He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. – Isaiah 53:3
My church is currently going through a period of grief. Our founding pastor, a man we’ve loved for years, went home to be with the Lord last week.
One of his lifelong passions was telling people about Jesus. And now as I reflect on the years I knew him, I can’t help but think about his dedication to the Great Commission. Honestly, I’ve been lax about this. But I’ve come to realize though just how important it is.
Because God grieves the lost.
My church is grieving a temporary separation. Though it hurts, though we miss him, we know we’ll see this great man again one day.
It hit me, though, that while we’re grieving a temporary separation, God is grieving an eternal separation.
I touched on this some in a previous post, but it’s becoming all too real to me now.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. There wasn’t supposed to be death and sin. When sin entered the world, God put in motion a plan to save us from the depths of hell.
Yet people reject Him.
From the very beginning, God faced this rejection. And when His Son came to earth, “his own received him not” (John 1:11).
So if we take the pain and grief we feel and magnify it, we’ll get a glimpse of what God feels. He loves everyone. The Bible says “For God so loved the world,” not just a select few (John 3:16). So it stands to reason that God would mourn the lost souls. The ones who died without accepting Jesus as their Savior.
What does this mean for us?
Well for one, it means realizing that God loves us. That we’re the one Christ died for. That our good works aren’t enough, we need to be cleansed by His blood.
Second, it means God’s people need to go out into the highways and the hedges (Luke 14:23). It means we need to tell people about Jesus. That we need to spread the message about His love and His sacrifice. That we need to live righteously so that our light will shine (Matthew 5:16).
It means we need to take this grief and channel it through our evangelical mission. To remember the hope we have and to share it with the world.
We need to allow ourselves to grieve, to feel the sadness. And as we heal, channel that into doing God’s work.
