No, you can't. You can't get a teddy bear like that one.

That's my teddy bear. It feels a certain way. It looks a certain way. It smells a certain way, and that child doesn't understand it. You can go get another teddy bear, and they'll throw it down. That's not my teddy bear. That sense of loss is real, because we live in this little compartment of life. So it's very difficult for us to sort through a sense of loss when we do lose something. There's an interesting psalm where David lost something. I'm sorry, David suffered from the feeling of abandonment. Now, he didn't lose something in this psalm, so this one isn't directly about what we're talking about. But I want to take a look at this because he is dealing with the feeling that God had abandoned him. So leave a marker here, because we're going to come back to Luke. Let's go to Psalm 13.

It's easy to talk about the resurrections, which gives us hope. And if you go to study the Scripture and you've lost someone, the resurrections give you hope. You know, when I think of all the people in my life that I've known, and relatives, and friends, that have died, I have this great comfort in knowing I'm going to see them again. I truly believe I'm going to see them again in the resurrection. I have comfort in that. But I have to go to the Scripture to keep reminded of that comfort. It is the Scripture where I find that. So we have to understand that even dealing with our emotional responses to life, there is a power in the Word of God that helps us work through that.

So when we talk about dealing with something like grief and a sense of loss, we should go to God. It's more than prayer. It's more than prayer. He's being able to go and let God talk to you. When I gave this last week in Murfreesboro, I had someone who had a close family member die recently, I walked up and smiled and said, I knew what you were talking about because I'm not alone.

That's the exact point we're talking about. You're not alone.

But it feels that way. Look at Psalm 13. Now, the way he starts this, you can see the depth of the exact emotion he has. He says, how long, O Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you forget me forever? You've just abandoned me, haven't you? Now, that's what he feels. Now, God doesn't come around and say, you know, David, because you feel this way, I am going to abandon you. You feel abandoned, so that's it. You lack faith, I'm going to abandon you. He writes this because he's expressing specifically, this is what I believe in. This is the question I ask God. How long will I feel abandoned? How long will I feel the sense that I have a sense of loss? I'm alone in this. You're not helping me. You've allowed me to go into a situation that I have no control over. Now, it's very important to understand here. He's not talking about sin in this passage. There are times when we feel abandoned by God because of sin, but that's a whole other subject. When we feel abandoned by God because of sin, we have to repent of that sin to be drawn back to God. So, if you feel abandoned by God because of sin, a lot of times people will feel a great sense of abandonment over a lot of time. And the reason why is because they haven't repented of their sins. Oh, they'll do some lip service to it, but they haven't truly repented of their sins. So, that's a whole other subject. We're nagged sometimes by this feeling of abandonment. It was a sin issue. What is the real issue here, then, why you feel that? So, today we're talking about something very specific. The last part of verse 1, he says, How long will you hide your face for me? How long shall I take counsel of my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? This wouldn't go away. Now, his sense of abandonment here came from a very specific problem. So, let's look at the problem he was having. How long will my enemy be exalted over me? Consider and hear me, O my Lord, enlighten my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death. Lest my enemy say I have prevailed against him, lest those who trouble me rejoice when I am moved. David's feeling of abandonment here was because he had some enemy who wanted to do violence to him. As king, there were always plots to kill the king. Or there was some other tribe or nomadic tribe or nation around them that always was at war with Israel. And there was always this realization, there's people out to kill me. And in this case, some specific person wanted to do violence to him. And it was going on and on. And his feeling of abandonment was, God, why haven't you stopped this person? This person wants to kill me! And you just let him go on and on. So that's why he has this feeling of abandonment. But notice it's the same. If you lose something, you still have the same feeling. God abandoned me because I have this sense of loss. It's gone. I can't fix it. I can't replace it.

Verse 5 is where he comes back in the focus. But I have trusted in your mercy. My heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord because he has dealt bountifully with me. He goes from, I've been abandoned, you've turned your back on me, to the point at the end of this short little song, he's saying, I'm going to sing this now. I'm going to sing how God helps me. Like God does in my life. We turn to God. We trust in God. It's the same thing when we feel abandoned because of loss. There is a point where we simply go to God and we don't understand. See, what we think is, for me to receive help from God, I have to understand what he's doing. Sometimes, the only way you and I receive help from God is when we accept, I don't understand and I can't understand.

Sometimes that's the only way you receive God's help.

Because we're saying, I have to understand to receive help. And what God is saying is, you can't understand. It's like a two-year-old. How many of you have said, one thing I'll never do is tell my kids because I told you so? That's what mom and dad told me, I'll never do that when I'm a parent. And then you find yourself being a parent. And the two-year-old says, why? And you explain. Why? After about the 10th time, you say, because I told you so. Because you can explain all day long and they cannot understand. Now, when they're five, they may understand. When they're 10, they'll understand more. You and I are like that two-year-old with God, and God says, I've told you enough times, you can't get it. Do we really believe we can get everything God is doing? We really can understand God to the level where it's, oh, I finally have peace because I get everything God's doing. I finally have reached the level of God.

Now, there are times, because you notice here, David didn't say, I finally figured it out. I knew what God was doing with my enemy and I'm okay. Oh, God killed my enemy. God didn't even take an action here. The problem still existed. What changed was him, because he said, I don't understand what I trust you. Sometimes, it's just like that two-year-old with the feeling that I've lost my teddy bear and I'll never get it back and you can explain, I'll get you a new one. You can explain this one will be better. It doesn't matter. You can explain and explain and explain it sometimes. All you can do is pick up the child, sit them in your lap and rock them, right? There's nothing you can do to the child except pick up the child, put the child in your lap and hold them while they grieve.

It's what God does. There are times we will never understand.

So what God does is send Christ to walk with us.

Let's go back. Let's go back to Luke 24. He sends him to walk with us.

And we don't even know he's there.

Verse 28.

So Cleopas and his friend are still walking along grieving over the loss of Jesus. God sends Jesus down and he's talking to him. This goes on. They walk for miles. Then they drew near to the village where they were going and he indicated that he would have gone farther. In other words, Jesus says, look, I'm going to continue. I have nice talking to you guys. For they constrained him saying, abide with us for it is toward evening and the day is far spent. They went in to stay with him. Now it came to pass as he set at the table with them that he took bread, blessed it and broke it and gave it to them. And then their eyes were opened and they knew him. And it's like, wait a minute. I know who you are. After all this time, your God had a whole different plan for what was going on. They didn't know that. They had no idea God had sent Christ to talk to them. And suddenly they get it. And then what happens next, I find just absolutely fascinating because Jesus didn't say, of course it's me, guys. It says, and he vanished from their sight. From their sight. He says, you get it? I get other work to do. See you later.

I've got you this far. Okay? Good. Keep going. I got you where you need to go. I walked and talked with you guys all day long. Verse 32, And they said to one another, now remember, He talked to them from the Scriptures. They didn't know who He was. Where did they find their help? It was God with them. They didn't know Christ was there. But He was there. And where did He take them? And they said to one another, did not our heart burn within us while He talked with us on the road and while He opened the Scriptures to us? We were changed as we walked and talked and He opened. He talked about the Scriptures and we knew the Scriptures and we knew what He was quoting and what was correct. And we were just on fire because of what He was doing. We should have known because of what was happening to us. But remember, we don't know what God is doing sometimes. We don't understand the problem. We don't understand the grief. We don't understand the sense of loss. And we don't see what God's doing right away.

But He is there. And He takes us to the Scripture. When we don't go to the Scripture, we won't recognize what He's doing. Eventually, when Christ revealed Himself and said, look, I've been with you, they said, ah, that's why the Scripture came so alive. And what did He teach them about who He was? Go back and have faith in the Scripture. Let God talk to you. Let God remind you of all those prophecies and how they did come to pass. So they rose up that very hour. Now remember, this is late in the day. They stopped to eat dinner. It's seven miles back to Jerusalem. So they rose up that very hour and returned to Jerusalem and found the 11th. So now they found the, you know, there were 12. Of course, Judas had died. They found the 11th. And those who were with them gathered together. So it's the 11 plus all the other disciples that are with them. Saying, the Lord has risen indeed and has appeared to Simon. And they told them about what had happened on the road and how He was known to them in the breaking of the bread. What did they do? It's amazing. Not only now where that emptiness had been changed into something else, it was changed immediately into action. They walked seven miles back to where they just come from so they could find other people and say, oh, did we have this wrong? We haven't lost something here. We've gained something. Remember, God could be doing a great work of spiritual healing, but we won't recognize it until the healing starts to take place. You know, it's like being sick and you're getting better, but you don't know it because you don't feel any better. And then you wake up and say, well, I feel much better today. Yeah, well, you may have been getting better for days before you finally are physically healed or physically better. It's the same way emotionally. It doesn't happen overnight. Emotions are healed over time. And a sense of loss doesn't go away. It lessens. It lessens. And God will help us through it. Let's go back here to verse 36.

So now they're with the 11 because this story just goes on and on. It's just a fascinating story. And Cleopas is there and it's like, he came and talked to me, you guys. I said, yeah, Peter said the same thing. Now, as they said these things, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them and said to them, peace be to you. It was like, wow, it took you alone, guys, to get the seven miles back. I've been waiting for you to show up. But they were terrified and frightened as opposed to seeing his spirit. They still were like, nah, well, yeah, no, he couldn't do this. We just left him seven miles away. It still wasn't clear. And he said to them, why are you troubled? Why do doubts rise in your hearts? Behold my hands and my feet. He said, look, look at me. I am. I am who I say I am.

He then says, don't you remember what I told you? And then, you know what he does? If you read through the rest of this passage, he talks to them about the scripture. Don't you remember? This is what God promises. This is what God said what happened. And this is exactly what happened. And Cleopas and the others, because of this, because of this now, were driven to go out and tell others about what God had done.

Well, we feel when we experience the feeling that we've been abandoned by God, it is easy for us to draw back from Him. Anytime you're feeling a sense of loss, it's easy to draw inward. It's just the way we are as human beings. And sometimes you need that time. But we also need to understand the need to reach out to God. Just like David said, how long will you abandon me? How long will I feel this way? Can this ever be healed? It's okay to ask Him that. He understands. But we understand from the story of Cleopas that He's with us. Christ is walking with us. Christ is there. God sends Him. God's Spirit is in us. But we don't always recognize it right away. We can't, because we don't understand. We don't always understand why bad things happen. Why God allows things that He obviously didn't cause. You know, why did He allow a couple not to have a child? They spent their whole life wishing they could have a child. Why does God allow this? Why does it even cause some things? Sometimes God will cause something that seems very bad to us. We have to understand that He has a greater purpose.

We are trapped in this little concept of life, and God lives in eternity, and He has eternal purposes. I don't know what it is to have eternal purpose. I'm just looking forward to dinner tonight.

Right? I don't know what it is to have an eternal purpose. I want one. I want what God promises as an eternal purpose. But I'm not going to come up with a resurrection, approach Christ, and say, oh, do I have an agenda for you? Okay? If we're all there, we'll just be happy to be there. So we have these little purposes because we're flesh. We're human. God understands that. And you know what's really amazing? As you go through life, sometimes it's in your deepest sense of loss that you actually find God. Sometimes it's in the deepest sense of loss that God becomes real and your life actually changes. But you have to lose something to get there. That's part of life, too. That is part of the Christian life. Sometimes we have to lose to find a deeper relationship with God because in that loss, God is able to come in and help us understand His greater purpose, His greater love, His eternity. We get three little clips of what God's doing. Now let's look at the second situation. Cleopas is one of my favorites, and this is also one of my favorites in this subject. And that's in John 11. Both of these have to do with the life of Jesus Christ. John 11.

And here, Christ is dealing with people who are suffering from a great loss.

So it's a long passage, but I want to read most of it because these two passages come together to really help us understand.

Now a certain man was sick, Lazarus of Bethany, the town of Mary and his sister Martha. And it was that Mary who anointed the Lord, this is John 11 verse 2, it was that Mary who anointed the Lord with fragrant oil, wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick. Therefore the sisters sent him, saying, Lord, behold, and whom you love is sick. Now let's set the stage a little bit here. Lazarus and Mary and Martha show up in the Scripture a number of times. They were very close friends of Jesus. I mean, Jesus had lots of people that he loved and interacted with, but there were some people who he was closer to than others. And these three people were very special to him. He spent a lot of time with them. He spent time in their home. So this is a very special relationship that ties Jesus to these three people. And he is very sick. And they asked for him to come and heal him. They had seen Jesus heal lots of people. They had total faith that God worked through him. They had total faith that if they asked Jesus to come, that God through him would heal. Believed it. Their faith was absolute. No lack of faith here. There's no lack of faith. That's what makes this such an interesting story. There is no lack of faith.

That Jesus heard it. And he said to the disciples, because he's not there in Bethany, he says to them, This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it. So he says, well, this isn't the death. So his disciples are like, oh, good. Okay. Whoo! Our glad Lazarus isn't going to die. And then Jesus does something that's very strange. He does not answer their request to be healed. He doesn't answer their request to come heal, to come pray. Jesus deliberately, as we will see, refused to come pray for Lazarus. Would not do it. Can you imagine that? Not only are they going to deal with a great sense of loss here, but a great test of how can God do things this way? This overwhelming sense of loss isn't the way I think God will work things out. Now, Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. And once again, John here wants to make sure we understand the depth of the relationship. These aren't just some acquaintances. You know, Jesus had become human. As a human being, there were certain people he was sort of attracted to more than others. That's just the way we are as human beings. Doesn't mean he didn't love everybody. These were three people he was very connected to. So when he heard that he was sick, he stayed two more days in the place where he was. Well, wait a minute. Isn't he supposed to rush in to help people? Doesn't he love them? He doesn't do anything. Now, this has got to be a little disconcerting to everyone. Then after this, he said to his disciples, let's go to Judea again. Now, they had another problem here. They figured one of the reasons they didn't go was because there was conspiracy there for people to kill him. So he's like, well, we understand why Jesus isn't going to go. They're going to try to kill him. Then the disciples said to him, Rabbi, lately the Jews sought to stone you, and you're going there again? Wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's talk about this, because we're with you, and if they try to stone you, they're going to try to stone us too. Okay? So let's just think about this. Before we all go traipsing down here to Bethany, let's think about, there's the people that don't like you. And Jesus answered, are there not 12 hours of the day? If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble because he sees the light of this world. But if one walks in the night, he stumbles because the light is not with him. He said these things, and they're saying, what does that mean? And after that, he says to them, our friend Lazarus sleeps, but I go that I may wake him up. Now we got to go because Lazarus, you know, we knew two days ago, he was sick and he's asleep. Then his disciples said, verse 12, Lord, if he sleeps, he'll get well. Right? That's what we all say. But someone's sick. How many times, oh, good, they're asleep. They need their rest. How many times has someone said, oh, you look terrible. Oh, yeah, I have a cold. Well, you need to go home and take lots of vitamin C and drink some hot tea and go to bed. And his disciples are good. Good. He's getting some rest. This is great. He's probably getting some chicken soup. You know, this is good for Lazarus. And then Jesus said to them plainly, verse 14, Lazarus is dead.

Understand he waited till he died. Now, most of us know this story, but remember they did not. They're in the middle of the story. They're living it. He's dead, but wait a minute. Mary sent someone here two days ago. We've watched you heal people that didn't even hardly knew God. We've watched you heal tax collectors. We've watched you heal all kinds of people. And your best friend is over here dying, and you did not go? Well, did he make sense? And then he says, but I'm glad. I'm glad he's dead. I am glad for your sakes that I was not there. You may believe. Now let's go to it. Now he knows what's going to happen. They don't. You have to remember, we keep looking at us from Jesus' viewpoint. They don't. Nobody knows anything's going to happen. All they know is they're all grieving. Now, there's a great sense of loss. Plus, it's like, but there's people there that want to kill us. That's right. That's what he's going to do in verse 16. Then Thomas, who's called the twin, said to his fellow disciples, and let us also go that we may die with him. The rabbis that intend on getting stoned. Okay, let's go. We'll just all die together. Might as well go down together. I didn't say Thomas didn't go, but I don't know. This sounds a little sarcastic to me. Oh man. Okay, well, let's all go die together here because we can't let him go by himself. So there's a lot of mixed emotions going on here. Lazarus, fear for themselves, and nothing Jesus does makes any sense. Nothing God is doing through Christ at this point makes any sense to the people involved, and that's what we have to remember. But why? Oh, I'm glad it's happened this way. But why? But why? This isn't right. This isn't fair. I'm glad it happened this way. But you waited two days. You could have stopped this. You could have done this great miracle that everybody would have known. You're the Son of God. I'm glad we did it this way. I don't understand. I know. That is God's response. I know. You don't understand.

He doesn't chastise us for not understanding. He says, I know. And Thomas says, well, then I guess we're all going to have to go die. Let's go. I don't understand this, but I guess I have to go. Now, Thomas didn't stay back. That's what's... OK. This makes no sense to me. For once, Peter kept his mouth shut. Peter's usually the one that's saying, this makes no sense. Peter's like, probably, I just keep my mouth shut on this one. There's nothing here makes sense to me. So when Jesus came, so he goes to Bethany, he found that he'd already been in the tomb for four days. And he's by the time the person with the message got to him, he'd already died. You know, they sent out a person to go find Jesus. They find him. He's died. He's still, you know, anytime he's waiting for a couple of days, then it takes him time to get there. So there's all this time here that goes on. He's been dead for four days now.

Now Bethany was near Jerusalem about two miles away. Now, the reason John puts that in there is like, he could have been there, you know, what? He had a decent walk, slow walk. He could have been here in an hour.

Jesus didn't come. And many of the Jews had joined the women around Martha and Mary to comfort them concerning their brother. Now Martha, Martha is a very, in some ways, a very mature person. We'll see, you know, there's other cases where she was so absorbed with her service and love towards others that sometimes she missed the importance of just listening to teaching. But here she shows a remarkable understanding. Martha, Martha here is a really important part of this story. Now Martha, as soon as she heard that Jesus was coming, went and met him.

But Mary was sitting in the house. Mary's the younger. Now, Martha said to Jesus, listen, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you. She didn't run up and say, Jesus, I'm so glad you came. I wish you could have been here for the funeral. Right? There was no welcoming him. It was simply, this makes no sense. I have, I'm just empty with loss.

I have lost here. And you could have changed it. You could have done something different and you did not. But I still know you're the son of God. In other words, what she's saying is, you didn't do what we expected you to do. I don't understand, but it doesn't change who you are. That is a remarkable statement of faith. Like Cleopas was lost, right? I'm lost here. I'm dead. Our hope is gone. She said, well, I know this isn't what we expected. This isn't what we wanted. But I still know you're the son of God. And Jesus said to her, your brother will rise again. And she says to him, I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.

She now goes to scripture and says, I know, I know that I do find comfort in that. I will see him again at the resurrection of the last day. So she has comfort in the scripture. She's already one step ahead of where Cleopas was when Jesus appeared to him. And now Jesus says to her, verse 25, I am the resurrection and the life who believes in me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this? And she said to him, yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God who is to come into this world.

She says, oh yeah, that doesn't change my belief in you and the belief in God the Father. It's just that this is horrible. It didn't turn out the way I expected. I don't understand. And that's what makes Martha so remarkable in this story. She did not understand, but it did not change her faith. It did not change the fact that she hurt.

Just like David going and saying, how long were you abandoning me? She walked up to a man who she knew wasn't just a man. She knew this was the Messiah, the Son of God, and said to him, why didn't you show up? You would have changed things if you would have showed up. I didn't get mad at her. He just said he'll live again.

I know that. I know the Scripture. He's actually comforting her. When he had said these things, he went his way and secretly called Mary and her sister, saying, the teacher has come, so Martha says, and is calling for you. So they go and get Mary. And Mary comes up, and the first thing she says is, where were you? Now, she doesn't have the same maturity of faith.

It's just like, where were you? You could have changed everything. He doesn't have the same conversation with her than he does with Mary, or with Martha, her sister. He simply says, where is he? He says, well, he's in a tomb over here. Go to verse 34.

He says to them, wherever you laid him, and they said to him, Lord, come and see. Now, I want you to remember, the only person in this story who has the bigger understanding is Jesus. He set it up. Nobody else does. He knows what's going to happen next. Nobody else does. So that's what makes this next verse, which when parents say, I was talking to someone who said that when they were a child, their parents said they had to memorize a scripture every day or every week. So the first one they memorized was the next one. Verse 35, Jesus wept.

Now, we read through that, and it's, oh, he cried. That shows his humanity. But it shows something even more remarkable. He was experiencing a sense of loss in the way they were. He knew what was going to happen next.

Now, think about that. So why is he so overwhelmed that he says he just broke down, weeping?

It's an empathetic response.

He has an empathetic response to everyone around him who is grieving. When you have that feeling of abandonment, when you, that sense of loss, whatever it is, is so great that it's just, I'll never get it back. It'll never be the same. Talk to people who lose an arm or a leg, and they'll say that they still feel like it's there. The sense of loss goes on for years. That sense of loss is there. God has an empathetic response to you.

He understands. We don't understand. Jesus understood. They don't understand. They didn't understand. Mary, Martha, His disciples, none of them understood. Now, remember He had actually told His disciples, oh, I'm going there to show you that I really am the Son of God. Okay. I think you're going to go there and get beat up or stoned. And we're probably going to get beat up or stoned along with you. They did not understand. You can imagine walking from Bethany back to here. They're talking about or walking to Bethany. They're talking about poor Lazarus. Boy, he was a good friend. Remember, all those times where Jesus was standing up, they'd stand up to midnight just talking. Remember? Jesus doesn't even seem that distressed over this. And yet now He's distressed. He's distressed because it's an empathetic response. When we are abandoned by God or we feel that we're abandoned by God, remember that feeling isn't reality. We haven't been abandoned by God. But it is a feeling and it's real. The feeling is real. The feeling is real. In that sense of loss, God feels it. He understands. There is an empathetic response from God.

And in both of these cases, what's He do? He sends Jesus to show up. Christ shows up and walks with us. Clevis didn't even know He was there. Martha knows He's there, but it doesn't mean a lot except, well, I know I'll see Him in the resurrection.

An empathetic response from God. He understands. He feels Jesus responded by weeping. He was overwhelmed with their sense of loss because His sense of loss would not have been the same because He knew what was going to happen next. That's what God does with you and your sense of loss. An empathetic response. Then the Jew said, see how much He loved them. And then some of them said, verse 37, could not this man, who opened the eyes of the blind, also have kept this man from dying?

Jesus comes up to the crypt and He says, roll the stone away. They say, we don't want to do that. He's been decaying in there for four days in hot weather. You really don't want to do that. He says, take it away. So they roll it away and He stands outside and He commands Lazarus to come out. They were all wrapped up. They wouldn't have been mummified, but they would have been wrapped up. They wrapped people in a cloth. In my mind, it's just like one of those mummy movies. He comes stumbling out, all wrapped up. He doesn't know what's happened. He's got to be a little confused, you know. He wakes up in the middle of a tube and comes walking out. It's bright outside and everybody's looking at him. Now, I know and you know, and very few people in life have experienced this. I mean, the people that I've lost in life are not going to come back like this. They're waiting for the resurrection. But the point of the story is, God knows what's happening. You and I don't, any more than these people did. And God's response to our sense of loss is empathy.

He shares it with us. He actually shares the loss with us. Think about that. He shares it with us.

He said, even though we feel they're alone, we're not.

Many times God's responses to things don't even make sense to long after the event. I look back at things in my life and I think, oh, I understand what God's doing now. I didn't at the time. There are times when things are like, well, life is just a failure. I've reached an absolute failure in life. And later you look back and say, that's not what was happening.

Many times there are things that happen in life. There are senses of loss that we will not understand until we meet Him. Although I think a lot of that when we get there, you know what our response is going to be? Oh, from this viewpoint, it's all pretty simple. From this viewpoint, it's actually pretty simple.

Because He sees things in this bigger scope and we see it in this little world we live in. So when you lose something in life, and we all are going to lose many times in life, we're going to lose people, we're going to lose things, we're going to lose jobs, we're going to lose things that brought us happiness. We all lose health as we get older. We lose. But that sense of loss that happens with those things, even though it brings grief and that's real, it doesn't have to lead us to a sense of hopelessness or fatalism. Because in the pit of despair, God actually hasn't abandoned us. He will send Christ to walk with us, to talk with us. He will, through His Holy Spirit, work through us in ways that we can't even imagine.

God our Father, not just Christ, God our Father has an empathetic response. Just like you can have an empathetic response to your child. You know, the little child that loses the teddy bear, everybody else says, oh, that's sort of sad, but you might see the mother sit down and cry, right? He says, well, it's just a teddy bear, why are you crying? It's an empathetic response to the child. I understand how the child feels. That's what the mother says. That's the way God is with us. An empathetic response. He will always take us back to the Scripture. We need to know this. If we don't know this, how does He bring us comfort? In Cleopas, Jesus took him right to the Scripture. With Martha, Martha responds to Christ as the Scripture. He says, good, then you know who I am. It's a wonder He didn't say, now watch what I can do. But He didn't. He says, good, now you know who I am. In both cases, the Scripture was the focal point where God talked to them. I responded back to them. Sometimes God's purpose is going to be apparent, and other times we're not going to understand. We're just not big enough. That's a hard thing for us to get. I should be able to understand it. But we don't. Well, you're telling me that even with God's Spirit, I can't understand everything? Yeah? But I think most of us have figured that out. We don't always understand. But we trust. We hold on. Because through all this, and even in a sense of loss, and sometimes it is most apparent and most intense in a sense of loss, that actually, because of that empathetic response from God, we are drawn towards Him in the Scripture. And in that, we truly discover a reality of what we talk about all the time. But we truly discover that we are the one who is the one who is the one who is the one His children.