Rick Warren - Getting Through Life's Losses - Part 2

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TOPICS: Hard times

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. 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, and 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 it. You have to allow yourself to feel it. 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 mention 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 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. 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 terrible losses in my life? How do you move forward? As I said, a lot of people are stuck 'cause 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 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 it, 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 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. 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.

Now, why don't we do this? You say, "I don't know if I want to do that or not. I don't know if I want to go back and think about my losses and whether I grieved over 'em or not". Why don't we allow ourselves to grieve? One word: fear. You're a fraidy-cat. You're scared. You're fearful. And what are the fears that you, supposedly a mature adult, are still holding onto? Well, there's the fear of "if I really go back and think about the losses in my life and I allow myself to grieve over, I might be overwhelmed with emotion". Yeah, it's not gonna kill ya. It's just, it's like a wave. It'll come and then it'll go. So, what? You're afraid of your own emotions, really? Then you're afraid of yourself. That's not very healthy.

Say, "Well, I'm afraid that if I really grieve about that loss, I'll never recover". You will recover. You will recover. Where you won't recover is if you keep it a secret. You keep pushing it down. That's like shaking up the Coke bottle. You keep pushing it down. You say, "Well, I'm afraid that I'll lose my mind". You won't lose your mind. You might, if you keep it a secret. You might if you keep pushing it down, but if you let it out, the boogeyman isn't that big anymore. You bring him out into the light. What you need to do if you're afraid to grieve about a loss in your life, you need to claim the 23rd Psalm, the most famous Psalm in the Bible. Psalm 23, verse 4 says this: "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me".

Now, that's one of the most famous verses in the Bible, but I want you to look at it like you've never seen it before. Notice, let's take it apart by words. "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow," circle the phrase "walk through". You're walking through it. You're not gonna stay stuck there. What I'm asking you to do is to consider the things maybe you've never grieved and you walk through them. You're not gonna stay there. You're not gonna stay stuck there the rest of your life. You're gonna walk through the valley, but you've never walked through it, and so, you're stuck on the other side, and that's why you can't grow. That's why you can't get rid of those habitual patterns in your life that are holding you back. You walk through it.

Then circle the word "shadow," "Walk through the valley of the shadow of death". You know when you're kids, when you're a child, we all feared shadows, particularly at night time, why? Because shadows make things appear bigger than they really are, but nobody ever died from a shadow. You're not gonna die in the valley of the shadow of death. You're not dying. You're still alive. It's not gonna kill ya. And on top of that, I'm gonna walk through it, it's a shadow, and you, God, are with me, so what am I afraid? You see, not once in the Bible are we told "weep not" or are we told "sorrow not" or are we told "cry not" or are we told to "grieve not," but we are told to "fear not". In fact, 365 times in the Bible, we're told "fear not," why? That's one for every day of the year. Because grief doesn't paralyze, fear does.

What you are afraid of is actually paralyzing you more than the grief itself. Your fear of your own emotions is actually paralyzing you, not your grief. Grief gets you through the valley of the shadow to the other side, and then you can get on with the rest of your life, and you will grow, and you'll be more mature, and you'll be richer in spirit. It's the fear that holds you back.

So, I need to list the losses that I've never grieved. Then number two, if you're serious about getting unstuck, identify what I've really lost. I go back and I look at and I say, "What did I really lose in that childhood"? Now, go deeper, beyond the obvious. In other words, what did I lose by having an alcoholic dad? What did I lose by being laid off? What did I really lose when my parents divorced? What did I really lose when my family moved so often as a child? Did I lose stability? Did I lose security? Did I lose identity? Did I lose encouragement? Did I lose my credibility when that happened? Did I lose trust? You need to look past the obvious and say, "When that happened to me, that painful thing, or when that loved one died, or when that person walked out of my life, or when whatever happened, what did I really lose"? And that's what you need to grieve. And as I said, I've got a list of questions you can ask yourself.

Now, the third thing you do, you make a list of the losses you've never grieved and you say, "What did I really lose there"? Third thing, you have the courage to lament. I need to have the courage to lament. Now, lament is not a word that we use much today, but it's a Bible word, and so, I wanna deal with it because it's a kind of action that you must do in order to be healthy emotionally and spiritually. What is a lament? Well, I gave you a definition there. Lament is a passionate expression of grief to God. To lament means I have a passionate expression of grief to God. I cry out to God, I may shout to God, I may weep, I may yell, but it's a passionate expression of grief to God. And a lament is an act of worship. It is an act of worship that can actually include arguing with God and complaining to God.

You say, "Wait a minute, complaining to God can be an act of worship"? Absolutely. You complain to God, that's an act of worship. You complain about God, that's an act of rebellion. We usually do the second. We complain about God, and that's a sin, but God says you can complain to me all you want, and God can handle it. We're gonna look at this in detail next week when I talk about struggle, and how do you argue with God, and how do you complain to God and it become an act of worship? But I'll let you in on a little tip, a little advanced notice: God can handle it. God can handle your rage. He can handle your resentment. He can handle your regrets. He can handle your complaining. He can handle your accusations. It's like a parent with a little child grabbing at your knees, having a temper tantrum. You can handle a temper tantrum of somebody less mature than you are. God can handle your pain. You can tell him anything you want, why? 'Cause he already knows it. He just wants you to get it off your chest. He wants you to admit it.

You know what I love about the Bible, what I love about this book so much? It doesn't whitewash any negative emotion. It's all there. It's just all there. And if a guy says, "God, I think you're being unfair right now. You just cheated me. You broke your promise. God, you just need to fix that, God". And God just puts it right there in his book. God isn't afraid of negative emotions. We are, but God isn't. And I love it because life is not all sunshine, and roses, and rainbows, and My Little Pony, and unicorns, and pickin' flowers, and talkin' about peace and love. A lotta life is tough. Everybody agree with that? Life can be rough, and just like the Bible says, there's times to weep, and there's times to rejoice, and there's times to party, and there's time to cry. This is part of life, and God says to be fully alive and to be fully human is to accept it all.

If you only accept the parties of life and not the grief, you live half a life. You are emotionally stunted because you're living only the good parts, and there's no depth, there's no color to your life. The depth and the color comes in the grief, in the tough times, in the valleys of the shadow. Now, the Bible is full of laments. In fact, there's an entire book in the Bible. It's called Lamentations. That's what that book is. If you've ever read the book of Lamentations, it's an entire book of Jeremiah complaining that God got it all wrong, and it's in the Bible! And God just says, "Well, have your say, Jeremiah, go ahead. Just spout off". Tell me what...what he was grieving was the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem.

And in the, you know, the book of Psalms, most people think the book of Psalms is about thanksgiving and praise. There are 150 Psalms in the Bible, in the book of Psalms. Sixty-five of them are Psalms of lament, and if you go read 'em, it can be pretty shocking that there's that much negative stuff in the Psalms. And God says, David and a whole bunch of guys just really say, "God, this is bad! I don't like this"! And God says, "That's an act of worship too". That's as much an act of it as "thank you, God," "praise you, God" is "right now, God, I don't like you". Because you're talking to God about God, and it's all, if you ever want to read the pinnacle of the dark lamentations of Psalm 88 by a guy named Heman, and the final thing is he says, "Darkness is my only friend". You go, "That guy's pretty upset". Okay, "Darkness is my only friend". He's handling that.

Now, you know, this Bible right here, I call this my depression Bible. I've had it since I was a teenager. When I was a teenager, I bought this Bible. It's a Living Bible Paraphrase. And in 1981, I went through a year, a really bad year, and it was very depressing, very discouraging year. I was under a cloud of depression the whole year. It didn't leave for a year, and I was just filled with all kinds of fears, and anxieties, and depression, and my goal wasn't "Oh God, build a great church".

My goal was: God, can you get me through this week? Can you get me through today? And I took this Bible, and I opened up the middle, which is Psalms, and I read through the book of Psalms, and I underlined every verse, highlighted every verse, that either A, I identified with in my pain, or B, was an encouraging word of promise that would encourage me. And I underline it all, and I still got it. And now, if I start to get discouraged, I go get my depression Bible, and I open it up, and I just start reading all, just the underlined parts, and I get encouraged again. You see, every emotion known to human man is in the book of Psalms. It's all expressed there.

So here's your assignment, your homework: Start reading through the book of Psalms. Get a Modern Paraphrase, you know, Living Bible, the Message Paraphrase or New Living, there's lots of good ones, and start reading through the book of Psalms, and underline every verse you identify with and every verse that encourages you, and then you'll have it in your time, and you'll have it to share when others are in their discouraging parts. So have the courage to lament. Now, there's one other thing you need to do. You need to ask Jesus to heal your broken heart. I ask Jesus to heal my broken heart because he's understanding. He made me. The Bible says he's close to the brokenhearted.

Psalm 103:13 and 14 says this: "The Lord is like a father. The Lord is like a father to his children, tender and compassionate to those who honor him. For he understands how weak we are". When we come to God and we say, "God, I'm hurtin'," and "God, I'm scared," and "God, I'm grieving," and "God, I just got fired and I haven't the slightest thing, I don't know what to do," "that's a huge loss," or "I just lost it all in the stock market," or "that big deal I was working on, it just fell apart," or "that divorce, it's final," or "that engagement, it got broken off," "Dear God, all the things I've wanted, they haven't happened. I wanted to get married. It hadn't happened. I wanted to have a baby and a family. It hadn't happened".

Tell that to God, and you know what God's gonna say? He's not gonna say, "Now, stop your crying". That's what adults humans do. He's gonna say, he's tender. He's compassionate. He understands how weak we are. In fact, Jesus said this in his first public sermon in his hometown of Nazareth. Luke 4:18, Jesus said, "God has sent me. God has sent me to heal the brokenhearted". That's what Jesus came to do. He came to heal the brokenhearted. So in your pain, the last thing you do is you look toward God. While you're walking through the valley of the shadow, you look to Jesus. You know what I've discovered about shadows? Wherever there's a shadow, there's a light. There's a light. And when I'm walking through the valley of the shadow, and I see that shadow over there, and it's scaring me, what do I do to get through the valley of the shadow?

I turn my back on the shadow and look directly into the light, and I'm not afraid anymore, because I'm not lookin' at the shadow. I'm lookin' at the light. Have you looked to the light? Jesus said, "I am the light of the world". You need to give your life to Christ. If you haven't done that, you need to do it no matter what campus or online. Wherever you are, you need to give your life to Christ 'cause you don't have the resources to make it through all the losses that are gonna come in your life if you don't have the power of God in your life, Jesus Christ, who came and died for you to love you. You know, the best way to prepare for the loss of a loved one, the best way to prepare for a loved one's death, and you're gonna have loved ones who die, just like I did. The best way to prepare for a loved one's death is to make sure you're prepared for your death. If you were to die tonight, do you know you'd go right to heaven? Have you settled that issue? If you haven't, let's do so right now. Let's bow our heads. Would you pray this prayer in your heart?

Dear God, you know all the things that scare me, and sometimes I'm even afraid of my own emotions. Sometimes I'm afraid to show 'em, and I admit I have often equated sadness with weakness, not strength. I realize that I needed to learn some stuff today about grief. That is a choice. It doesn't happen unless I let it happen in my life. And God, many times I've pushed it down. I've suppressed and repressed, and I've denied, and I've gone ahead thinking that I could go past it without goin' through it. Lord, help me to realize that grief is healthy. It's the only healthy response to loss. Thank you that you grieve with me. Thank you that you're close to the brokenhearted. Thank you for putting me at Saddleback Church where I can be in a healing community where we can carry each other's burdens and we can share each other's sorrows. I want to be in a small group to build that kind of connection, that safety net, when I'm in pain and when I can help others in their pain.

Lord, many times I've rushed it, always trying to find an answer, a quick fix, an instant solution instead of realizing that grief takes time and that there's a season for everything in life. Forgive me for that. Help me to make a list of the things I've lost in life that maybe I just was too busy or too afraid to grieve. I don't want to be stuck anymore. I want to identify what I've really lost, and I want to have the courage to lament, not just an intellectual exercise, but to feel the grief and express it. And thank you, God, that you can handle all my questions, and all my fears, and anger, and everything. You love it all and can handle it. Jesus, I ask you to heal my broken heart and I do that by, first of all, asking you to come into my heart and change me, fill my life with love where there's emptiness. Thank you that you are a Father that's tender and compassionate. You understand the weaknesses in my life. Thank you, Jesus, that you came to heal the brokenhearted. Start that today in my life. As much as I know how, I say "yes" to you. I wanna go your way, not mine, and I want to learn to love you and trust you, in Jesus's name, amen.