This Sunday was our special day at church to welcome visitors,
guests, and newcomers of all kinds. But keeping in mind that it may be
the first time that many of you have been with us, I wanted to keep the message
brief. Shakespeare said, "Brevity is the soul of wit."
While not all my sermons are brief, on the whole I tend to agree. I
remember visiting one church when I was a kid, where we were the only ones who
didn't know in advance that they should bring their lunches along and plan to
make a whole day of it! In general, and especially when there
are newcomers present, I believe it's best to keep the message short.
George Burns said, "The secret of a good sermon is to have a good
beginning and a good ending; and to have the two as close together as
possible.” Franklin D. Roosevelt used even fewer words than that, to say
the same thing: "Be sincere, be brief, be seated."
Often the briefest
things are the most profound. Today I
want to share with you what's purportedly the shortest verse in the Bible, John
11:35. Jesus’ friend Lazarus was sick,
so his sisters Mary and Martha sent word to Jesus that He should come. For his own reasons he delayed coming to them,
so by the time Jesus arrived Lazarus had already been dead for several
days. When he got there, both sisters told him the same thing, "If
you had been here, our brother would not have died." In verses 33-37[i] we read:
33 When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the
Jews who came with her also weeping, He was deeply moved in spirit and was
troubled, 34 and said, “Where have you laid
him?” They said to Him, “Lord, come and see.” 35 Jesus
wept. 36 So the Jews were saying, “See how He loved
him!” 37 But some of them said, “Could not this man, who
opened the eyes of the blind man, have kept this man also from dying?”
Jesus wept, not because
he grieved Lazarus' passing. In fact, He knew that he was about to
perform one of His greatest miracles and bring his friend back from the
dead. Jesus wept because He saw the overwhelming pain and turmoil of faith
in the eyes of His friends. They felt hurt because they didn't understand
why God would do miracles for others, yet let their brother die. They
were wounded because their friend Jesus, who always had time for other people,
had delayed coming to them when He could have prevented their brother's
death. Jesus saw all this in the tears that streamed from their eyes, and
in His compassion for them He wept.
The good news today is
that just as Jesus saw the need and pain and disappointment in His friends'
faces, He also knows your hurts and sorrows. Jesus sees you battered and
broken, and He weeps with you when you hurt. Jesus mourns over the
struggles you've had in your relationships, the financial pressures you feel,
your sin and disease and unforgiveness. He also cries tears of joy in
celebration of your triumphs. Jesus weeps. This is the good news:
God knows how you feel, and He feels it with you.
But Jesus didn't
continue to weep. Those two words, "Jesus
wept" are in the past tense, which means Jesus felt what the mourners felt,
but then he moved on to embrace hope and joy. He prayed a prayer of faith
and raised Lazarus from the tomb. So too Jesus wants to see victory over
the tombs in your life. He wants to see resurrected relationships,
flourishing finances, sinners separated from their sin, and feuds forgiven.
He can't do this by weeping. So He turns mourning into dancing.
Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.
This brings us to
the actual shortest verse in the Bible. While John
11:35, purportedly the shortest verse, consists of 16 letters in the original
Greek (ἐδάκρυσεν ὁ Ἰησοῦς), 1 Thessalonians 5:16
is two characters shorter (Πάντοτε χαίρετε). In English it simply says, "Rejoice always." If
brevity is the soul of wit, and “Jesus wept” is profound, then “Rejoice always” is equally deep. But how do we reconcile these two with each
other? They seem to be completely at odds—if Jesus is the model of divine
living, and His Word tells us to rejoice always, then how could he have
wept? If Jesus is the model of human
experience and he could weep over grief and suffering, how could he rejoice?
We can
understand these seemingly opposite things together when we realize that both illustrate
the diversity of human experience and the reality of God’s complete identification
with us. Jesus was fully human and fully
divine. He came so that humanity might
have access to the divine. So He can
laugh when we laugh and cry when we cry.
He can feel the sting of loss when a loved one struggles, yet He can
also speak words of faith that bring life out of death. This is what rejoicing does—it resurrects the
dead. Joy doesn’t deny that pain is
real, but finds hope and strength in the midst of suffering. Holding hands with hope, joy knows that there’s
victory in Jesus despite the pain.
I know
it’s hard to rejoice always—especially when, like Mary and Martha and Jesus,
you’ve experienced loss. It’s so
unimaginable that Paul had to say it twice in Philippians 4:4 – “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will
say, rejoice!” But then in verse
five he tells how to do this: “The Lord
is near.” Even in the midst of
trouble, joy reminds us that God is with us.
The Lord’s constant presence grants us access to peace of mind and power
of spirit—the kind that works miracles.
How do
you access that constant presence of God when situations scream hopelessness? The same way that Jesus did: Dispel despair
with prayer. In verse 41, Jesus says, “Father, I thank You that You have heard Me. I
knew that You always hear Me.”
Knowing that his His Father is so near that He has unlimited access to
the throne, Jesus could speak to the dead and bring him back to life. He tells us the same thing He told Martha: “…If you believe, you will see the glory of
God….(John 11:40b)”
Today I
ask you—what’s causing grief in your own life?
What’s dead inside of you, or in the life of a loved one? Jesus who said, “I am the resurrection and the life (John 11:25)” wants to breathe
new life to that which you have lost. It’s
okay to weep—after all, Jesus did. But
then He wants you to move from grief to faith.
He only asks that you believe, so that you can see the glory of
God. Even when things are tough, Jesus
invites you to rejoice always in God’s constant presence. Trust God, praise Him, pray to Him, and wait
for your miracle.
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