HelpFinder Bible - Flipbook - Page 154
page A152
Grief continued
• PR O V E R B S 1 7 :2 2 | A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit saps a person’s
strength.
Be aware of the toll that being brokenhearted takes on a person’s spirit, mind, and body.
Awareness leads to sympathy; sympathy leads to soothing the wounded, and that leads
to healing.
• R O MA NS 1 2 :1 5 | Be happy with those who are happy, and weep with those who weep.
Sensitivity to others’ feelings is needed. You can feel others’ sorrow as surely as you can
feel their joy. Being too cheery when others are grieving will only make them feel worse.
• 1 P E T E R 5 :1 2 | I have written and sent this short letter to you with the help of Silas, whom
I commend to you as a faithful brother. My purpose in writing is to encourage you and
assure you that what you are experiencing is truly part of God’s grace for you. Stand firm
in this grace.
Encourage the brokenhearted. Words of comfort can lift a hurting person.
• J O B 2 1 :3 4 | “How can your empty clichés comfort me?”
• J O B 1 6 :2 | “I have heard all this before. What miserable comforters you are!”
Be careful with the words you use with those who are grieving. Explanations and clichés
are rarely comforting. Love, sympathy, and the power of your presence are urgently
needed. Sometimes the best comfort you can give is to just be there.
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• J O B 4 2 :1 1 | Then all his brothers, sisters, and former friends came and feasted with him
in his home. And they consoled him and comforted him because of all the trials the Lord
had brought against him. And each of them brought him a gift of money and a gold ring.
• PSA L M 6 8 :6 | God places the lonely in families; he sets the prisoners free and gives them joy.
HelpFinder
As family and friends, you can support one another. Family life must be a safe haven from
a wounding world.
How does rebellion against God bring grief to him?
• PSA L M 7 8 :4 0 | Oh, how often they rebelled against him in the wilderness and grieved his
heart in that dry wasteland.
• G E NE S I S 6 :6 | So the Lord was sorry he had ever made them. . . . It broke his heart.
How many a parent has grieved when a child rebelled? How often God must grieve when
we rebel against him.
How do I deal with loss in my life?
• J O H N 1 1 :3 5 | Then Jesus wept.
Don’t deny your loss. Great grief is the result of great love. The tears of Jesus at Lazarus’s
death forever validate our tears of grief.
• G E NE S I S 5 0 :3 | The Egyptians mourned [Jacob’s] death for seventy days. (See note on page 49.)
Grief is a process that must not be denied or hurried. The rituals of wakes, visitations,
funerals, and memorial services all help us move through the stages of grief.
• 2 S A MU E L 1 1 :1 | In the spring of the year, when kings normally go out to war, David sent
Joab. . . . However, David stayed behind in Jerusalem.
For reasons not entirely known, King David gave up the active leadership of his troops.
The loss may have created a vacuum in his life that he was seeking to fill with an immoral
relationship with Bathsheba. As we grieve our losses we must be careful not to “medicate”
our pain with that which will only create more pain.
• J O B 1 :2 0 -2 1 | Job stood up and tore his robe in grief. . . . He said, “. . . The Lord gave me
what I had, and the Lord has taken it away.”
Losses always bring pain. Recognizing and expressing that pain is not wrong or sinful, but
rather it is a healthy expression of how God created us.
• H E B R E W S 1 0 :3 4 | You suffered along with those who were thrown into jail, and when all
you owned was taken from you, you accepted it with joy. You knew there were better things
waiting for you that will last forever.