How Jesus Shows Up in the Middle of Your Grief
Sean Flanagan · Tidal Church Moncton · August 17, 2025 · What Do the Miracles of Jesus Mean? series
Sean Flanagan looks at the raising of Lazarus in John 11 to show how Jesus meets us in grief. He weeps with us, brings eternal life, and lays down His own life out of love, so we can grieve with hope.
More from Sean Flanagan · The What Do the Miracles of Jesus Mean? series
Topics: Hope, Suffering, Grief
Transcript
[0:00] It's good to see you all. Yeah. As Pastor Jim said, my name is Sean. I'm the campus pastor in Miramichi. I'm really excited to be here. I'm excited to see you and to preach here this morning. I just have one problem. The one problem is I don't know all of your names, and when I preach, I really like to know people's names. So what I'm gonna get you to do on the count of three is very clearly, very loudly. Say your names. Can you do that for me? And I'll pay attention very closely, but you need to be clear. You need to be loud. 1, 2, 3. Good to meet you. Yes. Very good to meet you. Yeah, I'm glad to be here. We've been going through the Gospel of John over this summer. We've been looking at the miracles of Jesus, and we've been asking this question, what do the miracles of Jesus mean?
[0:52] It's amazing that Jesus turned water into wine, but what does that mean for you? Right? It's amazing that He healed a blind man, but what does that mean for us today? What did the miracles of Jesus mean? The first miracle took place at a wedding, if you remember, He turned water into wine, and today we're looking at the final miracle. It takes place at a funeral, and He raises a man from the dead. He was a man named Lazarus, and he was a friend of Jesus. I think sometimes when we think about Jesus, we think of Him as just like this kind of ghostlike figure. He's very spiritual and divine, and you know, He's just kind of floating in space or something.
[1:38] But the Bible says that He was fully God and fully man. He was a man. Like I'm a man, like you're a man. He had parents, He had brothers and sisters, grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, and He had friends. And it says in John that Lazarus was a friend of Jesus. That Jesus loved Lazarus. It says multiple times He loved Lazarus, but Lazarus got sick and Lazarus died. And so Lazarus had two sisters, Mary and Martha, and they send for Jesus, and they say, come.
[2:23] We need You here. And so Jesus starts to go, and He says to His disciples, I'm going to raise Lazarus from the dead. But His disciples say, whoa. Hold up there a second. Jesus. Just one second. You know, where Lazarus and his sisters are, that's in the village of Bethany. And actually just a couple weeks ago, I don't know if you remember this, Jesus, but just a couple weeks ago, people were trying to kill You there. They were trying to stone You. All the religious leaders were trying to kill Jesus. You can't go. If You go to heal, to raise Lazarus, You're gonna die.
[3:09] And Jesus says, I love Lazarus. I'm going. So He decides to go. And here's what happened. We'll read it in John 11. You can follow along on the screen or on your phone, in your Bible, whatever you like. So John 11, starting at verse 17, on His arrival, Jesus found that Lazarus had already been dead or already in the tomb for four days. He had been dead for about four days. Now, Bethany, the village, was less than two miles from Jerusalem. And so many Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them in the loss of their brother. So all these people from the city have come and they're all mourning with Mary and Martha. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet Him.
[3:58] But Mary stayed at home. "Lord," Martha said to Jesus, "if You'd just been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now, God will give You whatever You ask." Jesus said to her, "Your brother will rise again." And Martha answered, "I know he'll rise again in the resurrection at the last day." I know, you know, when all things are said and done, he'll rise again. But Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. Jesus said, I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in Me will live even though they die. And whoever lives by believing in Me will never die.
[4:45] Do you believe this?" "Yes, Lord." She replied, "I believe that You are the Messiah, the Son of God who has come into the world." Let's start with a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, I thank You for Your word. Thank You that it can open the eyes of the blind. It can heal us. It can bring life into our lives. I pray that You would prepare our hearts, prepare our minds, free us from distraction and speak to us. Bring faith into our hearts.
[5:30] I pray this in the powerful name of Jesus. Amen. We're gonna read more from John 11, but before we do, I want to ask this question. This is kind of the framing question for my talk this morning. It's this, how does Jesus show up in the middle of your grief? How does Jesus show up in the middle of your grief when you're grieving something? Maybe it's the loss of a loved one, right? Like Lazarus, maybe somebody in your life has died. You're mourning and you're suffering. What does Jesus do? How does He show up? Or maybe it's heartbreak. Maybe someone that you love has left you and you're grieving that loss. Or maybe it's, you know, a job or career or just the way that you thought your life was gonna go, right?
[6:22] Things just are not the way you thought they would be. And you're grieving. How does Jesus show up? What does He do? Let's continue in our passage in John 11. Let's keep on reading. So there's Martha who has already had a conversation with Jesus. She has a sister Mary, and she's gonna come to Jesus and have a very similar conversation. So when Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw Him, she fell at His feet and said, "Lord, if You'd just been here, if You'd been here, my brother would not have died." And when Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her were also weeping, He was deeply moved in spirit, and He was troubled.
[7:10] "Where have you laid him?" He asked. "Come and see, Lord," they replied. And Jesus wept. Then the Jews said, "See how He loved him?" See how He loved Lazarus? He loved Lazarus. He was weeping. So to answer that question, how does Jesus show up in the middle of your grief? The first thing He does is He weeps. And now what's amazing about this is that Jesus has already said to His disciples, and He's already said to Martha, I'm going to raise Lazarus from the dead. He knows in just a couple minutes, this funeral is gonna be the world's craziest funeral, right?
[8:00] The guy in the coffin is about to get up, right? It's gonna blow their minds. And He knows that Jesus knows. But He doesn't just like, you know, kick the door in and bust in and say, "Outta my way, I'm gonna perform a miracle." He sees them weeping and He weeps with them. He weeps with them. Why? Why does He weep? Why doesn't He just say, "All right, all right, I'm gonna fix this"? Right? A lot of men are kind of fixers, right? If your wife comes to you with some sort of issue, she's weeping. You say, "Okay, here's what you gotta do." Right? Not a good first move, really. I'll tell you that, husbands, just, you know, don't do that. Why does He weep? Why does Jesus weep?
[8:48] Well, I'll tell you a story to illustrate the point. When I was 19 years old, I was really skinny. And you say, "Well, Sean, I hate to break it to you, but you're pretty skinny right now." And well, actually, you haven't seen anything, 'cause I was about the same height as I am now. And when I was 19 years old, I was about 40 pounds lighter, if you can believe that. I don't know where the, where the weight came from, I couldn't tell you. But I was super skinny. And so I started hitting the gym. I gotta get some muscle. I gotta start, you know, adding some pounds to this, 'cause my twenties are not gonna be good if I'm this skinny. And so I go to the gym and I don't know what I'm doing. I have no idea.
[9:33] And so I do this exercise called a deadlift. I dunno if you know this exercise, you've got a barbell, you pick it up like that. And just a word to the wise: if there's an exercise with the word "dead" in it, maybe consider not doing it, right? And so I'm doing this exercise. I do the deadlift, and then something happens in my lower back and I go, "Oh, I think I maybe pulled a muscle there. That didn't feel good." So I try to walk it off and the pain doesn't really go away. And then a couple days go by and I still have this pain in my lower back. A couple weeks go by and the pain's actually getting worse, and now it's started to, like, shoot down my left leg. And it's really hard if I sit down on a chair like that, like I have to kind of, like, lean like this 'cause it's really just hurting me. It's really bad.
[10:23] And so what actually ended up happening was I got a herniated disc. Do you know this? I got a herniated disc. So in your back, you've got vertebrae, right? Your vertebrae is like that. And then in between your vertebrae, you've basically got these, like, jelly donuts, they're like Boston cream donuts. And in a herniated disc, what happens is your vertebrae kind of pressed together too hard. And so all the Boston cream filling ends up shooting out of the disc and ends up going into your sciatic nerve, right? And so that's what was causing all this kind of pain down my left leg. It was a lot of suffering. And unfortunately, just kind of going through the, you know, the jigs and the reels of the medical system, it took over 12 months for me to finally get surgery and get it healed.
[11:13] And so it was just a year of suffering and pain and really a lot of misery. But there was one other person that year who was suffering alongside me. There was one other person who, as I was suffering, was also suffering. Can you think of who that person is? If you're thinking, "Jesus," that's good. That's the correct answer. But actually, the answer I was really looking for was my mother. My mother was suffering with me. Because, you know, I was 19 years old. I'm my mother's youngest child, right? I'm her little baby boy. And when her baby boy had a herniated disc, it was like she had a herniated disc, right? I would sit down and I would go, "Oh," and she'd go, "Oh," right?
[11:59] Or I would go, "Ah," and she'd go, "Ah." And you know, that's kind of nice for, like, a couple weeks. Like, "Oh, thanks, Mom. Like, I know you love me. I really feel appreciated." But after 12 months of that, it's like, "Mom, please, I know you love me. I love you, but please, like, give it a break," right? It's my back, right? It's not your back, Mom. So why was my mom suffering, right? Why was she suffering as I was suffering? Because it's my back. She was suffering because she loves me. And when you see someone you love suffering, you suffer with them, right? When you see somebody you love who's mourning or grieving, you just can't help it.
[12:47] You suffer with them. You grieve with them. And Jesus, when He saw Mary and Martha and all these people weeping, He wept with them because He loved them. And so, for you today, how does Jesus show up in your grief? What does He do when you're suffering? When you're grieving, He weeps with you. Right? Some people think that God is far off. He doesn't care. Is He even listening? And I'm here to tell you that He cares. As you're suffering, whatever it is that you're going through, He's right there with you. You're not alone, 'cause He loves you. And when you love someone and they're grieving, you grieve with them.
[13:36] So how does Jesus show up in the middle of our grief? He weeps. And that's an amazing miracle. He could have stopped right there. That the God of the universe would care so much to come down and weep with us is amazing. That is an amazing miracle. But He doesn't stop there. So let's keep on reading in our passage. So we're in John 11 now, in verse 37. "But some of them said, 'Could not He who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?' Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance. 'Take away the stone,' He said. 'But, Lord,' said Martha, the sister of the dead man, 'by this time there's a bad odor, for he's been in there for four days.' Then Jesus said, 'Did I not tell you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?' So they took away the stone.
[14:38] Then Jesus looked up and said, 'Father, I thank You that You have heard Me. I knew that You always hear Me. But I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that You sent Me.' When He had said this, Jesus called out in a loud voice, 'Lazarus, come out!' The dead man came out, his hands and his feet wrapped with strips of linen and a cloth around his face. Jesus said to them, 'Take off the grave clothes and let him go.'" How does Jesus show up in the middle of our grief? He weeps with us, but He also brings life.
[15:23] He doesn't just leave us in our suffering, in our grief. He brings life. He says, "I am the resurrection and the life. If you believe in Me, you will never die." And then He raises Lazarus from the dead, almost as like a sermon illustration, the best sermon illustration that was ever performed to show you that if you believe in Jesus, you'll never die. that if you believe in Jesus, you'll never die. You'll have eternal life. I'm gonna spoil The Chronicles of Narnia for you. It's a book series that has been out for 50 years. So I'm sorry if you haven't read it yet, you can plug your ears for like the next 30 seconds.
[16:09] But at the end of The Chronicles of Narnia, you know, all the kids, okay, I'll try to not spoil all the details, but basically what happens is the world ends, right? It's kind of like the apocalypse. It's like the book of Revelation and just the world is turned upside down and basically everybody dies. Sorry again to spoil it. But you know, that's what happens. Everyone dies. And so, but people come back to life, right? And it's a new heavens and a new earth. And here's how C.S. Lewis describes what happened. He says, "All their life, these kids and all their adventures, all their life in this world, and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover page. Every adventure, everything that they had gotten into, all of this life was actually just the front cover of a book.
[16:59] It was just the cover page. Now, at last, they were beginning chapter one of the great story, which no one on earth has read. Now, at last, they're starting chapter one. And this story goes on forever. And every chapter is better than the one before." If you believe in Jesus, when you die, you don't really die. You don't just go into the grave, you're walking through a door, you're entering into chapter one, and every chapter is gonna be better than the next. You'll never die. Now what, what does that mean for us today?
[17:47] Right? That's an amazing hope. It's an amazing vision that you'll never die. We're gonna live forever. But what does that mean for me today? Tomorrow? What does that mean for us? How do we react with that? How do we live with this news that we'll never die? For some people, the way they react is kind of, they're always like, happy clappy. You know, like, everything's good, everything's great, right? Everything's all smiles all the time. You always have to be happy. And you know, so you know, St. Augustine, he was a great theologian. He's like the Wayne Gretzky of theologians. And there's a very interesting story that he told about the time his mother died.
[18:37] And St. Augustine, he was a bit of a mama's boy, right? Just like me. And, you know, he had this great relationship with his mom. 'Cause when Augustine was a teenager, he was a bad kid, right? He was doing all the wrong things. But his mother was just a devout, serious Christian. And his mom just prayed for him and prayed for him and prayed for him. And finally, Augustine's life was transformed, and he became a Christian. And he became one of the greatest theologians of all time. But he tells this story of the time when his mother, when his mother passed away, when his mother died, and she's lying there. And he closes her eyes and he describes, his tears start coming down his face.
[19:22] And what happens next is very interesting. He kind of reprimands himself. He wipes the tears away. And he says, "Those are childish feelings. I shouldn't be feeling this." And he says, he feels sorrow for his sorrow. He feels bad about feeling sad because Augustine knows, well, his mother is not really dead, right? His mother has life. His mother is in heaven. Now, there's nothing really to be sad about, right? And so he kind of beats himself on the chest and, no, okay, you know, no, I'm not gonna be sad about this, right? Because we have eternal life. And if I could have been there and I could have talked to Augustine, I would've said, "Man, your mom just died.
[20:11] It's okay. It's okay to cry. That's not childish. It's not unfaithful. It's okay to be sad." And here's what I worry about, is that I think sometimes we as Christians can actually start feeling bad when we're sad, right? We're grieving something, we're grieving a loved one, or we're grieving a lost love or lost career, and we kind of beat ourselves on the chest. Like Augustine. It's like, no, no, no. I shouldn't feel that. There's nothing, there's nothing to be sad about. Everything's okay. I've got eternal life, and I'm just gonna be happy. I'm gonna tell you, if you're grieving something, that's okay.
[20:58] It's okay to be sad. We don't have to put on a face. We don't always have to be happy, you know, and funerals. Now, and I wanna be careful when I say this, I don't, I don't wanna offend anyone, but at funerals now, we call them celebrations of life, right? And that's good. That's good. We wanna celebrate life, right? I've gone to funerals and we call them celebrations of life. And I'm happy 'cause we want to celebrate life. It's a good thing to do that. Do you know what else is a good thing though? Is mourning death, is grieving death, is actually a good thing. And you say, "Oh really, Sean, is that really a good thing? Like, isn't it just kind of like a, something we have to do?
[21:44] Is it really good?" But Jesus did it. Jesus wept. Jesus even knew just a couple minutes later that Lazarus was gonna rise from the dead, but He wept. So if you're feeling sad or grief, don't feel bad about it. Don't feel bad about it. It's okay. It's okay to have grief, right? We, yes, Jesus gives us life, but Jesus also wept. In Isaiah 53, this is one of my favorite verses, which tells you something about me. Isaiah 53:3, it describes Jesus in a prophecy. It says, "He's a man of sorrows, acquainted with our grief." So if you feel sad, it's okay.
[22:31] But on the other end of the spectrum, some people are kind of like, swing the pendulum maybe a little bit too far on the other side of the spectrum. And I'll call these folks lament, right? And I'm kind of one of them, you know, they just lament all the time. They see the brokenness in the world. They see the kind of the death and the sadness. And all they're doing is lamenting. And if you like meet, you know, a Christian my age in their twenties or thirties, and you ask them like, "Hey, do you lament?" They'll be like, "Yeah, man, I'm always lamenting. I'm like going through a season of lament right now." It's like kind of a cool thing to lament these days. I don't know. There's all these kind of Christian books being published about like practicing lament and, you know, that's cool.
[23:18] I can get behind that. But I will say this, that sadness is not a fruit of the Spirit. Sadness is not a fruit of the Spirit. It says in the Bible that if you're walking with Jesus, walking with the Spirit, that there are fruit that are gonna be produced in your life. You're gonna live and feel a certain way. And the second fruit of the Spirit is joy. It's not sadness. Sadness didn't make the list, right? So if you find yourself always lamenting, always grieving, I'd remind you to think about the gift that Jesus has given you of eternal life. And for me, this is a lesson I've had to learn.
[24:03] I'm not naturally a happy person. I'll tell you the first thing I did when I was born. So I came outta my mother, they spanked my butt and I started crying. And I've been crying ever since, right? And I actually, as I've grown up and as I've matured in my faith, I've had to learn to have joy. I've had to learn to trust Jesus. That, you know what, yeah, there's brokenness in this world. There's sadness and there's pain and there's a time to grieve. But we can have joy. Even now, in the midst of pain, in the midst of suffering. We can have joy. So Christian suffering and Christian joy and grief. You know, we don't wanna be just happy clappy that, you know, everything's fine all the time.
[24:49] But we don't wanna be lament. We always, we don't wanna always be mourning, right? It says in 1 Thessalonians, you can grieve, but don't grieve like those without hope. The picture that I have in my mind is like rain on a sunny day. Have you ever walked outside? And it's raining but it's sunny at the same time. It's kind of a bizarre experience. There's like clouds above you and it's torrential rain. But there in the horizon is the sun casting its light on you. And that's kind of what it's like to be a Christian in grief. That we can have a sadness and a sorrow, but also we have a hope, right?
[25:36] We have the Son to give us life. We know that the clouds of grief are eventually gonna go away. That eventually God is gonna wipe every tear from every eye. So how does Jesus show up in the middle of your grief? He weeps with you 'cause He loves you. When He sees you suffering, He suffers with you. But He doesn't stop there. He brings you life. If you believe in Him, you'll never die. And that would be amazing, just those two things in and of themselves, that would be amazing. Miracle of miracles. But He actually doesn't stop there. He keeps going. Do you remember I said at the beginning of the sermon that people in Bethany were trying to kill Jesus a couple weeks ago?
[26:26] And His disciples said, don't go, don't go to Bethany, 'cause if you go and you raise Lazarus from the dead, they're gonna kill you. So let's see what happens next. Therefore, many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary had seen what Jesus did. They believed in Him. Oh, let's keep on, let's go back there. Yeah. But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. Then the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin. So all the kind of religious leaders who hate Jesus have just been trying to kill Him. They're all going to get together now. They say, "What are we accomplishing?" They ask here, "Is this man performing many signs?
[27:13] If we let Him go on like this, everyone will believe in Him. And then the Romans will come and they'll take away both our temple and our nation." Then one of them named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, he spoke up, "You know nothing at all. You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish." And actually, I'm gonna read that last sentence again. I want you to catch this. Just pay attention here. This is Caiaphas, a man who hates Jesus, talking about wanting to kill Jesus. And here's what he says: "You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish."
[28:02] Now this is John, the author of the Gospel. He's about to comment on what Caiaphas just said. Caiaphas didn't say this on his own, but as high priest that year, he actually prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation. And not only for that nation, but also for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one. So from that day on, they plotted to take His life. And I really, really want you to get this final verse. So from that day on, they plotted to take His life. Caiaphas was just saying, we gotta kill this guy. We gotta kill this Jesus guy. It's better for Him to die and the rest of us can live.
[28:51] And John is saying, ah, Caiaphas, he didn't actually realize how true his words were. Yes, it's better for one man to die than the whole nation. It's better that one man would sacrifice Himself instead of all of us dying. And so from that day on, they sought to take Jesus' life. Now do you see the logic of the story? Do you see the flow of the story? There's a man named Lazarus and Jesus loved him. He was a friend of Lazarus, and Lazarus died. And Jesus loved Lazarus so much that He was willing to die for Lazarus.
[29:37] 'Cause He knew, if I go and if I raise Lazarus from the dead, that's gonna be the straw that breaks the camel's back. If I do that, all the Pharisees and the religious leaders and the dark powers of the world are gonna come against me. But Jesus loved His friend Lazarus so much He was willing to die for His friend. And Jesus said later, there's no greater love. There's no greater love than a man being willing to lay his life down for his friend. Jesus had that kind of love for Lazarus and He has that kind of love for you. How does Jesus show up in the middle of our grief? He weeps with us. He brings us life and He laid down His own life.
[30:26] He was willing to die so that you and I could live. He knew in order to bring us life, eternal life, that He had to lay down His own life. He knew to gather all the scattered children of God, to gather us all together, we're all on our way to hell. And in order to save us, Jesus had to go to the cross. Jesus had to lay down His own life. Why would He do that? Why? 'Cause He loved you. He loved you enough to lay down His own life. And if you wanna receive that life, if you wanna receive eternal life, He said you just have to believe in Him.
[31:13] You have to believe that He is the resurrection and the life. Do you believe this? Let's pray. Heavenly Father, I thank You that You so loved the world that You gave Your one and only Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but will have everlasting life. I pray for every person in here right now that they would know Your love despite whatever grief or suffering or pain that they're going through, that they would know deep in their heart that God loves them, that You love them so much that You would send Your Son and that He loves them and that He would die on their behalf.
[32:06] I just pray for faith to rise up in every heart here. We thank You for sending Your Son. We thank You for His sacrifice. We love You, and we praise You. We pray all these things in the powerful name of Jesus. Amen.