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Lament and the Mission of God

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Lament and the Mission of God (4)

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Part 4, Finding Hope

In this series of articles, I have been considering the role that lament plays in aligning us with God’s mission on earth. My understanding of the Bible, and my personal experiences, have led me to the unwavering conviction that God redeems pain. As I wrote in the first article, I want to emphasise that God’s mission is to reveal his redeeming grace to humanity at large, and to us individually. Within that process, lament can be a critical component because it is often in the hardest times of life that we lean most heavily on God’s redemptive grace.

We have seen in this series that lamenting is appropriate for us as believers because we reflect God’s heart concerning a fallen world. We lament on a macro level for the sin, injustice, and pain that humanity experiences, and we also lament for the losses that we have personally experienced. However, lament is not a destination. It is a gift of grace through which we can encounter God and experience his tender mercy, and through which we move towards healing.

Pete Greig has written:

‘It’s a common human tendency to settle in our grief, to redefine the geography of our lives according to the contours of our pain. And, of course, when we are bereaved and hurting, it’s important to stop for a while and lament our loss. It’s not healthy to continue as if nothing is wrong. But neither is it healthy to make disappointment our permanent domain.’*

As believers in Jesus, we can trust that God will redeem our pain. He can bring good from bad! That’s why Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 4:13 that we do not grieve without hope. Our faith in Jesus means that there is always hope for healing, hope for restoration, and hope for redemption.

Ever since I wrote Grief and Grace, I have had numerous conversations with people who are processing grief. One thing I have observed is that a massive obstacle to finding hope is the barrier of guilt. Guilt can cripple us from finding healing. Whether our loss is due to death, the loss of a dream, marriage, a job, or just the general disappointments we face in the world, grief confronts us with our failings and inadequacies. Our spiritual enemy can exaggerate these to cause us to become stuck and not find healing. In this mindset, guilt compounds our grief.

If our grief is contaminated with guilt, then we need to confess it before the Lord and seek support from others. Guilt will cause us to remain stuck and prevent the process of healing.

In my journey of lament, I have learnt that the antidote to guilt is gratitude. In the days after losing my wife, I had to learn to be grateful for the small things, the memories, and the privilege of having shared life with her. I began to list them. It wasn’t an immediate cure for my pain, but it enabled me to be thankful even while grieving. I believe this is an important part of lamenting which can, over time, help us to reach a place of acceptance.

Guilt will derail us. Gratitude will strengthen us.

That’s why Paul writes:

‘Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus’ (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18).

This isn’t easy, but it is necessary. Gratitude doesn’t mean that we are automatically happy. Rather, gratitude enables us to hold on to hope. It is a survival mechanism. We can summarise the contrast as follows:

  • Grief + Guilt = hopelessness. We become stuck.
  • Grief + Gratitude = hope. We find new horizons. This is essential for lament to lead to healing.

So, we’re back to highlighting the link between lament and the mission of God. God’s redeeming love is the ultimate message of hope to a broken world. And, in his grace, he will tenderly lead us through some seemingly intolerable trials so that we can learn to hold on to hope and experience his redeeming power. This is the paradox of pain which can make it a beautiful gift.

It is this perspective that enables us to echo the words of Paul;

‘Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal’ 2 Corinthians 4:16-18.

If you are in a season of lament, then please do not lose heart. God is at work. His mission is to redeem your pain and enable you to be a beacon of hope in this hurting world.

* Pete Greig, Dirty Glory, p.124.

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Lament and the Mission of God (3)

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Part 3: God Laments

In the first article of this series, I concluded that ‘the Bible teaches that God has provided lament as a means of grace through which we can express our grief, renew our trust in him, experience his redemptive grace, and discover God’s purposes beyond our pain.’ I believe this not because the Bible is a textbook that teaches us how to handle grief and loss, but because the Bible is the revelation of God’s redemptive heart. Through that revelation, we learn that God is a lamenting God. In the second article of this series, I shared part of my testimony of how I encountered God’s grace when I experienced deep lament after the death of my wife.

Many may assume that lamenting is a uniquely human instinct—a coping mechanism to handle grief within this broken world. However, as I’ve reflected on this, I see lament as something intrinsically linked to being made in the image of God. We have the capacity for lament because God himself laments. Here are three examples from the Bible:

The Father’s Regret

From Genesis 3-6, sin takes hold of early humans. As sin gripped the world after the Fall, we encounter God as increasingly sad. This reaches a climax in Genesis 6:5-6. The NIV says that ‘the LORD regretted that he had made human beings… his heart was deeply troubled.’ The Amplified version says that the LORD was ‘deeply grieved in his heart‘. The heart of the Father is broken by the rejection of his creation. This lament of the Father caused him to act in judgement (the flood) and grace (choosing Noah), foreshadowing how he would act in judgement and grace through the cross. The Father’s heart is still broken by sin, but his mission has been to redeem our sins so that our relationship with him can be restored.

The Son’s Tears

For you or me, what we now call Palm Sunday would have been the highlight of our ministry: the crowds are cheering, prophecies are being fulfilled, and as Jesus is approaching Jerusalem, people are declaring him blessed. Yet, something else is stirring in Jesus’ heart. This is not a moment of vindication or an opportunity to be exploited for personal gain. Rather, he weeps. Luke 19:41 says; ‘As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it.’ He then describes his lament as he foresaw the suffering of the city that would reject him and reject the opportunity for perfect peace (Luke 19:41:44). The lament of Christ didn’t lead him to despair or inaction. Rather, it led to a garden where more tears were shed (drops of blood like tears) as the Son surrendered to the will of the Father so that his ultimate mission would be accomplished—although not in the way the crowds anticipated.

The Spirit’s Concern

In Ephesians 4:30 Paul instructs us (indeed, warns us) not to grieve the Holy Spirit. Our actions as believers can grieve the Holy Spirit. His lament is that we are allowing the world to stunt our growth as Christians and impact our effectiveness in the world (see the surrounding verses in Ephesians 4:29-32). It’s a breathtaking thought the Holy Spirit laments over our continued sinfulness.

Considering just these three examples we can see that the Godhead—Father, Son and Spirit—lament. God laments that we choose death over life. He laments for the pain that his children endure because of sin. And he laments because our sin continues to stunt our growth into the likeness of Christ.

Do we lament over the same things? There is grief within the Trinity and we can conclude that it is godly to grieve. But let our lament align with God’s so that our mission can also align with his. Lament is not the end of the story. And we’ll consider this in more detail in the next article.

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Lament and the Mission of God (2)

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Part 2, My Ally in Grief

In part 1, I introduced the topic of lament as a key biblical process to help discover God’s purposes beyond our pain. Before considering the topic further, I want to share my context and how I discovered that God was my ally, not my enemy when I went through deep grief.

In 2016, my wife, Laura, died suddenly from a brain aneurysm. Over the past few years, I have written and shared extensively about facing the future I didn’t choose (please explore this website!) The following (adapted) extract from Grief and Grace shares some of how I related to God in the immediate aftermath of Laura’s death.

So where was God in all of this? How did my faith shape my response to this tragedy? Or, rather, how did walking through this tragedy shape my faith? When I was sitting by Laura’s bedside in hospital in the period before they turned off her life support, I had simply prayed, ‘Lord, everything I’ve believed since childhood had better be true’. Maybe it was a child-like or a childish prayer. But right then I needed a father. A daddy. And I called out to my heavenly father desperately hoping that he would give me the faith and resilience to survive the storm.

Laura passed away at 8.30 in the morning and a couple of hours later I was back at the holiday centre where we were staying. The news had been circulated and friends and family were traveling from various places to come and join us. While waiting, I went for a walk around the grounds of the centre – just needing some space and time alone. My mind was a bit numb and the gravity of what had just taken place was slowly beginning to sink in. My emotional turmoil was in stark contrast to the serene surroundings and incredible ocean views. At one point I stood still and tried to reflect on what I was feeling. I thought about God. Was I meant to feel angry with him for taking Laura too soon? Should I be resentful that this had happened to me? But my mind didn’t dwell on those things. Rather, in that moment, I experienced anger against death itself.

I hated death. Death is horrible. I had never felt this hatred for death before. Particularly the death of someone who still had so much to give. She still had so much life to live, and still had so many people to love. I had not invited death to visit my world and turn it upside down. But it came, unprepared as I was. And it occurred to me that death was not God’s plan. He hates death. And I wondered how he feels when, on a moment by moment basis, the creatures that he loves so much, have their life on this earth extinguished through a myriad of tragic events. ‘Wow’, I prayed, ‘that must cause you so much pain’.

And then it dawned on me that God was not celebrating that Laura had died. He never intended for a man to be left as a widower and for three children to grow up without their mother. No. God understood my pain for this was not his plan for human beings. He also understood my pain because, in order to defeat the consequences of death, he had watched his only Son die on the cross. This is what I’d believed since childhood. The truth of this historical fact had shaped my life. And now, when it mattered most, I didn’t feel disconnected from God. Instead, I felt that perhaps I could relate to him a bit better. We shared in this moment of grief. I realised that God was my ally, not my enemy. He was with me in the valley of the shadow of death.

My primary lesson throughout my grief journey has been that God is my ally. And he is my ally because we both lament death. It was never his plan. In the next article, I will look at the biblical evidence that God is a lamenting God who deeply identifies with our grief.

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Lament and the Mission of God (1)

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Part 1, Introduction

What image does the word “lament” bring to your mind? It can feel a bit Old Testament, can’t it? We associate lament with many of the psalms (indeed, seven of the first ten psalms are lamenting songs). There’s even a whole Old Testament book called Lamentations, which contains the laments of Jeremiah during a particularly tough time in Israel’s history.

But to consign lamenting to the Old Testament and conclude that it’s not relevant for New Testament believers would be a mistake. I hope to show in this series of articles that lament should play an intrinsic role in our lives as Christians. Becoming a Christian doesn’t make us immune from pain. But how we respond when we go through grief and loss is where the rubber hits the road of our faith. I believe that lamenting provides a powerful counter-cultural opportunity for us to not only find God’s tender mercy but also help us to identify with his overall mission. Now, the mission of God in the world is multi-faceted and I don’t want to run the risk of defining this too narrowly. However, for the purposes of these articles, I want to underline that God’s mission is to reveal his redeeming grace to humanity at large, and to us individually. Within that process, lament can be a critical component because it is often in the hardest times of life that we lean most heavily on God’s redemptive grace. We’ll unpack this further as we proceed through the articles.

The dictionary defines lament as a passionate expression of grief or sorrow. The implication is that lamenting is a deep form of mourning. However, author Mark Vroekop in his excellent book, Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy, provides greater nuance when considering Christian lament:

‘Lament is the honest cry of a hurting heart wrestling with the paradox of pain and the promise of God’s goodness… lament stands in the gap between pain and promise… Lament is a prayer in pain that leads to trust… lament is a path to praise as we are led through our brokenness and disappointment.’

I believe that the Bible teaches that God has provided lament as a means of grace through which we can express our grief, renew our trust in him, experience his redemptive grace, and discover God’s purposes beyond our pain. We will unpack this in the articles that follow as we reflect on the revelation that God laments, as we look at some biblical examples of lament, and as we consider lament as a pathway to healing. My prayer is that you will discover that lament needs to be a vital component of our discipleship through which we can more deeply engage with God’s mission to reveal his redeeming grace.