Lazarus

Weeping Prayers

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This is not me currently, but I know a few people who are navigating the process of grieving a loved one. It’s never an easy process and even though I’ve been around a while, I still can’t say that grief is a natural process because death really isn’t natural. It’s a product of the fall brought about by sin and not in God’s original design.

I do believe that God hears weeping as a prayer as much as He will hear your words and desires of your heart. The Bible says that God collects our tears in a bottle. I know that someone in deep grief may not have anything more than tears to offer to God, and that is enough.

As a reminder, there is no time limit on grief, because grief is the price of love this side of heaven. It will never be right that the person isn’t here. It will never be right that you will never hear that familiar voice or see that face again until heaven.

I love the fact that Jesus, knowing He was about to call His friend Lazarus out of the grave, still wept over his death. He wept over the grief of his friends who had no inkling of the coming miracle. He wept to show that we can believe in heaven and the resurrection and still be sad at the same time.

So I’m saying that there’s no shame in grief. Sometimes tears can be the only prayers we have.

Known Only to Him

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“You are still a promise, the heartbeat of God.
You may have forgotten, but He has not.
You are not your ashes, you are a flame.
Do not ask the shadows, the light of the world knows,
Knows your name” (Nicole Nordeman,  Name).

I find it fascinating that out of all the people in all the parables that Jesus told during His earthly ministry, He only gives one of them a name — Lazarus.

Lazarus is probably the one we’d be most likely to pass by while looking the other way. He was a beggar dressed in rags with open sores that the dogs would lick. He was longing for even the crumbs that fell off the table of the unnamed rich man.

The rich man is probably someone we’d hold up as the example to follow with his acute sense of business and wise investment portfolios. He’d be the hero in most of our stories. Obviously, our idea of blessed is quite different than Jesus’.

Lazarus dies, probably from his illness, and goes to paradise. I believe it was for a simple faith that persevered in the midst of great suffering and want. I like to think that Lazarus never wavered in his faith in the goodness of God and believed wholeheartedly that God would set all things right.

The rich man was the first century equivalent of Forbes’ 50 richest people, one whose name everybody probably recognized. Yet it takes him dying and going to Hades before he shows concern for anyone else but himself (see the NIV Study Bible notes on Luke 16:28). His neglect of Lazarus who sat right outside his gates is telling of what kind of man he was. But God remembered Lazarus.

If God knew the name of Lazarus, He surely knows your name. You are indeed not forgotten. You are still heir to the promise God made to you long ago, even if you have forgotten it.

The Light of the World still knows your name.

 

 

 

Easter Saturday

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / 1 Comment

tomb_closed

I suppose it was a quiet day for the disciples. Not quiet in the sense of anticipation and hope but more in the sense of resignation and despair. They had seen their Messiah crucified and buried in a tomb.

It was over. All their hopes and dreams for the future went with Jesus into that tomb and the future that presented itself was as bleak as the black sky over Golgotha that afternoon.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a state of grief where there are no more tears to cry, where there’s a quiet calm after the storm. Where it feels like you’ll never feel happiness or laughter ever again. That’s where they were as they stared at the massive stone that a legion of Romans had rolled in front of the tomb where Jesus lay. Even if they wanted to, all twelve of them couldn’t have budged that stone from its place to steal the body of their leader and Lord.

Yes, they had seen Lazarus alive and joking around after being in the grave four days, but this was different. Lazarus had been ill and died in his own bed. Lazarus hadn’t been brutally beaten and whipped within an inch of his life before being forced up the hill to his own crucifixion.

They had seen the finality of the final moments where Jesus commended His Spirit to God in a loud cry. Truly, it was over. There would be no more parables, no more stories, no more miracles, no more crowds.

It’s easy for me, having read the rest of the story, to rush past this day. But for those who were there, there was no rest of the story yet. Just a grey sky and a dark room and a dead Messiah.

Yet early in the morning, just shy of daybreak, everything for these disciples and for the rest of the world was about to change forever.