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JESUS’ UNUSUAL WAY OF DEALING WITH OUR PAIN
– MORE THAN A MAN SERIES
Good morning, Life Fellowship. Some of you may remember the Band R.E.M.’s
song, ‘Everybody Hurts Sometime.’ Everybody hurts sometime. If there is one thing we
know about life, it is this - pain is inevitable. Pain will come your way if you live long
enough. Keep your eyes open and the wave of pain will come crashing down on each of
our lives.
And we can respond in one of two ways. We can sink, or we can swim. But pain
will head each of our ways. Maybe you have read the book by Philip Yancey, ‘Where is
God When it Hurts?’ It is in seasons of walking through the valley, it is in seasons when
we are in pain that we end up with many questions about the goodness and
omnibenevolence of God. It is the struggles of life that we face that cause us at times to
question, ‘God, where are you?’
That may be you this morning in this room. You might know deep pain in your
life like the pain of a marriage that is on the line. Or the pain of having a child that has
gone astray. Or the pain of being secretly addicted to pain pills. Or the pain of being an
alcoholic. Or the pain of having no job. Or the pain of being wracked with emotional
depression, anxiety, worries, insecurities and all the other emotions that can bombard our
lives. Maybe it is the pain of feeling like you are always on the outside looking in. Or
the pain of feeling ostracized in your work. Or the pain of feeling ostracized in your
school. Maybe it is the pain of feeling like no one gets you. The pain of feeling like
mom and dad don’t understand you. The pain of not having a dad involved in your life.
The pain of not having a mom who seems attached. The pain of having sibling rivalry.
Pain comes to us in some form in our lives. Sit on the shore of life long enough
and a wave will form named pain. And when it comes crashing down, the question is,
‘How will you respond?’ You must not allow it to crash your life.
This morning I want to talk with you about this idea of Jesus’ unusual ways of
dealing with our pain. Because sometimes we don’t quite understand what He is up to in
the midst of our suffering. And I am going to tell you something. If we don’t understand
His unusual ways of meeting us, or dealing with us in our pain, we will live life confused
as Christians. We will also feel as though God is not meeting up to our expectations, but
here is what I want you to understand. The way that God deals with pain, and the way
that we deal with pain when ministering to each other, are two different things.
Look what Isaiah has to say here in Isaiah Chapter 55 and verses 8 and 9. “For
my thoughts are not your thoughts; neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways,
and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
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If you would at this time, please turn in your Bible to John Chapter 11. And we
are going to come to this passage where Jesus is going to deal with Mary and Martha in
the midst of their pain in some very unusual ways. He is not going to handle their pain
the way we would handle pain. He is going to deal with them in a different manner. And
I want to assure you, if you will grasp what this passage is showing us this morning, you
can navigate the pain that you are going through a million times better.
How many of you would like to know how to navigate pain without being
drowned by the wave of pain? Not many, right? Well, that is no big deal because I know
you are just kind of not wanting to raise your hands. And that is okay. But we all really
want to know how to deal with our pain better. And you have to understand that Jesus’
ways are not our ways. He works in a way that feels a bit like a conundrum to us. He is
a mysterious God, and we cannot always get our hands around God. And when we try to,
we set ourselves up to be defeated, because there is no way we can wrap our arms around
the ways of God.
But what we can do is better understand that He works in our lives in unusual
ways. And in particular, when pain comes on the shore of your life, you will begin to ask
questions like, ‘How could you, God?’ ‘Where are you, God?’ ‘What is the deal, God?’
‘How could you let this happen, God?’ And if you are not careful, you will act like
someone who does not know the mind of God. And if we understand the Scriptures, it
can help us navigate through the treacherous waters called pain.
It is kind of like this. Tony Evans describes this idea of pain by liking it to going
to a fitness center and working out with weights. And he says, “Weights can create pain
that is a good kind of pain in your life. You lift weights and our muscles need resistance
in order to develop.” And if you have ever worked out, you know when you work out
with weights, the weights create a resistance that allows you to get that six pack that you
want, get those lines in the shoulders that you want, all that kind of a muscle tone fitness
that you want. That is what weights will do.
But if someone were to walk into the gym and pick up the same weights that you
were doing an incline dumbbell chest press with, and they picked up the dumbbell and
chucked it at your face, then the weight would have been used in a way not to develop
you, but rather to destroy you. And when it comes to God, He wants to develop our
spiritual muscles, and He will allow weights to come into our lives in the form of pain.
And what Satan wants to do is to destroy you while God wants to develop you.
And if you understand that there can be a purpose to your pain, it can help you to
navigate your pain. Like a woman in labor, she is willing to go through the arduous pain
because a baby will shortly be arriving. And as we come to John Chapter 11 I want you
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to meet Mary and Martha. They are hurting deeply. Their brother is dying, and they are
going to send a message for Jesus. They are going to send out an SOS for help. And I
want you to pick up with me, if you will, in John Chapter 11 and verse 1. “Now a certain
man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha.” Now
Mary and Martha are the sisters of Lazarus, and they live in Bethany, which is only two
miles away from Jerusalem. In fact, it is a little bit less than two miles.
(Points to the map on screen.) We have a map here and you can’t see the location
as good as I would like, but you can kind of see the Dead Sea right in here, and Bethany
would be right around here, and Jerusalem would be just a few miles away. And then
you have the Mediterranean Sea. And we know that Jesus has been camping out because
He left and He went back to where John the Baptist baptized Him near the Jordon River.
And He headed back there at the end of John Chapter 10.
So now we are in this place where Mary and Martha are in Bethany a few miles
away from Jerusalem, and they are suffering. They are struggling because their brother is
ill. Verse 2, “It was Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment, and wiped His feet
with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was ill.” Now it doesn’t tell us what kind of
illness that Lazarus was suffering from, but we know that it is lethal because if you have
ever read the rest of the story you know that things don’t turn out the best for Lazarus, at
least in part of the story.
It says that Mary is the one who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped His
feet with her hair. We are going to come to that story in John Chapter 12, so I am going
to allow a little suspense to ride over you before I begin to unpack that. But Mary was a
worshipper. And you will remember the story of Mary and Martha and how Jesus would
show up at times to visit with them. And on one occasion He shows up and Martha is all
stressed out and worried trying to prepare a meal. And we know how Mary is, she is
sitting at the feet of Jesus, drinking in from His well.
And we often talk about how we can resonate. We often have Marys’ who can do
a good job at sitting at the feet of Jesus. But then we talk about how a lot of us relate
more to Martha. We are worry warts. We are busybodies. We are always anxious. You
could say that Martha was a worrier and Mary was a worshipper. But we will learn more
about Mary and Martha in a few weeks as we will talk and focus in on Chapter 12.
But at this point you need to know that Lazarus is sick. He is the brother of Mary
and Martha. And the location where they are at this time is just a few miles away from
Jerusalem. So pick up with me in verse 3, “So his sisters sent to Him saying, Lord, he
whom you love is ill.” Now before we begin to unpack that, let me just say a couple of
things. Let’s not become numb to what they are feeling. We read the newspaper often,
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don’t we? And what we get in the newspaper is ‘bad news.’ All you have to do is look at
a paper like today’s that said, ‘Ten Christian Aid Workers Slain in Afghanistan.’ And
you can walk through this paper and get one bad blurb after another. And you know what
can happen? We can become numbed to the pain that is going on in the world that we
live in.
Now in some ways that numbness is a sense of God’s protection. Can you
imagine every time you are flipping through the paper, every time you are watching the
news, and you would just begin to cry. I mean we would be just an emotional mess. So
you can say it is a sovereign work of grace that there is some numbness. But every now
and then we have to remind ourselves to be jolted out of our numbness, because what can
happen is we can become anesthetized to what is taking place.
And so when we think about these sisters, Mary and Martha, go there with them.
Put yourself in their shoes. Their brother is dying. They are a close knit family. They
are hurting. Picture someone in this church right now and their brother is dying. We are
going to feel some empathy for that person, right? All of us have known the feeling at
one time or another in our lives of having lost someone we love, and what that feels like.
Maybe you are trying to recover right now because you have lost a loved one.
One of the things that has been difficult for me watching my parents get older is knowing
that as the older they get the more imminent death is. And none of us are going to live
forever. We can die at any age. But when I think about my parents getting older, I can’t
help but think about it when we spend time together. It seems like every time I say
goodbye, my brain starts thinking, ‘how much longer?’ I sat with my dad over lunch this
past week and we had a wonderful time together. And I just told him how much I loved
him while we were having lunch together. He went to the doctor and his platelets are low
and we are waiting to find out what is wrong with his platelets. But I just began to
encourage him. And I told him I really wanted him to take care of himself. I told him I
wanted him to know that I loved having him around. I told him I wanted him to know
that I had a tremendous amount of respect for him and that I was not ready for him to die.
I want him to take good care of himself. And I just kind of had that moment where I
went to that place in my mind of how I don’t want to be in the shoes of Mary and Martha,
losing a loved one. And we all can relate to that because we care for our loved ones.
Now what is interesting about Mary and Martha and Lazarus is when you think
about the Bible and how it validates itself. It is interesting that in 1873 they found an
ossuary, which is a bone box, right outside of Bethany with the names inscribed Mary,
Martha and Lazarus. And they would bury families sometimes in these ossuaries. And
so in 1873. archeologists found a bone box with the names Mary, Martha and Lazarus.
That does something to my insides, it kind of gives you the chills, doesn’t it? Wow!
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Almost two thousand years later, a bone box was found with the names Mary, Martha
and Lazarus. Now those were common names, and perhaps it was coincidence, but I
think it is a great coincidence. I have heard it once said before that coincidence is when
God is trying to remain anonymous.
So in verse 3, it says, “So the sisters sent to Him saying, Lord, he whom you love
is ill.” They sent to Him. They sent out an SOS. Now we have to understand that this is
pre-pony express days. Okay? They couldn’t tweet Jesus. There was no Facebook
moment for Jesus. There was no iPhone to pick up and say, ‘Yo Jesus,’ or drop him a
text. They couldn’t fly a Fed Ex to Him. The way to get news was slow in that culture.
And so they send out an SOS to Jesus, and we learn a great principal right here. And we
learn a principal that is known as, ‘when you are in pain, go to Jesus.’
That is what they did. They sent for Jesus. And sometimes Jesus is the last place
we turn when we are in pain. We want to figure it out ourselves. We want to think that
we can put our life back together. But in this particular situation, they go to Jesus. What
are you doing in your pain today? Perhaps you are struggling with the pain that we
talked about, and you are trying to carry the load on your own. Do me a favor. Go to
Jesus. Go to Him right now. Go to Him in your heart and say, ‘Yes, Jesus, you are the
one I need to meet in the midst of my pain. You are the one I need to come to my rescue.’
Go to Jesus!
I like how they appeal to Him by sending Him a messenger. “So the sisters sent
to Him saying, Lord, whom you love is ill.” So this messenger would go and find Jesus
and say, ‘Hey Jesus, you need to understand something. Mary and Martha want you to
know that Lazarus is ill. They wanted me to tell you, He whom you love is ill.’ Notice
they don’t appeal to Jesus out of their own desires, they appeal to Jesus by saying, “He
whom you love is ill.” So make sure you let Jesus know the one that He loves is sick.
They are reminding Jesus that He loves Lazarus. And so if He really loves Lazarus He is
going to come through. He is going to come to Bethany, right?
A lot of times when we go to God in our prayers perhaps we should appeal to His
love for our fellow creatures that we are praying for, not to our own needs in the moment.
And Mary and Martha appeal to Him based on the one that He loves, Lazarus.
In verse 4, we continue on in the narrative, “But when Jesus heard it, He said,
This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God so that the Son of God
may be glorified through it.” You can circle the words ‘glorified through it.’ Because
when you tend to think about the word glorified, what we think of is this idea of praising
God. This does not end in death. It is meant so that the Son of God may be praised
through it. But that is not the way that the Greek is being used here. It is meant so that
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the Son of God can be praised. It carries this idea of unveiling, of revelation. This does
not end in death. It is for the glory of God so that His glory could be better unveiled, so
that people could have a better revelation of just who He was walking on the earth.
And so what Jesus wanted that messenger to understand was that it was not going
to ultimately end in death. What was going to happen in this story is people are going to
have a greater sense of who He was. That He was more than a man. And that is what
Jesus is saying in that moment.
We pick up in verse 5, “Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister, and Lazarus, so
when He heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where He
was.” Here is Jesus’ unusual way of dealing with our pain. He stays two days longer.
The SOS comes, ‘Hey Jesus, Lazarus is dying. You have to rush here.’ And the
messenger goes back all by himself.
Can you imagine what that felt like to Mary and Martha, when they saw the
messenger returning alone. ‘Where’s Jesus?’ ‘He didn’t come. He stayed behind.’ Can
you hear them saying, ‘What? Doesn’t He care? Doesn’t He understand what we are
going through? Doesn’t He understand our pain? I thought He loved Lazarus.’ You
can kind of feel that moment, can’t you? Jesus’ unusual ways of dealing with our pain.
What does He do? It is called delayed response. You are in pain and you think
He should come to your rescue on your timetable. But God’s timetable is not always our
timetable. God sometimes shows up at a time when we least expect it. And so here in
the midst of this pain, the response is delayed. I mean, can you imagine, coming up to
me and saying, ‘Bobby, you don’t understand. Roland, is in the Dominican Republic,
and he is dying. Something bad has happened.’ And I would say, ‘Okay, thanks for
letting me know.’ And I drop a tweet to pass to Roland, but I don’t go to him.
We don’t respond that way as individuals, do we? When our loved ones are
hurting, we go and try to minister to them. But Jesus? He is supposed to be the greatest
comforter of all, and He just lets us sit in our pain. How unusual. How strange of a way
of dealing with us. I bet you are curious to know why, aren’t you? I bet you want to
know why would He possibly do such a thing to us? We don’t mess around when
someone we love is hurt or ill.
I don’t know if you remember the country song by Blake Shelton called, ‘The
Baby.’ I can enjoy listening to some good country music sometimes, and this is some of
the lyrics to that song:
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“My brother said that I was rotten to the core
I was the youngest child, so I got by with more
I guess she was tired by the time I came along
She'd laugh until she cried, I could do no wrong
She would always save me because I was her baby
I worked a factory in Ohio, a shrimp boat in the Bayou
I drove a truck in Birmingham, turned 21 in Cincinnati
I called home to mom and daddy, I said, "Your boy is now a man"
She said, "I don't care if you're 80, you'll always be my baby"
I got a call in Alabama, said, "Come on home to Louisiana"
And come as fast as you can fly 'cause your momma really needs you
And says she's got to see you, she might not make it through the night
The whole way I drove 80 so she could see her baby
She looked like she was sleepin' and my family had been weepin'
By the time that I got to her side and I knew that she'd been taken
And my heart it was breakin', I never got to say goodbye
I softly kissed that lady and cried just like a baby.”
That’s how we respond when a loved one is hurting. We drive 80 miles an hour,
we hurry, we rush. But Jesus, He just kind of does what He does. Why? He is on the
Father’s time clock. And He moves when the Father says so. He just becomes like a shy
God sometimes, when we need Him the most.
C.S. Lewis, in his book, ‘A Grief Observed’ writes, “Meanwhile where is God?
(Speaking about when pain hits.) This is one of the most disquieting symptoms, when you
were happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him; if you turned to Him then
with praise you will be welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when you are need is
desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your
face, and a sound of bolting, and double bolting on the inside. After that silence you may
as well turn away.”
What is going on, Jesus? What are you doing here? Let me say this. I love
interpreting Scripture in light of Scripture, and I am so grateful verse 5 comes before
verse 6. Again verse 6 says He waited two days. But let’s go back and revisit verse 5
together. “Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister, and Lazarus.” It is like John
anticipates that we are going to wrestle with this, and he is saying, ‘Before you get out of
control here, understand something. Jesus loves them.’
And here is what I want to tell you right now. In your pain, never confuse the
silence of God with the love of God. Never confuse the silence of God with the love of
God. Just because He is not answering your request on your timetable, don’t think that
He has checked out. He has a perfect plan. He is prophetic. You see Jesus is going to do
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something greater than their request. They want to experience a healing, but Jesus is
going to do more than a healing. And sometimes while we are in the midst of our pain,
waiting for God to come through, He is upping the ante. He has grand visions for the
future because He knows what you don’t. And that is the future. You know the moment.
And in the moment your pain is saying, ‘Get me out of here.’ But He is saying, ‘That
pain produces. Hang in there.’ And He helps you to sit still in the moment and to hang
in there.
What you need to ask in the midst of those difficulties is, ‘What can I learn from
this pain?’ Refuse to panic. If we are not careful we will tend to think of God like this,
with a remote control. And you go to God and you say, ‘Oh God, my brother’s dying.’
And we get this image of God smiling and hitting the pause button. Just holding it right
there. Right? He just kind of stops everything for you and lets you just sit in it. ‘God I
just lost my job. I need you so much.’ And we think he just smiles, and hits pause. And
just lets us camp in the midst of that. ‘God I just found out that I’m dying from cancer.’
‘So what.’ And pause. And we tend to think that way, don’t we? Or we think that God
just hears about our pain, ‘Oh God I desperately need you.’ ‘You do?’ And pause again.
Isn’t that just our image of God, just kind of detached? Stuck on pause?
But what we need to do is we need to look at the Bible and when we do that what
happens is we realize that God has not paused at all. You can push ‘Play’ because this is
a God who is animated in all of our life. He is working through us powerfully and He
knows everything that we are going through. And He knows how to handle our
situations. But the question is, ‘Do you trust Him to deal with your pain?’ ‘Do you trust
that He knows the end product that your pain will produce?’
Verse 7, “Then after this He said to the disciples, Let us go to Judaea again.
The disciples said to Him, Rabbi, the Jews were just now seeking to stone you, and are
you going there again?” ‘Jesus, remember you are on the Ten Most Wanted List in
Jerusalem. Bethany is less than two miles away. Are you mad?’ And I love that about
Jesus. He is always more willing to follow the Father than He is to follow His fears. We
often follow our fears more than the Father, don’t we?
How many opportunities do we miss out on life because we follow our fears?
How many people don’t go to the mission field because they won’t follow the Father, but
they follow their fears? How many people are going to stand before God someday and
they are going to realize that their life only shook out to twenty percent of what it could
have been, because they didn’t follow the Father. Instead they were paralyzed by their
fears. Some of you could be paralyzed by your fears. God has a calling on your life, He
has asked you week after week after week to get out of yourself, to start following Him,
and you continue to stay fearful. Some of you have social anxieties that need to be dealt
with. It causes you to isolate. And you need to understand that there is a person behind it
known as Satan who wants to keep you isolated from the community of God, to keep you
isolated from ministering. And so you don’t go into the public. You only go if there are
lots of people around because the anxieties rack your life.
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Jesus followed the Father and faced His fears. And the disciples didn’t get it. He
was going to a place where they wanted Him dead. Would you do that? Would you go
to a place knowing they wanted you dead? It is a question we all have to ask.
Verse 8, “The disciples said to Him, Rabbi, the Jews were just now seeking to
stone you, and are you going there again? Verse 9, “Jesus answered, Are there not
twelve hours in a day? Anyone who walks in the day he does not stumble because he
sees the light of this world.” Verse 10, “But if anyone walks in the night he stumbles
because the light is not in him.” To help us to get a better understanding of those verses,
Tom Constable, a professor that I had at Dallas Theological Seminary writes this:
“The Jews and the Romans commonly regarded daylight hours as twelve, and the
nighttime hours as the other twelve. Literally Jesus was referring to the daylight hours.
Metaphorically the daylight hours represented the Father’s will. Jesus was safe as long
as He did the Father’s will. For the disciples, as long as they continued to follow Jesus,
the light of the world, they would not stumble. Walking in the night pictures behaving
without divine illumination or authorization. Living in the realm of darkness, that is evil,
is dangerous.”
Pick up in verse 11, “After saying these things, He said to them, Our friend
Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I will go awaken him.” I love that He says, “Our friend
Lazarus.” He speaks to us like friends. Verse 12, “The disciples said to Him, Lord, if
he has fallen asleep, he will recover.” They are like, ‘Jesus, why walk all this way?
Why put your life on the line? Let him finish out his nap, and when Lazarus wakes up,
everything will be chill, right?’
Verse 13, “Now Jesus had spoken of his death, but they thought He meant he
was taking rest in sleep.” Now this isn’t referring to soul sleep here, this idea that when
we die our souls go and they just sleep in the grave until the future resurrection. Paul
says to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. So this isn’t soul sleep.
Sleep is an euphemism for death. And that is what is being used here in this particular
way. It is a nice way of referring to death. A nice way of referring to something that is
evil. And so Jesus says, “I am going to go and wake him up.” I love that.
Jesus, in His unusual way, sometimes allows things to go from bad to worse to
impossible. It was bad when the guy showed up and said, ‘Hey Jesus, you need to come.’
It was worse by the hour. But Jesus allowed the situation to go to impossible.
Sometimes Jesus allows pain in your life that will go from bad to worse to impossible.
He will bring you to the end of yourself where there is absolutely nothing you can do. At
this point Lazarus is dead. Jesus wanted to make sure that Lazarus was truly dead before
He headed to Bethany. So unlike us, so unusual, so ‘Why Jesus, what is going on here?’
Well He supernaturally knew that Lazarus had died because we don’t see any
other messenger coming. So He is saying it is time to go. And what He is going to do
you are going to see in a little bit here, is He is going to use the sisters’ pain to build the
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faith of their disciples. Sometimes that is one of the reasons we go through pain. Not
only is He building our faith, He will use our pain to build the faith of those around us.
Pick up with me in verse 14. “Then Jesus told them plainly, Lazarus has died,
and for your sake I am glad that I was not there, (why) so that you may believe. But let
us go to him. So Thomas, called the twin, said to his fellow disciples, Let us also go
that we may die with Him.” Now this is Thomas, the doubting Thomas who we will
later learn about who doubted Jesus had risen from the grave. And scholars are kind of at
a mix up on how to interpret verse 16. Some will say Thomas once again is doubting.
“So Thomas, called the twin, said to his fellow disciples, Let us also go that we may die
with Him.”
But others say it is not supposed to be read like that. That this is a great statement
of faith where Thomas is saying, “Let us also go, that we may die with Him.” Isn’t it
amazing just the way you read the verse can change the tone. Which is it? I don’t know.
Based on the context previously I would guess that Thomas may be fearful, but I don’t
know.
Verse 17, “Now when Jesus came, He found that Lazarus has already been in
the tomb four days.” Circle the word ‘four.’ That is a very insightful word. It was
believed by many Jews in that time, that a spirit would hover around the grave for three
days after it died looking to go back into the body. In fact many Jews would go and revisit the tomb for three days in a row to make sure the person was dead. So some
scholars speculate perhaps Jesus waited until the fourth day before He would attempt to
raise him from the dead so that no skeptics could possibly say, ‘Ah, he wasn’t really
dead. He was only asleep.’ So Jesus waited four days so that no one could say anything.
Why? Because it was for His glory. What is glory? He was revealing something about
Himself.
And this is where understanding Biblical culture can help you in interpreting the
story that we see here. So Jesus is the last to arrive and you can picture this scene.
Imagine this moment here. Verse 18, “Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles
off, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them concerning
their brother. So when Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met Him.
But Mary remained in the house.” Martha was a typical Type A personality, going out
and getting busy. Mary remained seated in the house.
Verse 21, “Martha said to Jesus, Lord, if you had been here my brother would
not have died.” Can you hear some blame there? And then she said, “But even now I
know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.” Now before we get too
excited, she is not saying that she thinks He can raise him from the dead, because in verse
39 Jesus will later say, “Martha, take away the stone. But Martha said of the dead
man, her brother, Lord, by this time there will be an odor for he has been dead four
days.”
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– MORE THAN A MAN SERIES
So that is not what Martha is saying, and that is why you have to keep reading to
make sure your interpretations are proper. Otherwise you would read that and think, ‘Oh,
Martha is thinking He is going to raise Lazarus from the dead.’ And that is not what she
is thinking. She is probably thinking that He has come and now He can probably offer
some sort of a sovereign comfort to this hurting family in the midst of their pain. That is
what has been speculated.
Verse 22, “But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give
you. Jesus said to her, Your brother will rise again. Martha said to Him, I know that
he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day. Jesus said to her, I am the
resurrection and the life.” (This is the fifth ‘I am’ in the book of John now.) “I am the
resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. And
everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.”
Jesus asked her, “Do you believe this? She said to Him, Yes Lord, I believe that
you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.” So He reveals
Himself as the resurrection and the life. That is to say, if Jesus Christ is the resurrection
and the life it will be no problem to raise Lazarus in a moment, and then later in the
future resurrection. Not only that, Lazarus’ resurrection is going to be an example of our
resurrection. Lazarus’ death is an example of our spiritual death. Just as Lazarus is dead
in the tomb, and he could do nothing to come out of it, we are spiritually dead, and can do
nothing to contribute to our salvation. We desperately need Jesus to speak life into us.
So Jesus in His unusual way of dealing with our pain will also allow pain to come
into our lives to help create belief in Him as we see Him work. As we wrap up and the
Worship Team comes I want to say this. As long as we live in this world, there will be
pain. When Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life,” He is the life right now. He
says, “I have come that you might have life, and life abundantly,” and the resurrection
is later. And what is important for us to understand when it comes to this idea of pain, is
Jesus ultimately provided a rescue from our pain which will be experienced in the future
resurrection. These bodies will experience pain from time to time in this world, and
Jesus will allow that pain to deepen our belief in Him. He will allow us to have pain to
help us to trust in Him. He will allow that pain in our lives so that others around us can
be strengthened by the way that we trust in Him.
But ultimately when He revealed Himself as the resurrection and the life, by
believing in Him, there will be no more bodily pain. We will die and we will go into
eternity and spend forever with Jesus Christ. So I will ask you this question, ‘Do you
believe in Jesus Christ this morning? Do you believe, like Lazarus, that you are dead in
your sins?’ And it is going to take Jesus to wake you up. It is only through the cross that
you will experience forgiveness of your sins. Jesus knew that He had to experience the
ultimate pain, an unusual thing, to die on a cross for our sins, so that we someday would
not live in pain and suffering and agony. Let’s pray.
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JESUS’ UNUSUAL WAY OF DEALING WITH OUR PAIN
– MORE THAN A MAN SERIES
Father, I pray for Life Fellowship, and I pray for our guests who may be in pain
this morning. I pray that you will comfort them. I pray that you will comfort me as I feel
like I’m sweating bullets in pain in this room this morning. Lord, thank you so much for
this church. I pray for anyone here today that doesn’t know you, that they will say
something like this: Dear Jesus, meet me in my pain. And forgive me of my sins.
Comfort me, I pray. I believe you died on a cross and rose from the grave, and I ask you
to be my Savior. I want to repent of my sins and walk with you. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
The preceding transcript was completed using raw audio recordings. As much as possible, it includes the actual words
of the message with minor grammatical changes and editorial clarifications to provide context. Hebrew and Greek
words are spelled using Google Translator and the actual spelling may be different in some cases.
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