Christian Grieve Your Losses
Table of Contents
One of the best ways to deal with the loss of a loved one is to grieve your losses. It can cause mental health problems like depression, insomnia, and anxiety if you do not. Taking this time to be sad and reflect on your memories will allow you to heal properly. Often times it seems Christians want to skip right over the grief process. In my own life, I know one of the hardest things for me to do was to learn to grieve my losses, no matter how insignificant they may seem. To be perfectly honest, I am still working on it. In Lamentations, we read.
“The roads to Zion mourn,
for none come to the festival;
all her gates are desolate;
her priests groan;
her virgins have been afflicted,
and she herself suffers bitterly.” (Lamentations 1:4)
We can’t simply bypass the grief process and think everything will turn out ok. Listen to the words of Jesus in Matthew 5:4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” In His famous Sermon on The Mount, Jesus taught us in context that those who mourn over their sin and repent are blessed. I am not saying all losses are because of some sin in our life, but I am saying that all losses do stem from. If sin never entered the earth, loss would never be known. So why should we grieve these losses?
If we do not grieve over our sin we repress our ability to see God’s grace.
Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains (John 9:41 ESV). Charles Spurgeon once said, “It is not our littleness that hinders Christ; but our bigness. It is not our weakness that hinders Christ; it is our strength. It is not our darkness that hinders Christ; it is our supposed light that holds back his hand.” The only way to see is to admit you are blind; if you want to experience God’s grace, we must grieve over our sin.
God’s Word in Hosea reads Sow for yourselves righteousness;
reap steadfast love;
break up your fallow ground,
for it is the time to seek the LORD,
that he may come and rain righteousness upon you.
(Hosea 10:12 ESV) As followers of Christ, we must break up the unplowed ground of our hearts and feel the grief in all of the ways we have not sought God. If we truly want to see spiritual change in our life, we must go through grief. We must grieve our losses.
Secondly, notice that.
Grief brings about God’s healing
In the beginning, God created man to have unbroken fellowship with Him and with one another. However, man sinned and broke that fellowship. We were created to have this perfect connection with God, but sin made us depart from it. What is the one thing that we desire? The Bible answers that for us. “What is desired in a man is steadfast love, and a poor man is better than a liar. (Proverbs 19:22 ESV)
Deep down in our hearts, what everyone wants is to know that love is always there. The problem we are faced with is that from the time we were small children, the only love we experience is a love that is anything but steadfast. Even in the best families do not give their children everything they need when it comes to love because no one can love perfectly.
There is only one unfailing love, and that is the love from God. So whenever we look to another human being for love, we never get ut; instead, we experience the one thing that we do not want to experience, the one thing that this blog post is about loss. When we experience this over and over again, we feel stuck in this cycle of love and loss, so how do we respond? We respond by trying to stop the pain by ignoring it or pushing it down, never dealing with it and covering it up. This is why the proven tells us it is better to be poor than a liar.
The writer is saying, “hey, it is better to be honest, and just admit that they really want a steadfast love instead of substituting with something that will never satisfy. This leads me to this
We cover up our need for love with things
We do this repeatedly in our lives, and the funny thing is we may not even acknowledge it. The kid that gets bullied in school becomes someone famous to gain a sense of value and power. That kid that felt like they could never satisfy their father seeks significance in their job to show they really are worth something. You see, the problem with the solution being found in things means the underlying need is never met; the one thing that we were all built for is never realized, and that is steadfast love. This is why we must grieve our losses, or we will never heal.
How God heals through grief
Think of the Canaanite woman in Matthew 5; she came to Jesus and proclaimed, “Lord Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering.” At first, Jesus ignored her, then the passage speaks on race and ends with comparing this woman the family dog. The interaction is fascinating, especially considering this woman is coming to Jesus for help. It is almost as if Jesus adds to her problems with how He responds and interacts with the woman. One could say that Jesus was using her as an example because he already knew she would be an example of faith.
Regardless of whether you read the passage, it all seems harsh unless there is something else going on that we sometimes overlook.
Think about this woman and her suffering think about the grief that she must have faced day after day as she watched her daughter suffer. Think about how society probably judged her. She surely thought the answer to end life’s sufferings was for her daughter to be healed. However, just like us, she lacked an eternal perspective.
We are just like this woman; we look at our temporary problems and think they are the biggest obstacles to our happiness and freedom. Yet from the perspective of Jesus, they are nothing from the protective of Jesus; this woman had a far bigger problem, and that was she had an eternal problem. Sure He could heal her daughter, but if she failed to understand God’s ultimate plan revealed in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, she would only have a temporary fix.
What does Jesus do? He teaches her that she had to rid herself of earthly pride and ask him for help. In her humbling herself amid her grief over her daughter, she walked away with healing and an eternal solution. There are times that God uses our attachments to an earthly problem to open us for healing that is not contingent on the problems of this life.
Grief helps us grow and mature
James tells us Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. (James 1:2–4 ESV)
He is not saying that we ignore grief when we go through trials. He is talking about the ultimate goal of persevering through our trials with faith. I have had to learn to grieve my losses in my own life, and I am still learning to do so, but as I persevere through those losses, it adds maturity in my faith.
I have taken the time to grieve and still have to take time to grieve. I have to engage in the grief process and realize the goal is that my joy will come from God. For most of my life, I have tried to escape grief, push it down, and hold on to other things, but when I engage and realize my joy will come from God, I gain maturity, and when I don’t, my growth is stunted.
So what should we do when we go through a difficult time? Well, first, we can pray that God would fix the situation so that our grief can stop. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. However, we must be ready for our prayer not to be answered our way. We may have to remain in grief for a period. So often, when we feel God is not answering, we take matters into our own hands and bring ourselves comfort by an earthly means. This is why when we are grieving, we will eat more, or spend more, or any number of things because we are trying to bring ourselves comfort.
When we try to bring ourselves comfort, we are not going to learn anything about the will of God. When we feel disappointed by our prayers not being answered, and then we actually grieve the trial, we grow. Why? Because it is not our will being done but God’s will for us in the middle of that situation.
Right now, I am trying to find a job; it is hard when I apply for a job and don’t get it or send my resume to a church and don’t hear back, but where is my security? Is it in things or in God? My security is not in a job, sure I need one to earn money, but that is not where my security is at. It is not in my health because it will fail. Our life is full of disappointments, one right after another, but those disappointments can turn into the way we can bring comfort to others going through the same trial. Every single loss we go through and grieve through with faith creates an opportunity for us to become anchored in the providence of an almighty God who has the whole world in His hands.
To be honest, when our life is going well, it is great, and no doubt God has designed us in a way that we are to enjoy our lives. However, we must understand as followers of Christ that it is not part of God’s plan that we seek heaven on earth. We must go through the process of grief to prepare us for the next life. When we read our Bible, we final all kinds of accounts, teachings, and examples of how grief refines our faith.
The greatest example we have of this is found in Christ, in whose example we are all called to follow. In the book of Hebrews, we read, “Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him,”
Christian, it is ok to grieve your losses, and it is even ok to grieve in front of others that; grief does not have to rob your faith of its joy; there is meaning in the trials you face. I actually started writing this last week sometime and finished tonight when my heart is heavy with grief for someone I love and as he lay in that bed and I held his hand and told him I love him even amid the heartache, there can be joy because death is not the victor Christ is.