Episode #343 When God Meets You in Grief – How to Bring Your Feelings to God

Hey, friend. Today we're talking about grief and how we can bring even that really hard feeling to the Lord. I wanna start off this episode by saying if you are going through something hard, if you are grieving a loss, maybe you're in a long journey of grief and you're preparing your heart for a loss that's looming in the near future, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for the pain that you're navigating.

We are not created to grieve. We're not created for this loss and pain. That's a result of living in a fallen world, and I'm not the only one who empathizes with this pain. God does too.

We're in this series bringing our feelings to the Lord, not withholding them, not trying to clean them up before we come to him, and not even just separating them from what we can see as spiritual activity. There were so many seasons where I had hard things that I was navigating, and I separated them from what I deemed as spiritual or things that I thought God cared about. I would pray for an answer or I would pray for relief, but I didn't really feel safe to share how I was feeling with the Lord, and so I would separate that. Okay, my spiritual activity is worship and gratitude and reading my Bible and praying for people and going to church, serving in church. But the things I'm wrestling through, the pain that I'm navigating, the places my heart is hurt? God might not be as interested in all of those things.

But that's not true.

God can handle all of our emotions and he longs to draw us close to himself. He longs to share himself with us. And so as we go through everything in life, we get to have those moments as places that we share with God. Even in the tender things like grief.

There's a couple passages of scripture that I identified to share with us today, and not so much to teach from, but to notice in scripture how God meets people in the moment of grief.

And so the first one is from John 11:32-36. And this is when Jesus' friend and Mary and Martha's brother Lazarus has died. It says:

“Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

See, Jesus was off doing ministry and he received word that Lazarus was sick, and he didn't come until after Lazarus had passed away. For some of us, we've experienced the loss of losing a loved one, and I'm in that category that no one wants to be in either. And we can come to the Lord and saying, God, you are everywhere. You are all powerful, and yet my loved one died, and yet this horrible thing happened. What is going on?

How could this be? You had the ability to stop it and you didn't.

But let's look at how Jesus responds to her grief.

It says, “When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled.

  And he said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.

Jesus wept.”

Jesus meets us in the places of loss and grief. He is not indifferent to our pain, but it grieves him. It troubles him. Jesus knew that he was going to raise Lazarus from the dead, and yet he still wept with those who were grieving. He was moved in his spirit with compassion for them, and he met them in their grief.

The other example I wanted to share is from the story of Ruth. Ruth is the daughter-in-law to Naomi, and the book of Ruth begins with her story where Naomi had two sons and Ruth married one of them, and then both sons died. Naomi is gonna travel home to her homeland and Ruth is saying, Hey, I'm going with you. Where you go? I will go where you stay, I'll stay. That's where we get that from.

I wanna read for you first from Ruth1:20-21. And this is where Naomi is naming her grief. And she said to them, “Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. I went away full, and the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi, when the Lord has testified against me and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me?”

Naomi's like, Hey, the way you used to know me, it's not true of me any longer. Because of my grief. Because of the loss that I have endured.

And God doesn't correct her for it. God doesn't reject her for it. God allows her her grief. If you're going through a season of grief, know that God will enter it with you. The posture that he takes is presence. That he comes to be with you. Yes, to bring strength. Yes, to bring comfort. Yes, to bring healing. But sometimes we wanna rush ahead to those moments and kind of seek out that solution, that answer to the problem, that relief, and we miss the opportunity to allow God to be in it with us.

And so right now we have that opportunity. Whether you're grieving something large or small, God can meet you in it and here's a question that you can ask him:

God, where can I sense your compassion meeting me in my grief even quietly?

Have a good talk.

And if you've been encouraged by this content, please share it with a friend and help them grow in their conversational relationship with God too!

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