Rick Warren - Getting Through Life's Losses - Part 1
Let's take out our message notes. We're in this series I'm calling the stages of, "Getting Through What You're Going Through," and I told you that there's six stages of getting through what you go through. There's shock, then there's sorrow, and then there's struggle, then surrender, then sanctification, and service. And we're looking each week at how do you get through what you're going through, and today we're gonna look at sorrow, or how to get through life's losses.
Now, folks, I feel like the last four months of my life, I got a PhD in how to get through losses, how to deal with the great losses of life. And what I wanna do this weekend is share with you five things that I've learned from God's Word during the last four months and then share with you how do you get through major losses in your life. I hate to say this, but unfortunately, you're gonna need this message sometime in your life. You might not need it right now but I highly encourage you to take notes because you're gonna go through major losses in your life. Now, let's get right into it.
The first thing I've learned is this. I wrote it on your outline. Loss is unavoidable but grief is a choice. Loss is unavoidable but grief is a choice. You have to choose to grieve, and a lot of people choose not to, they stuff it, they deny it. They try to go through all of the losses of life without ever grieving. That's a big mistake. There is no life without change, there is no change without loss, and there is no loss without pain. But grief is a choice. Let me explain that again. All living things change. The only things that don't change are things that aren't alive.
Does that make sense? Yeah, so if you're alive, part of life is you're gonna go through changes in life. The things around you change, the things inside you change. There is no change without loss because in change, you lose some of the old to grab on to some of the new. So, there's loss, you're losing things, all the time in your life. And there is no loss without pain because we don't like to lose things. But grief is a choice. You have to choose to let grief in. You have to allow yourself to feel it. Now, people say, "Well, why in the world would I ever want to feel grief"?
Now, I'm gonna explain that in this message this weekend because grief is the key to your spiritual growth. We'll come back to that in just a minute. First, let me just say this. When I mentioned grief, most people think grief is something that happens only at funerals, that it only happens with the loss of loved ones. But really, you have thousands of losses in your life. You can lose your health, you can lose your job, you can lose a friend. you can lose your finances. There are literally hundreds and hundreds and even thousands of things that you have in life that you lose, and so grief is not simply for when somebody dies. That's one of the things it's for but there are many other things in life you ought to grieve because there are losses in life.
Now, because grief is unpleasant, most people just try to avoid it. They wanna stuff it, they wanna put it aside, "I'm not gonna grieve. I'm just gonna get on with my life. I'm gonna deny it". And I wanna say to you, that is the cause of many of your problems: unresolved, unmourned grief. There were things that happened to you as a child, there are things that happened to you in school, you should have grieved over and you haven't. And if you don't grieve over it, you get stuck at that stage. I'm gonna explain that. Grief is absolutely essential to your life. In fact, number two, the second thing I've learned is that grief is healthy. It is healthy. In fact, it's the only healthy response when you have a loss.
Now, the loss could be anything. It could be the loss of a job, it could be the loss of a career, it could be infertility, it could be the loss of an engagement. I mean, serious financial problems, stillbirth, all kinds of different things. Maybe a loss of a limb or loss of a breast or whatever. We all have losses in life. Grief is actually healthy. It's good for you. It's the only healthy response to loss because it's unhealthy to deny a loss. Now, grief is, without a doubt, the most painful emotion we go through in life. It's also the most helpful emotion.
You say, "How is that? How is grief helpful to me"? Grief is God's tool for you getting through the transitions of life. If you don't grieve in your losses, you get stuck, and some of you are still stuck at age 14 or age 28 or age 32 because you didn't grieve a major loss in your life and you got stuck there. And you wonder why you have anxieties and you have phobias and you have fears and you have low self-esteem, because you haven't learned how to do good grief. Now, would you agree that Jesus never did anything wrong? Yeah, he never did anything... he never sinned, he never did evil, and Jesus never did anything unhealthy. And yet, Jesus grieved.
Jesus, the Bible tells us, wept. The Bible says he was a man acquainted with sorrows. When his dear friend Lazarus died, the Bible says Jesus grieved. He cried. In fact, he sobbed. Here's what the Bible says in John 11:33 to 36. "When Jesus saw Lazarus' sister sobbing," that was Mary, "and he saw how all those with her were crying also, his heart was touched, and he was deeply moved... Then Jesus started crying. 'See how much he loved Lazarus!' they said".
Now, notice Jesus started crying. Sadness is not weakness. That is an American myth, that sadness is weakness. Actually, weak men are afraid of showing their emotions, weak men are afraid to cry, weak men are afraid to get emotional. They are afraid of their emotions. They are very weak. I'll just be honest with you, on the way to church, before this service, I actually cried in the car as I was thinking and praying about some people that I care about deeply who are in some deep trouble, and I was crying out to God. Nobody's ever accused me of being weak. Weakness and and sorrow, or sadness, are not the same thing. In fact, the stronger you are, the more confident you are, the more you're not afraid to show your emotions.
Now, there are two unhealthy reactions to loss, and I wrote them there on your outline. One's called repression and the other is called suppression. Repression is when I unconsciously try to block out painful thoughts out of my mind, and suppression is when I try to do it consciously, I intentionally say, "I'm not gonna think about that hurt. I'm not gonna think about that pain. I'm gonna put my head down and move forward". I wanna tell you, friend, that is a mistake. To not grieve losses is a mistake. Grief is God's gift of getting us through the transitions of life.
Let me explain it this way. You might write this down. If I don't let it out in healthy ways, I'm gonna act it out in unhealthy ways. And I see this all the time, people who, as adults, are doing all kinds of bad behavior because they never grieved over an alcoholic dad or an unloving mother or mistreatment and prejudice and bigotry, and, you know, things like that on the playground. If you don't grieve the losses in your life, then, as I said, you act it out in unhealthy ways. Another way I say it is this.
When I swallow my grief, my body rejects it. Doctors have said that a lot of illnesses that people have come from unresolved grief, unresolved regrets, and unresolved resentment. And you can empty most of the hospitals with a lot of people because all that pain in the back or that pain in the rear or my aching neck or whatever, a lot of that is caused because we take emotions inside us that God never intended for us to keep bottled up. He intends for us to keep it out, let them out. So, loss is unavoidable in life but grief is a choice, and you have to choose to enter into it. You have to embrace it. Why? Because grief is healthy, it's good. It's the way you get through the stages of life.
Now, the third thing I learned, and this is a big one, is that God grieves with me. God grieves with me. In fact, your whole ability to grieve actually comes from God. The only reason you have emotions is because God has emotions. And you were created in the image of God, and so God gave you the ability to have emotions. And the reason you grieve is because God grieves. Did you know that God gets sad? Did you know that God weeps? Did you know that God sorrows? Did you know that God has regrets when he sees the evil that people do? The Bible says that God is an emotional God. Your ability to grieve is what makes you different from animals. Cows don't grieve, worms don't grieve, birds don't grieve.
When you say, "I'm not gonna grieve over that loss, I'm just gonna put my head down. I'm gonna live in denial. I'm gonna stuff it," you are denying the very thing that makes you a human being. You are denying the very thing that makes you like God in his image. Animals don't grieve. Humans grieve because they're made in the image of God. And so, you don't wanna say, "Well, I'm not gonna grieve".
That's what makes you a human. If you don't grieve, you're a robot. You're emotionally no better than an animal because you're not using the abilities God gave you. And the Bible says that God not only gave us the ability to grieve, God actually grieves with us. God suffers with us. He is a suffering God. He is a sympathetic God. God doesn't, when I'm in pain, God isn't aloof. He's not standing over the sideline watching like, "Well, can't you get over that," or, "Why don't you buck up and work harder and," you know, "take it like a man," or whatever. No, the Bible says God isn't standing on the sidelines. He actually enters into your grief.
Psalm 34:18 says this: "The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and he saves those who are crushed in spirit". Circle the word "close". Some of you are brokenhearted this weekend. Maybe your heart was broken this week, maybe this month, maybe this year, or maybe it's been broken for a long, long time. The Bible says God is close to the brokenhearted. When you think God is a million miles away and he's nowhere to be found. Guess what? He's as close to you as he could get. You just need to tune in to him. The Bible tells us that grief is healthy and that God grieves with me.
The fourth thing that the Bible teaches us, something I've learned, is that grief is healed in community. You're not gonna get well on your own. Nobody gets well on their own. We are better together, we need each other. When God created man, he put him in the Garden of Eden, he was living in a perfect environment. And yet God said, "It's not good for man to be alone". Do you know there's one thing God hates? God hates loneliness. God hates it. He made us to be in community, be in relationship, to love God and to love each other. Now, I don't have to go into this a lot because we talked about it last week, that fellowship is what you need when you're in shock, and fellowship is what you need when you're in sorrow. You need other people around you.
The Bible says it like this in Galatians 6:2, "Carry each other's burdens, and in this way, you will fulfill the law of Christ". In other words, when you're in pain, I'm supposed to carry your pain. When I'm in pain, you're supposed to carry my pain. When either of us in grief, we are to carry each other's grief. We are to support each other. And by the way, I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago but I'll say it again, when you're going through a tough time, you're going through a loss, it's always interesting to see who shows up and who doesn't. And some people who you expect to show up aren't going to, and some people you didn't expect to show up will show up to be there in your pain and in your grief.
I wanna just tell you this: Don't judge those people who don't show up, just don't do it. For two reasons. One, you don't need the resentment, and second, you don't know what's going on in their life. Sometimes there are fears in their life that keep them apart from you. Sometimes they're going through something as serious as you are. You don't know. So, just don't judge anybody if they don't happen to show up and you expected them to show up in your life. Just be grateful for the ones that do show up. Romans 12:15 says this, "When others are happy, be happy with them. And if they're sad, share their sorrow". Circle that phrase "share their sorrow". Grief is healed in community. Revealing your feeling is the beginning of healing. We share it with each other, and that's what we do in small groups. By the way, let me give you a little tip on sharing.
When somebody is in pain, comparing never comforts. You might write that one down. Comparing never comforts. In other words, somebody... well, let me give an example. Many people have come up to me in the last four months knowing that I had just lost a son to suicide and they'll say, "Oh, I'm so sorry. I know what it's like. I lost my grandfather". No, you don't. You don't know what it's like. In fact, even if you had lost a son, you don't know what it's like because everybody's grief is different. So, when you try to console by comparing, it doesn't work. Even if you had lost a mother and somebody else had lost a mother, they're different relationships to their mother, and so everybody's grief is different. Comparing your pain to somebody else's never helps anybody in their pain.
So, just don't do it. Grief is healed in community. The fifth thing that we learned from the Word is that grief takes time. Grief takes time. It isn't overcome quickly. It's not like, I'm gonna give it 48 hours and I got to get back to work. It just doesn't happen that way. Grief has its own timetable and you cannot rush it. I couldn't count the number of people who said to me things like, you know, "Are you over it yet"? Let me explain something to you about grief. You don't get over grief, you get through it. You might write that one down too. You don't get over grief, you get through it. You will never get over the major losses in your life but you will get through the major losses in your life. Grief is not something you get over.
If you had a baby born and it lived a week and died, you will get through that but you won't get over it. You will remember it the rest of your life. It's part of your life story. So, don't try to get over it, try to get through it because grief takes time. Now, the Bible says this in Ecclesiastes 3:1 and 4, "There's a time for everything, there is a season for every activity under heaven... there's a time to weep and there's a time to laugh, there's a time to mourn and there's a time to dance". And what the Bible is saying is that life is composed of opposites. We have good days and we have bad days. We have up days, we have down days. There's a time to weep and there's a time to rejoice. There's a time to be sad, to mourn; and there's a time to dance and party. Both of them are legitimate parts of life, and maturity is when you can enter into both.
Now, if you can only enter into the parties of life and you don't know how to grieve, you're missing half your life, and that's the part of your life that causes you to grow spiritually. You don't grow in the parties, you grow in the valleys. And so he says, "Grief is a season". Circle the word "season". Now, what a season means is it's more than one day. It's more than a week. A season is a season of grief. In the Bible there's a phrase called the "time of mourning" and it's used many, many times. It talked about the time of mourning when Moses died, it was 30 days, and that the whole nation mourned for 30 days. When I go to Rwanda, they have a national day of mourning and they do it every year for the last 20 years for the genocide. It's not something you wanna forget. It's something you wanna remember. There's a season of life in grief.
Now, why am I belaboring this point? Because what we do whenever we face a loss, let's say you've lost your job or you lost your boyfriend or you've lost your health or you lost a big deal or you've lost your dream or you've lost your faith, there are a million different things you could lose, and in that moment the temptation is we immediately want to fix it, instead of just grieving the loss. Don't try to fix everybody the first thing out of the gate. Just grieve. That's part of the healing process. It's how you get on with your life. I mean, we learn this as little kids because you go out and you fall over and you break your head open and you start crying and the first thing an adult says to you, he says, "Now, don't cry". Really? "Don't cry"? My head is bleeding, it hurts.
Parents, there are a lot of things worth crying about and stop teaching your kids how to stuff it because that's one of the worst lessons you could, let them cry as long as they need to cry. You're making it sound like the crying is worse than the pain. No, the pain is worse. But when an adult immediately starts saying, "Stop crying, stop crying, stop", it means like, "I'm more interested in you not making noise than me taking care of your pain and me comforting you". So, stop trying to force your kids to stuff it. What you have to do is to learn to lament. You see, what I'm trying to teach you is that you can't get past your pain until you acknowledge it, you accept it, and you feel it. Once you do that, then you can get through it.
But many of you have had a painful, or traumatic experience in your life and rather than actually feeling it, actually grieving over it, actually going through the season of mourning, you just put your head down, try to ignore it, and went on ahead, and it's popping up sideways here and there. It's like taking a coke bottle and shaking it up without letting the cap off. It's gonna come out one way or the other, and all kinds of bizarre behaviors and habits and fears and hang-ups and problems come because we don't actually deal with the losses we have in life. And that's how you get stuck.
See, what happens, we want to go past our sorrow without going through it, and you can't. You can't. And if you don't go through the sorrows of life, you get stuck there. And you may have been hurt as a little kid or as a teenager or as a young adult, and if you didn't go through the pain at that moment, you just got stuck and you're stuck at 15, or you're stuck at 26 because you can't get through it by trying to go past it. You just have to go in it and you gotta go through it. You have to do what the Bible calls lament, and that is to cry out to God with your pain, with your hurt, with your anger, with your complaints, and just tell God exactly how you feel.
God grieves with us, grief is healed in humility and in community, and grief takes time. And if I don't grieve wherever I've had a loss and I didn't grieve it, I'm gonna get stuck, because you can't get through it, you can't get past it, unless you go through it. You get stuck if you try to get past it without going through it. So, how do I get past it? How do I move on in spite of the terrible losses in my life? How do you move forward? So, I said a lot of people are stuck because they don't know how to do this. Well, if you wanna get unstuck, you're gonna need to do four things. You might write these down. Number one, you wanna move forward, you wanna get past the pain, painful experiences you've gone through.
Number one, I need to list the losses that I haven't grieved over. List the losses I've never grieved. And you need to go back and really take a little inventory of your life and you need to look at your life and reconsider, where have I had major losses in my life? And, you know, maybe you went off to war, maybe you experienced rejection, maybe you missed some loved ones in your life or long term illness or you lost your home or you lost your job or whatever. What are the things, the losses in your life, that you said, "You know what? I just said I'm gonna put my head down and I'm not gonna think about it and I'm not gonna grieve but I'm just gonna move ahead".
Well, that's where you got stuck. So, you start by listing the losses that I've never grieved. In other words, I can't get past it till I acknowledge it. Now, let me ask you, and I'm gonna ask this of all of our campuses, and even those of you online, you can do this, too, how many of you would like your future to be blessed by God? Let me see your hands. Yeah, okay. That's unanimous. We all want God to bless our future. Jesus said grief is the key to blessing. Notice this next verse. Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, "Blessed are those who," what? "Mourn, for they shall be," what? "Comforted".
Who gets comforted? They. And who are the they? Those who have the courage to mourn. What is he saying here? Cover ups don't get comforted. If I cover up the pain, if I ignore the pain, I deny the pain, I pretend it's not exist, I'm too afraid of my emotions, then I don't get comforted. And if I don't get comforted, I don't get blessed. Blessed are those who mourn. You want God's blessing? You gotta learn how to grieve clean, how to grieve good. It's like if you have a wound.
If you had a wound, you got a bad wound, and it got dirty, you would not think of letting a doctor simply put a Band-Aid on it without cleaning out the wound. If you don't clean out the wound, it's gonna fester. Yet, you tried to do that with many things in your life where you thought, that was painful, I just felt rejected, she just walked out on me, he just walked, but I'm not gonna think about anymore. What you did is you put a Band-Aid over a wound that's just festering. You didn't clean it out. You didn't have clean, good grief. And my guess is that in your life your unmourned losses are also still waiting there to be mourned.