How many of you remember when you were 16? What is the greatest thing in the world that can happen to an average 16 year old? Driver’s License! I remember when I was 16 and was taking Driver’s Ed through the school. My teacher was Mr. Robertson. Mr. Robertson was the vice-principal and he was a tough old bird and kind of scary. He had seen lots of kids come and go through that school and he was in control of every situation. You know the type, kind of like a drill sergeant.
So, picture the scene. I’m behind the wheel of a brand new Chrysler K-car, light blue with plastic seats and a Black and Decker aquarium pump for an engine but I don’t care. I’m about to drive! I’m all buckled in. Mirrors adjusted. Seat adjusted. And Mr. Robertson tells me, “Take the first port, then drive 3 blocks and take a starboard and get on the main road.”
I asked which way that was and he said I would know because if I got it wrong he would thump mewith his class ring that was on his left hand. And then he put his arm across the seat with his hand behind my head. Needless to say, I drove with my aching head hanging halfway out the window most of the way. But I learned.
I remember one time after I had been driving a while I got a little lax about a stop sign. I was just enjoying the drive, got my shades on, being cool (in the K-car) and all of the sudden the car comes to a screeching halt. I felt like I was going to go through the windshield! Do you remember how the driver’s ed cars had the extra brake pedal on the passenger side? Mr. Robertson slammed it down as hard as he could and I just thought I was in control. I just thought I had it all together in my fine ride but I was wrong. I had cruised through a stop sign and Mr. Robertson stopped everything with his right foot.
Some of you may know how that feels. You may not have had the luxury of a K-car in driver’s ed but you know the feeling all too well of cruising through life and then having everything come to a stop with the death of a loved one or through divorce or some other loss. One minute everything is fine and the next, maybe through no fault of your own or maybe solely because of you, now everything has changed.
And you can cry (and you should) or you can complain (which may be your right) or you can write your congressman or curl up in the fetal position or you can drink yourself into a stupor or do any number of other things to help get you through what you are going through. Some of those ways may be right and some may be wrong while others may be right for you but wrong for other people. Some may be good and some are destructive and at this point you may very well not care about what is good for the long term; you’re just trying to get through the next 5 minutes.
We are in the middle of a 3-sermon series entitled “Good Grief” in which we will study how sometimes God answers our prayers like we want as He did for Hannah last week. And sometimes He doesn’t answer our prayers as we would like but He can always sympathize with our grief. We are going through a 5-part video series on grief every Wednesday night through March and it is a powerful and well-made series that I would encourage everybody to see.
We are going through this issue of grief so thoroughly, not because we enjoy it – nobody enjoys ripping the scab off of a wound – but because every single one of us is going to go through some type of grief and if you are not going through it right now then there will be somebody that you can help with this in the very near future. And we all want to help but we are honestly not going to be of a whole lot of help to someone if all we can say at their time of heart-breaking, gut-wrenching grief is, “Uh…sorry.”
And that may be the best thing to say sometimes or it may even be too much sometimes but what a blessing it will be to you or your friends to know this lesson before either of you need it, instead of years later like it has been for some of us.
If you have your Bibles, turn to II Samuel. There should be a Bible in the seatback in front of you if you need one. I told you last week that the 2 books of Samuel are story books of the Bible and they contain some of the best-loved and best-known stories in the entire Bible. My very favorite story in the Bible comes from I Samuel 14 where Jonathan and his armor bearer go up the side of the cliff and karate chop 20 Philistines by themselves! It’s a great story. I don’t know that they used karate but there had to have been some skills going on up there.
Other stories don’t always have happy endings. One of the wonderful things about the Bible is how it doesn’t gloss over or sugarcoat what really happened. When somebody makes a mistake it tells about it, sometimes in great detail. And I say that is wonderful because, unlike most of you, I have made some really bad decisions in my life and it has been invaluable to me to see that not only am Inot the only one to make bad decisionsand to suffer the consequences of them but those decisions don’t mean that God is through with us. He can and will forgive us and help us through the consequences and I know that, not only in my own life, but through stories like the one we have before us this morning in II Samuel 12, verses 15-23.
You know the setting for this passage. It started with King David being at the wrong place at the wrong time. He saw Bathsheba on the roof top and one thing led to another, as they say, and pretty soon there is a baby involved. An innocent baby is conceived by the not-so-innocent and because of that sin, David is informed by Nathan the prophet that the baby will die.
And that is where we pick up the story. We pick up as the car comes to a skidding stop leaving black marks and tire smoke coming up from the road. David had everything he could ever want. He thought he was in control and everything was bopping along just fine but God slammed His sovereign foot on the brake pedal and now everything has changed for David. Maybe you know that feeling. Maybe you can relate to the intense grief that David is going through. And while everyone’s journey through grief is different and everybody reacts differently, we can learn from what David did and his response to his grief and we can learn about God’s response to his grief as well.
After Nathan had gone home, the Lord struck the child that Uriah’s wife had borne to David, and he became ill. 16 David pleaded with God for the child. He fasted and spent the nights lying in sackcloth[a] on the ground. 17 The elders of his household stood beside him to get him up from the ground, but he refused, and he would not eat any food with them. 18 On the seventh day the child died. David’s attendants were afraid to tell him that the child was dead, for they thought, “While the child was still living, he wouldn’t listen to us when we spoke to him. How can we now tell him the child is dead? He may do something desperate.” 19 David noticed that his attendants were whispering among themselves, and he realized the child was dead. “Is the child dead?” he asked. “Yes,” they replied, “he is dead.” 20 Then David got up from the ground. After he had washed, put on lotions and changed his clothes, he went into the house of the Lord and worshiped. Then he went to his own house, and at his request they served him food, and he ate. 21 His attendants asked him, “Why are you acting this way? While the child was alive, you fasted and wept, but now that the child is dead, you get up and eat!” 22He answered, “While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept. I thought, ‘Who knows? The Lord may be gracious to me and let the child live.’ 23But now that he is dead, why should I go on fasting? Can I bring him back again? I will go to him, but he will not return to me.”
Even with all of their similarities, this is quite a different story from the one in which we looked last week. Last week Hannah prayed for a baby and God blessed her with a healthy baby boy. She prayed fervently, even fasting and crying and begging God for the child and God was merciful. This week David does the same thing and God does not answer his prayer as David had asked.
Is that right? Is that fair? Is that what we should expect from sovereign God; at best a 50/50 chance? Maybe that’s how you feel about your situation. Maybe you feel that what you have gone through isn’t right or fair and honestly, you may be right. It may not necessarily be fair but it is something you are going through. It is reality and one of the first things you have to do to get through this journey of grief is to come to grips with the fact that this really happened. It’s not a dream and fair or not you have some decisions to make.
Experts tell us not to make any major decisions within the first year after a significant loss and that is wise council. Grief has a way of making you not think straight and so don’t decide to sell the house or buy a yacht or get a full-back tattoo without getting lots of wise advice from others you trust that are not grieving. And then follow their advice.
But you do have decisions you will have to make and since grief makes everything compress, your long-term planning may go from “What will I do in the next 5 or 10 years?” to “What am I going to do in the next 5 or 10 minutes?” And so, through this story I want to look at how we respond to our grief and how God responds to our grief. And if that outline looks similar to last week’s it is because it is identical to last week’s and yet I hope to see something completely different in this story than what we saw last week.
Back in the early 90’s I worked in a feed store where we sold feed and supplies for all kinds of animals. One of the big sellers for a long time was Mane ‘n Tail Shampoo. It was made for horses but we rarely sold it for that. Word got out that it was great for human hair and we couldn’t keep it on the shelf. Women came in like crazy to get their hands on it.
I remember one time when my boss was in the store and then my boss’s boss came in and we were talking around the front register when a lady came in and asked for the Mane ‘n Tail so I showed her where it was and then I explained how it worked and how to use it. All the while I could tell that my bosses were watching me and so I gave her the whole spiel about how good it was. Then I rang up the sale at the cash register, bagged it up and gave her the receipt like a good employee and she left. As soon as she walked out the door the 2 big wigs started dying laughing and they asked me what I said to her because they couldn’t hear my great sales pitch.
What they found most incredible was that as they watched me talk to her, I actually took off my ball cap and pointed to my own head as I talked, obviously making a point and yet she still bought the shampoo and the conditioner. Well, I made some smart-alec comment about just being that good of a salesman and then I walked off.
Well, I want to channel that same salesman this morning as I make the case that David’s first response to his grief was the correct response. His first response, as we see in verse 16, was to pray. It says he pleaded with God. And the reason it may be hard to make that case is because somebody might look at that and say, “Yea, that worked for Hannah but fat load of good it did for David. That was a waste of time. He would have been better off doing his own thing instead of fasting and praying.” And I can understand that thinking. But it would be incorrect.
Let me start by asking,“What is prayer?” Is it explaining a situation to an unknowing, unseeing God who needs your input to understand what’s going on? Of course not. Then why should we pray in our grief? Why should our first response to grief be to fall to our knees in prayer? I’ll give you a couple of reasons. First, we should pray because God says to (and that should be enough). It should be enough to know that there are benefits of obedience. Matthew 26:41 says "Keep alert and pray. Otherwise temptation will overpower you.” In Luke 18, Jesus tells his disciples that they should always pray and not give up. Ephesians 6:18 says “And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.” So, we should pray just because God tells us to.
But for all of you rebels out there; for those who don’t have the experience to know that obedience is enough, let me give you another reason and I go back to the scriptures for this as well. Proverbs 3:5-6 were written by Solomon, David’s son many years after the passage we are reading this morning. It is advice that I am sure was learned from his father who had dealt with this grief correctly. It says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; 6 in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.”
“In all your waysacknowledge Him”. Even when you don’t know which “way” is up. Even when your way is confused and hurt and your way has been abused and taken advantage of and life isn’t fair, take that to God. Do you know what God doesn’t want to hear? God doesn’t want to hear, “Hey, this isn’t fair! Who do you think you are?” Do you know what God longs to hear from you? “God, this isn’t fair and I don’t understand why I have to go through this. Can you please explain to me or show me what you want me to understand through this horrible time, please?” There is a world of difference in those two questions and God wants you to come to Him with the right attitude and with right motives and He wants to hear from you so you can hear from Him, because He loves you.
And that is how we should respond to grief and it leads us right to how God responds to our grief. Last week we saw that God responded to Hannah’s grief by answering her prayer as she wanted but I made the point that it was because she prayed in her grief that she was blessed with the child. I don’t think it would have happened if she had not prayed. It had not happened in all the years leading up to that point so I believe God was waiting to hear her fervent prayer.
You have heard before that God will answer your prayer either yes, no or wait and this week we see God’s answer to David was a definite no. God did not allow the child to live. Again, I cannot comprehend how that must have felt and we have learned from our “Journey Through Grief” video series that even if someone has had a similar loss, every loss is different and every person grieves differently and one is not necessarily better than another.
But what did David do when he heard the bad news? What would you have done? See, now is the perfect opportunity for David to freak out and do something stupid. Can you imagine what he was going through? Not only did he just lose his infant son but he knows that it was directly related to his sin. That kind of guilt has done in lots of people. He could have gone off and drank himself to death or run off and done what the others thought he might do and take his own life somehow.
But what does he do? Look at verse 20. He got cleaned up and he went and worshiped and then he got something to eat and then in verse 24 (we didn’t read that verse) it says he comforted Bathsheba. I’m sure Bathsheba was grieving intensely as well and he comforted her. I propose to you this morning that what David did was not normal. It was not a natural thing, in fact, it was a supernatural thing that allowed him to start his journey through that grief and even bring comfort to Bathsheba.
That was God’s response to David’s grief. Because David prayed; because he prayed fervently and continued to pray, God answered his prayer. It was not answered in the way David had asked but it was answered by the merciful and forgiving God who does not want His children to drown in their grief. It was answered in the way that was right and just and best for David and for the Kingdom of God and so sovereign God heard David’s cries. And being a God who is familiar with grief He allowed David to have wisdom and peace even in David’s worst day of grief. And not just some peace, God gave David enough peace so that he could go to Bathsheba and give her peace as well. That is peace that passes all understanding.
It doesn’t mean that David was through with his grief. In fact, this was just the beginning and I am sure David thought about that day for years and years. And just because he got up and ate something and worshiped doesn’t mean that he didn’t mean what he prayed or that he didn’t love the child as much as somebody else loves their child. It means God gave him grace and mercy to start his journey through grief and allowed David to grieve properly and not destructively.
David’s response to his grief was to go to his Creator and Sustainer and his Friend in despairing conversation, being honest and respectful but being able to ask any question. God’s response to his grief was to give David what God knew he really needed and to give it abundantly because that is how God works. Ephesians 3:20 says that God “is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us.”
Jesus said in John 10:10, "I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full." That was His reason for coming! Don’t miss out on that, especially in your time of grief. He wants you to talk to Him so that He can talk to you and give you an abundant life even in the darkest times of your life. Will you accept that from Him today?
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