Immanuel Sermon Audio
Lamentations (25:66)
All right, thank you, Ms. Joe, and thank you, Tony. If you have a Bible, find the book of Lamentations, short book, five chapters, Lamentations. There's outlines at the front, in the back, if you need an outline, you want to follow along. I wish, in a sense, that the topic tonight was more light-hearted, or more pleasant, or not such a downer, but the reality is the whole book of Lamentations is kind of a downer. And in a sense, I guess we should be grateful for that, in that when we turn to Scripture, we don't find just some sort of otherworldly pie in the sky. Everything's okay, rosy, smiley, nonsense. We find real-life stuff, because in your life and in my life, you face things that make you want to lament. And so this is one of those books that just sort of reflects real life. Every first thing on your outline right there, just to set the stage, it's a book about grief, book about grief, or you could say it's a book about sorrow, a book about suffering. All of those words would sort of capture what we're trying to get at here. Lamentations is a book about grief, or sorrow, or suffering. What's with that next slide up there for me? You guys ever heard of this lady, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross? She wrote a book in 1969 called On Death and Dying, and came up with what people call today the Kubler-Ross model of grief, and she says there's five stages in the process of grief, and her stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and then acceptance. So that's one take on grief, and how we deal with it, on how we experience it. Here's another guy named Granger Westbrook. This guy is a Christian. He was a Lutheran pastor, and he wrote a book called Good Grief, so sort of a play-on words there. His stages are, he says there's more stages to grief. You talk, you express emotion, you experience depression, and then this is a separate stage, but I combine them for the sake of space. Then loneliness, then physical distress, then you are panicky, then you experience guilt, then you experience anger, then you resist returning to normal everyday life, then you have some sort of hope, then you affirm reality. And Granger says, no, when people experience grief, this is what they go through. You can pick your psychologist, okay? They're all going to sort of have some understanding of grief is a process, and when you are grieving, you go through a number of emotions. And I think one thing that's helpful, some of these psychologists, some authors make this point more clear than others, but when you see these five stages or however many Granger has ten or so, some guys are really good at explaining, this is not like just one to five in a row and then you're done. This is like one, four, two, five, two, five, two, three, one, and you just sort of experience them just cyclical and they come and you think you've knocked one of those stages out and then you find yourself back in one of those stages. So definitely something to the idea that there are stages to grief. And you know from everyday life, I don't have to convince you that we grieve differently, but we grieve over big things and little things, right? It doesn't have to be just some huge catastrophe in your life for you to experience grief. It may be that. You're going to pray for a family later on that is experiencing a huge catastrophe and you just think you can't even wrap your brain around it, how tragic it is. But I don't want to make light of that but I do want to just be clear to say we also grieve about just disappointments in life. When you want something to go a certain way and it doesn't go that way, you experience grief and maybe it's not on the same level or the same magnitude as this tragedy, maybe it doesn't last as long and you don't find yourself hopping around these stages as long. But we experience grief, big things and little things. And it's really of no value to us to try to compare grief, right? Sometimes you hear people almost kind of compare grief, like you hear someone tell a story about, look, this family's going through this and then it becomes, oh, well let me tell you about this family. You think it's bad that that guy has, let me tell you about this guy that has and his wife has and then this person says, oh, you think that's bad, I knew a guy one time and we just sort of sometimes play this one-upmanship on whose grief is the worst or do we know the person who's grieving the hardest. Here's the reality. If it's your life, it's bad. If it's your grief, it's tough. And you don't need to feel guilty about saying, sometimes we try to do the thing, well, well, I know other people have it worse than me, well, I know that I shouldn't feel this bad. It could be worse, that's just nonsense. You just need to say grief is grief. If it's a tragedy in your life, if it's something small, a disappointment or plans that fall through, grief is grief. And we do need to know how to handle it. We do need to know what to expect going into it, but we all experience it, okay? We all experience it on different levels, and so lamentations is a book about grief. And in that sense, it is very, very practical. And I just want you to get that in your brain. This is a very practical book. You may read the book as we talk about what's going on and why Jeremiah wrote it and when he wrote it, and you may say, that has nothing to do with me. That was so long ago, I've never experienced that. I've never found myself in that circumstance or situation, nor do I ever think I will. I can't relate to that. But when you back up and you understand that the book is about grief, that's the name of it. Lamentations, lamenting, sorrow, pain, heartbreak, then you realize that it has something to say for your life. So we're going to talk about grief. Lamentations, just to put it all sort of in context for you, it's one of the major profits, which as we've talked about, does not mean that it's more important or most important as compared to the minor profits, it's just in a group of books that are longer in nature. And Lamentations is the exception to that. It's only five chapters. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel are way longer. Daniel is significantly longer. And there are minor profits that are longer, at least in chapter number, than Lamentations. But Lamentations gets put in here with the major profits because Jeremiah wrote it. And that's why it falls where it falls in the order of the books of the Bible. Isaiah, Jeremiah, the book that Jeremiah wrote, and then Lamentations. The other book that Jeremiah wrote comes right next to it. Here's where it goes. Here's where it falls in the history of Israel, just so we know the storyline of the Old Testament. The conquest with Joshua, they go in, they fight at Jericho and A.I. and all the different cities they conquer, period of the judges, Jephthah, Samson, Deborah, all these guys in the period of the judges. The last judge is Samuel, and the period of the judges also covers the book of Ruth. Then the monarchy under David, first Saul, then David, then Solomon, then the division of the kingdom, Jeroboam, Rehoboam, rebellion of Israel first in the north, then Judah in the south. In exile, they get kicked out of the land. Just like God brought him into the land, he kicks him out of the land. That's where Lamentations happens, is right during the exile, at the beginning of the exile. And then, when you read Lamentations, this is really important. You've got to remember that this is not the end of the story, okay? It's not the end of the story in the sense that there is a New Testament after the Old Testament, but this isn't even the end of the Old Testament. After the tragedies that we read about in Lamentations, then God brings his people back to the promised land, back to the land that he promised to give to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in their family. So, let's think about the exile, okay? Just some dates and names of empires, if you're interested in that, that helps you in understanding. The year 722 B.C., Assyria came and conquered the kingdom of Israel, conquered the capital of Samaria and hauled the people in the northern kingdom of Israel into exile. Which means, just so we're all on the same page, they came to the northern kingdom, they marched against the capital city of Samaria, they destroyed the city, and when they destroyed it, they destroyed it, flattened it, took the people, killed anybody who was worth anything, anyone who had any level of intelligence or power or influence, and then took all the peasants and the poor people and hauled them into exile, okay? A complete catastrophe, if you live there. Then in 587 B.C., the Babylonians did the same thing in Judah and they marched against the city of Jerusalem. So, Jeremiah wrote this book, and you remember we talked about Jeremiah last week. Jeremiah lived during the rebellion and the exile, and Jeremiah's job, we saw it last week in chapter 1, is you go to Judah and you tell the people that God's about to punish him. And Jeremiah's job was to go and to say, "You just need to submit and surrender to Babylon. If you just wave the white flag and march out there, you'll live. You're going into exile one way or the other, but at least you'll live. You get to go. If you stay here and fight, you're going to die." And all the other false prophets said, "No, we're a great kingdom. We'll never fall. Jerusalem can't be conquered. Don't listen to Jeremiah. He's a traitor. He's a traitor." But that was his job, not anybody listened to him. And when Babylon came and attacked Jerusalem, they besieged the city for one and a half years, 18 months. Okay? So, you're in Jerusalem, and you can look out the walls of the city, and you can see the hordes of Babylon camped out there, and they're lobbing catapult rocks at you and shooting arrows in the city and attacking and all sorts of things. They're just a year and a half. They attack the city. They don't let anybody in. They don't let anybody out. They just sort of camp out there and attack the city. You can imagine if you're walled into a city and you don't get to come in or go out, they ran out of food and water pretty quick. And it got so bad at one point in the siege, Jeremiah talks about this in the book of Lamentations. It got so bad at one point that people were afraid to leave their home because they thought someone would murder them to eat them. That's how bad it was in the city. I'll just stay inside and starve to death or die of thirst because my fate will be worse if I leave my home in somebody's hungry and maybe they think I look tasty and they might kill me and eat me for dinner. That's pretty bad. Eventually, after 18 months, they knocked down the wall. They come into the city. They flatten the palace or in your brain and my brain, the White House, the King's Palace. They flatten it to the ground. So if you want to understand what it's like, you just think armies parked out there on the Atlantic Ocean. They finally come in. They flatten the White House and they flatten the temple in Jerusalem. They just destroy it all. They kill a ton of people and they haul people into exile and it was really, really bad. Here's the structure of the book. It's pretty simple in how it's laid out. Chapter 1, 22 verses in a one verse acrostic. Guess how many letters there are in the Hebrew alphabet? 22. So in chapter 1, you can't see this in English, but you can see it in the Hebrew. The first letter of the first word of each verse begins with one letter of the Hebrew alphabet, all the way from beginning to end. Okay? Does that make sense? So it does that in chapter 1. It does it in chapter 2. It does it again in chapter 4. Right in the middle, the longest chapter, the most important chapter, is the same thing except three times as long. And there's three verses that begin with olive. And then there's three verses that begin with bait. And then there's three verses that begin with gimel and all the way through the alphabet in chapter 3. And then chapter 5, I'll be honest with you, I almost couldn't even type this and put it on the screen as a type A person who likes structure and order and everything to be even and nice and the same. The last one is not an acrostic. That drives me crazy. I look at that and I say, Jeremiah, you are just, you are messing with people like me. That you would make it so neat, acrostic, acrostic, acrostic, the longest chapter is right in the middle. So it's balanced, it's not top heavy, it's just nice, neat, even. And then he comes to the last chapter and he just writes it, okay? Is not an accident. Is not Jeremiah coming to the end and saying, you know what, I'm out of letters. I'm out of words. I can't think of it. I can't come up with anything. We know that because we remember and we realize as Christians it wasn't just Jeremiah writing but it was the Holy Spirit of God inspiring him to write this. And so when you think about what Jeremiah is writing, it's all ordered, it's all structured and then you come to the end and it just sort of falls off the edge. The pattern goes away and you come to the end and you realize that he's making a point even in the structure of the book, not just the words but the structure and he's saying everything has fallen apart. Everything is not the way it's supposed to be. This did not end well for us. And you remember, he doesn't know or he hasn't, he knows but he hasn't experienced the end of the story, the return from exile. He's just saying, here's the, here's where we're at. We've gone into exile and as I end this book, not only am I going to tell you how bad it is but I'm going to show you in just the style of it and the structure of it that everything has pretty much gone to pot. So not an accident at the end of the chapter. Just a note that you may think is interesting, you may not think is interesting, today in Jewish synagogues, they read the entire book of lamentations every year on the ninth day of AB, AB, AB, however you want to say it. And that is interesting, that is not the day that Babylon came and destroyed the city. But that is the day in 70 AD when the Romans marched back into Jerusalem and destroyed or you could say, re-destroyed the rebuilt temple. So Babylon comes, they come in, they tear everything down to the ground. A bunch of years go by, the Jews rebuild it. Ezra and Nehemiah is a rubber belt, they rebuild Jerusalem and then Herod comes along later and he builds a bunch of stuff on the temple so it's called Herod's temple, they make it really nice and really big and then in 70 AD the Romans come in and they flatten everything again. And on that anniversary, ninth day of AB, Jews read lamentations to commemorate that and to remember that. So let's talk about the book, we're talking about grief and when you look at these chapters, there's something in each chapter that you need to do when you experience grief. Whether it's for this sort of thing, you get taken into exile or whether it's loss of a loved one, a broken relationship, someone who is sick and dying, disappointment in life, whatever. This is how you and I ought to handle grief, five steps. Not stages of grief, but how to handle grief. Number one, when suffering comes, you confess your sins. And I want you to stay with me on this because I don't want you to think I'm a crazy person, so stay with me. You confess your sins. Look at Lamentations 1, verse 5, it says, "Her foes have become the head, her enemies prospers," talking about Jerusalem, "because the Lord has afflicted Jerusalem, her, and He's afflicted her because of the multitude of her transgressions. Her children have gone away, captives before the foe." Look down at verse 8, it says, "Jerusalem sinned grievously, therefore she became filthy. All who honored her despise her, for they have seen her nakedness. She herself groans and turns her face away." Jump down and look at chapter 1, verse 18, it says, "The Lord is in the right." The Lord is in the right, "I have rebelled against His word, but here all you peoples and see my suffering, my young women and my young men have gone into captivity. I called to my lovers, but they deceived me. My priest and elders perished in the city while they sought food to revive their strength. Look, O Lord, for I am in distress and my stomach churns. My heart is wrung within me because I have been very rebellious. In the street, the sword bereaves, and the house that is like death, they heard my groaning yet there is no one to comfort me. All my enemies have heard of my trouble. They're glad that you have done it. You have brought the day that you announced. Now let them be as I am. Let their evil doing come before you and deal with them as you have dealt with me because of all of my transgressions, for my groans are many and my heart is faint." Chapter 1, Jeremiah is confessing sin, and when you experience suffering, you need to confess sin. Now, when you hear that, some of you are thinking, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. Are you trying to say that all suffering is a result of your sin, like God is just paying you back for every bad thing you've done, anything bad in your life, God's just getting you back and just pounding you?" No. Not what I'm saying. But think about what Jeremiah did in chapter 1. He doesn't say those people are really bad people. Those people caused this. Those people are wicked. What does he say? We did it. I did it. Jeremiah, the one guy who's listening to God and telling people to pay attention to God, he doesn't just schluff it off on other people, but he says, "We did it. I did it." Anyway, when you suffer, it is not always God's discipline in your life, it's not. You still need to confess sin, and here's why. When people suffer, it is very easy for their heart to become hard. You know that from personal experience and from knowing other people. When people suffer, in the greater you're suffering, the greater the possibility that your heart becomes hard and you become angry and you become bitter. If you will do this, I'm not saying that you confess your sins as in you just say to God, "God, I think you're punishing me. I think you're making me suffer because I'm a sinner." I'm just saying when you suffer, confess your sins and just remind yourself, "I am a sinner. I don't deserve anything good from God." Like he said in the middle of chapter 1, "God is in the right." No matter what happens, I believe that God is in the right. If you will do this, when you suffer, it will prevent your heart from becoming hard and from you becoming a bitter person. Number 1, when suffering comes, you confess your sins. Number 2, when suffering comes, you recognize the sovereignty of God. Remind yourself of the sovereignty of God. This is chapter 2. Look at chapter 2, verse 1, and I want you to pay attention in chapter 2, beginning in verse 1, and I want you to listen as I read this, for who is the one acting? Who is the one doing things? Lamentations 2, 1, "How the Lord in his anger has set the daughter of Zion under a cloud. He has cast down from heaven to earth the splendor of Israel. He has not remembered his footstool in the day of his anger. The Lord has swallowed up without mercy all the inhabitants of Jacob. In his wrath, he has broken down the strongholds of the daughter of Judah. He has brought down to the ground in dishonor the kingdom and its rulers. He has cut down in fierce anger all the might of Israel. He has withdrawn from them in his right hand, withdrawn from them his right hand in the face of the enemy. He has burned like a flaming fire in Jacob, consuming all around. He has been his bow like an enemy with his right hand set like a foe. He has killed all who were delightful in our eyes in the tent of the daughter of Zion. He has poured out his fury like fire. The Lord has become like an enemy. He has swallowed up Israel. He has swallowed up all its palaces. He has laid in ruins and strongholds. He has multiplied in the daughter of Judah, mourning and lamentation. He has laid waste, his booth like a garden laid in ruins, his meeting place. The Lord has made Zion forget festival and Sabbath and in his fierce indignation has spurned king and priest. The Lord has scorned his altar, disowned his sanctuary. He has delivered into the hand of the enemy, the walls of her palaces. They raised a clamor in the house of the Lord is on the day of the festival. The Lord determined to lay in ruins the wall of the daughter of Zion. He stretched out the measuring line. He did not restrain his hand from destroying. He caused a rampart and wall to lament and they languished together. Who's the one doing all the acting? God is. If it's not clear enough in those verses, look over in verse 17 in chapter 2. The Lord has done what he purposed. He has carried out his word which he commanded long ago. He has thrown down without pity. He has made the enemy rejoice over you and exalted the might of your foes. When you're suffering, you remind yourself that God is in control. These people are sitting there and who is the one marching into the city, Babylon. Who's the one setting fire to the temple, the armies of Babylon? Who's the one slaughtering people in the streets, Nebuchadnezzar and his armies. And Jeremiah looks at it from a completely different perspective and he says, "God is doing this." Now, I'm going to be honest with you, that makes some people uncomfortable. That makes some people kind of squirm in their seat and say, "I don't know if I believe that," that God would be the one to do these things. And what you'll hear a lot of people say is something like this. They would never say, "They don't like how Jeremiah says it," but they don't like how Jeremiah says it. And they would say, "I would prefer to say that God allowed these things to happen rather than that he was the one who did them." I don't want to say that God was the one who brought this judgment on them and all this disaster. Let's just say that God let it happen. Okay? First thing is that's not how Jeremiah talks about it. Jeremiah says, "God did it. He did it. He did it. He did it. He did it. He did it. He did it. He did it. He did what he purposed. God did it. The second thing I say to those people is if you back them into a corner and you say, "Okay, do you want to just pretend like God let it happen?" He didn't do it. He just stood back and let it happen. Do you believe that he knew it was going to happen? Well, yeah, yeah, I mean he knows everything, okay. Do you believe he knew it was going to happen? Do you believe that he could have stopped it if he wanted to? Well, yeah, he's all powerful. He could do whatever he wanted. He stopped kings before and armies and turned them back. He said, "Okay, so you just want to say God let it happen, but you believed that he knew it was coming and you believe he could have stopped it if he wanted to. And he didn't. That sounds like you're saying the same thing I'm saying. He did it. He's the one who did it. And when you suffer, you have to remind yourself of this. Jot down on your notes. We're not going to look it up, but jot down Acts 4, 27, and 28. If you don't think that that truth is comforting, that God is sovereign, then you go read Acts 4, 27, and 28, where it talks about Jesus being handed over to wicked men, evil people, bad leaders, and crucified and killed on a cross because that's what God had planned to happen. That was the plan. The worst tragedy that ever happened, the only sinless person who ever experienced any sort of calamity, Jesus, that was God's plan. God was in control of that. I didn't just let it happen, he planned it to happen. So you can look at that later. Acts 4, 27, and 28. So number one, you confess sins, number two, you recognize the sovereignty of God. Number three, you give special attention to Godly leaders. Give special attention to Godly leaders. We're skipping chapter three, but we'll come back to it. Look at chapter four, verse 10, this is scary verse, "The hands of compassionate women have boiled their own children, they have become their food, they became their food during the destruction of my daughter, of the daughter of my people." That's how bad it was, it was really bad. Look over in chapter four, verse 11, it says, "The Lord gave full vent to his wrath and he poured out his hot anger and he kindled a fire and Zion that consumed its foundations. Look backwards and look at verse one in chapter four. It says, "Gold has grown dim, pure gold is changed, holy stones lie scattered at the head of every street." Chapter four is saying everything is tipsy-turvy backwards. Compassionate women are not taking care of their kids. God is not protecting his people, his city. Gold, valuable jewels, worthless, they're just laying in the street, nobody cares about them right now, they have no value right now. Everything is upside down, and here's the problem, chapter four, look at verse 13. This was for the sins of her prophets and the iniquities of her priests who shed in the midst of her the blood of the righteous. They wandered blind through the streets, they were so defiled with blood that no one was able to touch their garments away, unclean people cried at them, away, away, do not touch, so they became fugitives and wanderers. People said among the nations, "They shall stay with us no longer. The Lord Himself has scattered them, and He will regard them no more. No honor was shown to the priests, or no favor to the elders." And in those verses you circle priests and prophets in verse 13, you draw a line down to verse 16 and you circle priests and elders. And what you see is that the judgment came on the people, and one big reason the judgment came is that their leaders were wicked, right? You rewind and you go back to Jeremiah. Jeremiah is the only one speaking for the Lord, and you have dozens of prophets, prophets in quotes, speaking for themselves, speaking for the bales, speaking for the ashras. You have elders and you have priests who are supposed to be godly influences on the people who are leading people into immorality and wickedness. And God says when you do that, look, it fits with the verses we read earlier. When you do that, when the leaders are not leading the people in godly ways, everything is tipsy-turvy. It all goes wrong. And you read this chapter and you realize as bad as all these leaders were, somebody should have listened to Jeremiah. So in the midst of your suffering, you pay attention and you listen and you look for godly leadership, people who will truly speak for God. Okay? Number four, when suffering comes, you pray for the future. And this is chapter five, it's not an acrostic, everything has just kind of come undone. It's a picture of the chaos, picture of the pain. But look how it ends in Lamentations 5, 19 to 22. You, O Lord, reign forever. Your throne endures to all generations. Why do you forget us forever? Why do you forsake us for so many days? Now think about that. Jeremiah writing this, does he know the answer to verse 20? He knows it, right? He's been telling people for years, God's going to judge you, God's going to bring judgment. And then it happens and what does he do? He does what everyone does in suffering, why? He asked the same question that we all wrestle with. Why do you forget us forever? Why do you forsake us for so many days? It's okay for you to ask that question in your suffering. As long as before verse 20, you include verse 19. And before you ask a question, you remind yourself, God reigns forever in your throne endures for all generations. Reminds himself of the truth. He asked the questions that are on his heart. Then verse 21, restore us to your self, O Lord, that we may be restored. Renew our days as of old, unless you have utterly rejected us and you remain exceedingly angry with us. For all the chaos and the sorrow and the lamenting in the book, it ends with Jeremiah saying, you're still God, this is miserable, please restore us. Please bring us back, right? He's praying. He's asking about the future. You say, well, why do you need to do that in the midst of suffering? Think about people who are suffering. When you are suffering, all you can see is your suffering. And your world gets shrunk down to the size of your world, right? You sort of lose when you're suffering. You almost lose the ability to look outside yourself. You almost lose the ability to think about others in their plight when your suffering is so severe. And sometimes you even lose the ability to look to tomorrow, like another day is even going to come or to think, how am I going to get to next week? How am I going to make it through this? I don't know how it's going to happen. And Jeremiah tells you how to do it. You pray about the future and you say, I know that you are the king forever and ever and ever today in the midst of my suffering tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next day and the next day forever. And right now, you can ask the question, why? God, this hurts. It's painful. I like it. Why? But then he comes back and he says, I'm praying that down the road, you will strengthen me. You'll be gracious to me. You'll restore me. So he prays about the future, okay? In your suffering, you cannot let your world become all about your world. And you've got to look down the road and you've got to pray about the future. Number five, when suffering comes, you hope in God. And that's the middle chapter, the longest chapter, the most important chapter. Look at Jeremiah 3. And let's start in verse 21. Well, let's start in verse 19. Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall, my soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me. But this I call to mind, therefore I have hope. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercy has never come to an end there, new every morning, great is your faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, says my soul, therefore I will, here's that word again, I will hope in him. Verse 24 and verse 21, I will hope, I have hope. The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth. Let him sit alone in silence when it is laid on him. Let him put his mouth in the dust. There may yet be hope. Let him give his cheek to the one who strikes and let him be filled with insults, for the Lord will not cast off forever. But though he calls grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love, for he does not willingly afflict or grieve the children of men. To crush underfoot all the prisoners of the earth, to deny a man justice in the presence of the Most High, to subvert a man in his lawsuit, the Lord does not approve. Who is spoken and it came to pass unless the Lord commanded it? Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that good and bad come? Why should a living man complain, a man about the punishment of his sins? Let us test and examine our ways and return to the Lord. Let us lift up our hearts and hands to God in heaven. We have transgressed and rebelled and you have not forgiven. You have wrapped yourself with anger and pursued us, killing us without pity. You have wrapped yourself with a cloud so that no prayer can pass through. You have made a scum and garbage among the peoples. In that chapter, right there in the middle, in the heart of it all, his hope is just going to be easy tomorrow. His hope and his comfort is not, well, some people have it worse than we do. His hope in all of it is, God is still God and his mercies are new every morning and my hope is in him, not in my circumstances, not in that it could be worse, but my hope is in God and who he is. So here's what you do when you find yourself grieving. You know there will be stages to your grief, right? That's normal. That's reality. Whether you experience five or ten or seven or eight or twenty, there's stages to it and you work through that. What you don't do is you don't just sort of lay back and passively say, well, this grief is just, it is what it is and I can't get past this and I can't get over that. You know there's going to be stages and they're going to come when you least expect it, but you do the kinds of things that Jeremiah's talking about in the midst of your grief, right? You confess your sins, you hope in God, you do all of these things. Pray for the future, listen to Godly leaders, trust in his sovereignty and it is a help. Doesn't make it easy, doesn't make you just zip through those stages in a week, but this is what you do. You work through it, you experience these stages and these are the things you do when you're dealing with grief. So let me pray for us and then we will share some prayer requests. Father, we're grateful for your word and even as we meet and study, we are reminded that your mercies are new every morning, you are good to your people, you do provide, we thank you for the rain that is falling outside and we remember that your word says that if it falls according to your will on the just and the unjust and you're good and you are faithful to sustain us and to give us what we need. And Father, as we come as a group, we know that individually there are all sorts of griefs and sorrows and hurts in our hearts and in our lives and some of them are very fresh and some of them are old and have been with us for many years and some of them may seem trivial and some of them may seem catastrophic. And Father, all of us experience grief and we know that it's a result of living in a broken, fallen world that doesn't work like you originally created it to work. We know that our sin has brought suffering and pain and relational strife and heartbreak into creation. And Father, my prayer is that as we deal with grief individually in our families, in our church, that we would not just lay back and experience these waves or these stages of grief but that we would do what your word tells us to do, that we would listen to Jeremiah, a man who was grieved and who experienced tremendous suffering and who tried to deal with it in a God-honoring way and we want to do the same thing in our lives. Father, as you give us opportunity to encourage other people, we want to be sensitive and we don't want to just throw around pithy catchy phrases to try to make someone feel better but we do want to encourage them with godly biblical advice and so we pray that you would give us wisdom to do that as we walk with our friends in the midst of grief and suffering and pain. Lord, we love you and again we're thankful for your word, for the book of lamentations that's very real, very raw, very honest and very applicable to our lives. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.