In this video clip from my interview with Costi Hinn on For the Gospel podcast, I share the importance of grieving with hope as believers in Jesus Christ:
I’ve heard it said, “There’s no wrong way to grieve.” I disagree.
Certainly, there are different ways and lengths of time to grieve. We should not rebuke or lay guilt on the brokenhearted! Even knowing He would raise Lazarus, Jesus wept for and with his grieving family.
The Bible says this about grief: “And now, dear brothers and sisters, we want you to know what will happen to the believers who have died so you will not grieve like people who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and was raised to life again, we also believe that when Jesus returns, God will bring back with him the believers who have died” (1 Thessalonians 4:13–14 NLT, emphasis added).
This means grieving as if we have no hope is the wrong way to grieve. And grieving while embracing Christ’s rock-solid promise of His second coming and our resurrection—and that of all who love Him—is the right way to grieve.
A grieving father wept as he told me, “I will never again hug my daughter.” I asked, “Don’t you believe in the resurrection?” He said, “Of course.” I responded, “But the resurrection means you will hug your daughter again and again!”
Jesus said, “Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have” (Luke 24:39). Our resurrection will follow the model of His (Philippians 3:20–21; 1 Corinthians 15:49). We will have the same bodies made new and perfect. Those who believe in the resurrection will grieve while consoling themselves that they will live forever with their Redeemer and their redeemed loved ones in their redeemed bodies on a redeemed earth!
We grieve the wrong way when we surrender ourselves to debilitating grief, allowing it to eclipse our love for God and others. Of course, most grief needs time, comfort, and counsel, not repentance. Still, if self-absorbed grief draws us further from Jesus, we need to repent, not only for God’s glory, but for our own good and that of our families. It’s a paradigm shift to learn neither to deny our losses nor be buried by them, but to bring them to the feet of Jesus who sympathizes with us and also empowers us (Hebrews 4:15–16).
Our grief has an expiration date. The world as it is now is under the curse, but God will lift it once and for all: “No longer will there be any curse” (Revelation 22:3). No more sin. No more cancer. No more dementia. No more suffering. No more death. God “will swallow up death forever” (Isaiah 25:8).
We who are grieving need to hear these words: “Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:16, 18).
