Speaker 1: City church, broadcast, audio updates, sit in church, St Petersburg, 10:30 AM at 12, 11.
Speaker 2: Joy, my fair share of humor, but as I was reflecting on our passage this morning and reflecting on where we have been this summer and the life of our church, I was struck by how much hardships so many of us have been going through in our church this summer.
Speaker 2: We have an experienced several deaths in our families.
Speaker 2: Several of us have had a significant amounts of pains and struggles in relationship.
Speaker 2: Many folks here at city church have had experienced loss and even those of you, many of you who are new here to city church are going through the transition of moving from one place to another.
Speaker 2: All of these things are things that cause us pain city church, so many of us have been experiencing those things this summer.
Speaker 2: It's almost too many to count, so what's normal?
Speaker 2: It's us as Christians to experience suffering.
Speaker 2: That's that's part.
Speaker 2: We like to think that, well, when when I become a Christian, everything's gonna, be fine.
Speaker 2: Everything will go my way that the bread will always land butter side up for me now.
Speaker 2: Well, but it's the hard truth of it is it just does that.
Speaker 2: Our lives are often led by sort of suffering now.
Speaker 2: It's not normally mustard as bad as it has been for us in September.
Speaker 2: Nevertheless, this isn't normal for some of us.
Speaker 2: This is things that are happening on a large scale and small scale.
Speaker 2: These are big things where it's death by a thousand paper cuts.
Speaker 2: Sometimes our suffering is caused by our decisions, but offering oftentimes it's caused by situations around us and I think the question for many of us as we reflect on all that, we've gone through the pain and suffering in our lives and the lives of those poster message.
Speaker 2: What
Speaker 3: do what?
Speaker 2: What do we do with all of these problems?
Speaker 2: What do we do with this pain and frustration?
Speaker 2: How do we handle this?
Speaker 2: How do I hit this?
Speaker 2: Maybe this morning, the way that we're going to look at it first as how to date of this?
Speaker 2: As we walked through the life of David, you kind of see that David's trajectory in the book of First Samuel is an upward trajectory.
Speaker 2: He is the shepherd boy who didn't miraculously defeats Goliath.
Speaker 2: He has anointed as king and even though he chaste and hunted down by Saul, God always seemed to give him the victory and David is always on the up.
Speaker 2: His stock is always rising and then David becomes king and you would expect the story to be, and then David lived happily ever after.
Speaker 2: Well, that's pretty much the opposite of the kids.
Speaker 2: Once David becomes king, things a little bit start coming off the rails and in the case of David's life, some of the consequences his we spoke a few weeks ago about David's sin with Bathsheba and Uriah and a lot of what has happened in David's life ever since then.
Speaker 2: It's the fallout or the consequences of those things that done last week.
Speaker 2: We talked about absalom.
Speaker 2: One of his sons and the son murdered another one of his children.
Speaker 2: This son allowed his sister to be raped, to give him reason for this.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of drama, but absolutely eventually formed a coup and takes over the land of Israel and David is once again on the run.
Speaker 2: He kicked out of his policy, is expelled from Jerusalem and he is on the run from absalom.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 2: Will eventually, David and his men, especially his general Joanne, has taken over and has killed absalom.
Speaker 2: Inspire within battle.
Speaker 2: Is it for the Glory Story About Absalom?
Speaker 2: Had a big head of hair.
Speaker 2: It made it kind of once a year.
Speaker 2: The Bible, this strange detailed at the Bible about a, you only cut his hair once a year.
Speaker 2: That's not that straight to the detail, but the strange detail is that every year his hair weighed five pounds when they cut it off, which is I have to say, and the rest of the amount of air, uh, but it doesn't work out for him.
Speaker 2: Ends up his hair gets tangled and three.
Speaker 2: Um, and that leads to his death.
Speaker 2: That's probably about the majority of the comic relief you're going to get.
Speaker 2: Today is a joke.
Speaker 2: Insert your joke about eighties hair bands here.
Speaker 2: What's deep in do this son?
Speaker 2: Who, who kicked him out, the son who drove him out, staged a coup, who you served.
Speaker 2: His role is now dead, helps state what does that show us about our hearts and the way that we interact, suffering, grief, despair.
Speaker 2: What I'd like you to do is stand up.
Speaker 2: I'm going to read the very end of Second Samuel Eighteen, and then the first eight verses or so of Chapter Nineteen.
Speaker 2: So if you would stand with me as I read God's word, and Mccain was deeply moved and went up to the chamber over the gate and wept, and as he went he said, oh my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom would the I had died instead of you.
Speaker 2: Oh Absalom.
Speaker 2: My son.
Speaker 2: My son was told Joanna, behold, the king is weeping and mourning for absolute.
Speaker 2: So the victory that day was turned into mourning for all the people, for the people heard that day, the chines grieving for his son and the people stolen to sit the city that day as people who steal in, who are ashamed, when they leave the battle, the king covered his face and then cried with a loud voice.
Speaker 2: Oh my son, absalom, absalom, my son, my son.
Speaker 2: Then David came into the house, then came into the house to the king and said, you have covered with shame the faces of our your servants who have this day, st[inaudible] life and the lives of your sons and your daughters and the lives of your wives and your concubines because you love those who hate you, hate those who love for you have made it clear today that commanders and servants are nothing to you.
Speaker 2: For today, I know that if absalom were alive and all of us were dead today, then you would be pleased.
Speaker 2: Now therefore, arise.
Speaker 2: Go out and speak kindly to your servant for I swear by the Lord.
Speaker 2: If you do not go, not a man will stay with you this night and it will be worse for you than all the evil that has come upon you from your youth until now.
Speaker 2: Makia roads and took his seat in the game.
Speaker 2: The people were all told, behold the king is sitting in the gate and all the people came before the city church.
Speaker 2: This is the word of God written nearly 300 years ago and intended for us this morning.
Speaker 2: You may be seated.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: David is absolutely distraught over the loss of his son, but the question for us is what do we learn?
Speaker 2: How do we take this story of a father's grief?
Speaker 2: Over the death is a.
Speaker 2: I think the the key lesson for us as we sort of walk through this text, the big idea that I think we need to engage with is that our lack of trust in God terms our grief into despair.
Speaker 2: It turns our normal grieving process into something that is deeper, that is despair, and that transformation, that change comes from our lack of trust in God.
Speaker 2: It, it'd be helpful to explore what grief and despair are as we begin to think about this.
Speaker 2: In many ways, we as a culture have a hidden death and suffering from our day to day.
Speaker 2: We have pushed it away.
Speaker 2: What's interesting is, um, can you think of a single cemetery or great yard in downtown St Petersburg, it's worn only cemetery or graveyard in downtown.
Speaker 2: St Pete is the historic Rosa Parks Cemetery.
Speaker 2: The same thing is true of hospice care.
Speaker 2: You have to go out to 34th street to get to an inpatient hospice care facility.
Speaker 2: Why?
Speaker 2: Why is this the case?
Speaker 2: Why do our, our cities that are newer, that were built more recently, why have we pushed graveyards and cemeteries out?
Speaker 2: Why do we hide our hospice centers back in neighborhoods and out of the normal day to day channels of life?
Speaker 2: It's because those things, by their very presence magazine, it's uncomfortable to drive by a cemetery because you can't drive by with that without at least flashing the idea of that into your mind.
Speaker 2: You cannot pass a hospice center without thinking suffering.
Speaker 2: And what we have done as a culture is we have pushed all of that away because we don't want to see it.
Speaker 2: We don't want to be confronted with our mortality.
Speaker 2: We don't want to be reminded of how much suffering is involved in human life.
Speaker 2: So we can move all of that into the parts of town that we don't go.
Speaker 2: We're burying behind bigger buildings.
Speaker 2: We don't have to look at work because we don't like the idea of we don't like the idea of steering hate in its face.
Speaker 2: And yet grief is a very normal and very healthy process that helps us grapple with pain.
Speaker 2: It helps us understand our last three is something that we as humans do and should do, and it can take a number of forms.
Speaker 2: For some of us.
Speaker 2: Grief can begin to take the form of anger.
Speaker 2: Let me let it go brief and come in the form of isolation.
Speaker 2: Or it can be an overwhelming sadness.
Speaker 2: Grief is something that we all deal with.
Speaker 2: The grief is never an excuse for us to say.
Speaker 2: That's part because what happens is you went on.
Speaker 2: I don't want to grieve in a healthy way.
Speaker 2: We went to read by letting our anger instead of turning our anger.
Speaker 2: We want to grieve by isolating ourselves instead of being around the that can encourage we to grieve by sitting in our sadness, not by being willing to see the good and bad, and not only that, the way that we often handle grief is to hover over it with distraction.
Speaker 2: You've seen this in your life and you've seen this, the life of others, because I've seen this in my life to when there's something really going on in my life, I ain't going to do whatever I can to distract myself from that pain.
Speaker 2: Sometimes I'm going to distract myself with bad things, right?
Speaker 2: Things like substance did, substances that me the pain and make me forget about it.
Speaker 2: Other times I want to get involved in unhealthy relationships to help me get through the grieving process, right?
Speaker 2: This is just the concept of a rebound relationship in our culture, right?
Speaker 2: You had a bad traumatic experience.
Speaker 2: Let's just go get a quick unhealthy relationship and make us ourselves.
Speaker 2: Forget what pain that we're actually experiencing.
Speaker 2: Let's cover that over.
Speaker 2: Let's.
Speaker 2: Let's not re, let's just be distracted.
Speaker 2: For some of you, when you're in the midst of grief, the way that you handled it, like doubling down on things like work with all of these, all of these are ways that we deal with our deal with our pain without, without acknowledging it, without acknowledging that suffering is a part of what we go through.
Speaker 2: This others of us, we try to take a more religious.
Speaker 2: You know what?
Speaker 2: I'm a Christian and I.
Speaker 2: I should.
Speaker 2: I shouldn't feel bad about this.
Speaker 2: This is just a thing that happened.
Speaker 2: This is all in God's hands.
Speaker 2: That's why I'm going to ignore my pain.
Speaker 2: What about some of us try to try to go, no, you know what?
Speaker 2: I'm going to distract myself.
Speaker 2: I didn't see.
Speaker 2: What happens in each of these cases is instead of admitting that you're struggling, instead of being in touch with our pain, instead of writing ourselves, go through the natural and Godly review process, we distract us.
Speaker 2: We cover overload.
Speaker 2: We pretend our grief doesn't and what we're doing is actually showing what's going on in our hearts.
Speaker 2: You see, suffering has a way of bringing out what the real idols of our hearts, what the real sense beneath our sin.
Speaker 2: If you see for me the way this works out and and my personality and mindset of sinfulness, this whatever, there is something that's hard whenever I experienced suffering by Goto idle is comfort.
Speaker 2: So whether that is comfort that I can find in any way, in any place, oh, I want to do is not have to feel the pain of a heart situation.
Speaker 2: So I'm going to run away.
Speaker 2: I'm going to go to sleep, I'm going to.
Speaker 2: I'm going to do whatever it takes.
Speaker 2: Not to feel.
Speaker 2: I think some of too, but for others are go to response when we're in pain, is to try to control every scenario around us.
Speaker 2: I'm going to control everything I can.
Speaker 2: That way I can manage where.
Speaker 2: You know what?
Speaker 2: I don't want people to see me as weak as I go through this.
Speaker 2: So here's what I'm gonna do.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna.
Speaker 2: Make sure everybody knows that I am suffering and we want our reputation to be the thing that comes out of this, or maybe it's that we take grief and turn it into the energy that we need to achieve so that we feel important.
Speaker 2: Still run away from our.
Speaker 2: Yet the Bible says that grief is something that we should experience.
Speaker 2: It's something that Jesus experienced here on earth.
Speaker 2: It is the result of sin in this world, but there's pre and then there's something deeper.
Speaker 2: That thing that is deeper is despair.
Speaker 2: Grief is a natural way to work through things, but grief is something.
Speaker 2: Yes, we try to cover over some.
Speaker 2: Despair is something deep.
Speaker 2: Despair is brief, coupled with an absolute loss of hope.
Speaker 2: Despair is when we're hoping this despair in the face of pain is when we say that the wounds of this situation, the scars of this moment are so deep, I don't think they will ever heal.
Speaker 2: That's despair.
Speaker 2: That's where we believe that there is nothing good that can come of this, that I will never feel right again.
Speaker 2: Grief is something that we should experience and that is a way for us to process.
Speaker 2: Despair is a life of faith.
Speaker 2: This is hopeless because it is painless and what we're saying in despair is usually one of two things.
Speaker 2: Either that we don't believe God is there, that I am alone, that I am an orphan and I have to figure all this out on my own and let.
Speaker 2: If I can't hear myself, I can't fix it, then I will never be fixed because God's not coming or it's a belief that God is cool, but God is there that she could help and that he chooses not to because he doesn't like me and doesn't want to see.
Speaker 2: Those are the two ways that you begin to go down into the pit where the normal sufferings of our lives, the things that happen around us because of the brokenness of this world.
Speaker 2: When that happens to us and we just begin to not just read, but to go to something deeper, despair cuts us off from hope and it cuts us off from any source of hope.
Speaker 2: Urgent.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 2: This is something that Jesus as well as I read this passage and I thought about the grievant as I thought about hope and despair, I was reminded of the Psalm of the suffering servant, which is a song that's not in the book of Psalms.
Speaker 2: You know, it's a little confusing.
Speaker 2: It's in Isaiah and Isaiah begins to predict who Jesus is.
Speaker 2: He looks forward to who Jesus says.
Speaker 2: He gives us a very different picture of who we expect our savior to be.
Speaker 2: I say it begins to describe Jesus.
Speaker 2: Then he says, he is a man of sorrows, that he is well acquainted with grief, and as we look at the life of Jesus, we can see that we can see that he experienced loss, that he experienced betrayal, that he suffered not just physical pain, but the emotional pain that we as humans go through.
Speaker 2: So our savior is a suffering savior.
Speaker 2: See, if I was to put my best foot forward, if I was to create a religion, I would create a religion with hearing not a assigned, and yet Jesus was the man of sorrows.
Speaker 2: Someone who is well acquainted with grief, but not only was he relatively with that same passage in Isaiah, says that he bought the he carried our sorrows, see part of what Jesus does, part of who Jesus is.
Speaker 2: He is the one who walks beside us who can sympathize and understand what our struggles are because he has experienced those same things in his life on her that he has walked through sorrow, pain and loss.
Speaker 2: That he knows what it's like to lose a family member, that he knows what it's like to see relationships fall apart around them.
Speaker 2: He knows what it's like to have that by a thousand paper cuts of discouragement, and he walks with us, his people.
Speaker 2: You see, what's interesting is we find in the story of David David rocking through this brief, David been absolutely despondent and yet he is encouraged, aggressively encouraged, but encouraged nonetheless by as commander Joe.
Speaker 2: He says, look, what you're doing is not receiving.
Speaker 2: You're acting in despair because now not only is your grief something that you are dealing with between you and God, but you are causing all of the people around you.
Speaker 2: Who thought for you who were willing to bleed and die for you, you are causing all of them to feel shamed because only person you can think about is yourself absent.
Speaker 2: It's interesting because it is that community is that community of of love and trust that calls David out of despair.
Speaker 2: Yes, degree, but not to grieve as those without David goes back and he sits at the gate, he begins to move his life in a normal way.
Speaker 2: Now, does it say that David sat at the gate and everything was fine?
Speaker 2: Now, does it say that David sat at the gate and and had a rousing party?
Speaker 2: No, because grief takes time because greed, this something we have to process and yet three is something that propelled David interesting as David was grieving though that he gives us a picture of Jesus.
Speaker 2: The very end of Chapter Eight, team and David first hears about his son.
Speaker 2: He says apps.
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 2: My son, my son would the I would have died, which is no accident because it is the great, great grandson of Jesus who does die.
Speaker 2: It is the son of David who dies to pay for our sins and not just our sentence.
Speaker 2: It doesn't just rid us of our guilt through the cross.
Speaker 2: He doesn't just take away our shame, but he becomes for us the God of comfort, the God who has suffered and risen again, the God who has suffered, knows what it's like to walk with these people.
Speaker 2: So the call for us as we, as the church, as people in city churches, people here in St Petersburg walked through these moments, these heavy moments of pain and loss.
Speaker 2: We're called to remember that we have a savior who has some knows what it's like.
Speaker 2: You willingly get calls us into his family, not just for ourselves but so that we can be Joanne, so that we can be the ones that are calling other steve when we are suffering.
Speaker 2: Way Better reach, take shape is by looking at Jesus to be the one, not to.
Speaker 2: Our distraction, not to are not the things that we want to give us, pleasure, movement or reputation, but rather to the God walks with us and loves us.
Speaker 2: And what happens is we begin in that moment, you begin to look up, instead of looking around in our grief, we begin to have hope that the god who suffered and rose again is the same guy who can give me hope.
Speaker 2: We can bring me out of this pit of grief.
Speaker 2: This hope allows us comfort others.
Speaker 2: You know it's interesting.
Speaker 2: I want to read you a passage.
Speaker 2: It's very nice, similar that's related to this from a St Paul's second letter to the Corinthians.
Speaker 2: He says, for we do not want you to be unaware, brothers of the affliction we experienced in Asia, but we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself.
Speaker 2: Indeed we felt that we had received a sentence of death, but that was to make us rely not on ourselves, but on God who raises the dead.
Speaker 2: He delivered us from such a deadly peril and he will deliver us on him.
Speaker 2: We have set our hope that he will deliver us again.
Speaker 2: You must also help us by prayer so that we will give thanks on our behalf.
Speaker 2: The blessings granted the prayers of many.
Speaker 2: He says, right before this, if we're afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation.
Speaker 2: If we are comforted, it is for your comfort which you experienced when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer.
Speaker 2: Our hope for you is unshaken.
Speaker 2: For we know that you share our sufferings.
Speaker 2: You will also share our complexity.
Speaker 2: Church Jesus not only delivers us from hopelessness into hope not only takes us from being orphans to making a sons and daughters of the king, but because of that transformation, he works in our lives.
Speaker 2: He makes us the agents of hope.
Speaker 2: Peers during he makes us the channel by which he is seeking out his love to the city by the way, that we can comfort others even though we to experience maybe we turn to God and not assuming the other may we trust in him and none the less hopelessness and may the Holy Spirit.
Speaker 2: That's correct.