Peter Witkowski Memos, Pain & Suffering

Anna Who Waited: How the Means of Grace Sustain the Grieving

When my dear wife stopped breathing, I instinctively and instantaneously began yearning for the wholeness that had been. Though I longed for a quick fix, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob does not guarantee his members two-day shipping. At times, we will have to wait weeks, months, years, and even lifetimes for God to restore and heal what has been lost. In other words to grieve well, we must learn to wait well.

Half The Story: Make Your Bed And Do the Next Thing

A few year back, Admiral H. McRaven made waves in American culture when he asserted that, “If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.” He explained, “It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another take and another and another.” Though there exists a whole litany of reasons why someone might not make their bed first thing in the morning (for example sleeping spouses and children generally don’t appreciate being folded into sheets at 5AM), the basic idea behind the “make your bed principle” still stands. When everything is not what it should be and when we feel like quitting life, we do not need to climb Mt. Everest. We only need to do the next thing: take a shower, pick up the kids from school, or organize those pillows at the foot of the bed. Such an attitude can keep depression from spiraling into an ever-growing vortex doom which grows in size with ever failed tasks. But while the determination ‘to do the next thing’ proves essential to survival while grieving (click here for a fuller discussion of this topic), it cannot restore and sustain our aching souls as they wait for wholeness.

That Something More: Prayer and Fasting

Life comes not from our resolve but rather from our dependence upon the author of life through prayer and fasting. In Luke 2:36-37, the gospel author introduces us to the prophetess Anna. Like all young women of her day, she had entered marriage at a young age anticipating all the joys that come with having a family. But the children never came. Before she reached her eighth wedding anniversary, her husband would die. She would spend at least the next sixty years (if not more) as a widow waiting for the appearance of the Lord. How did she survive all those long years of waiting in the midst of grief? Luke relays the secret of her success writing “She did not depart from the temple, worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day (Lk 2:37).”

Upon the death of her husband, Anna doubled down on her faith. As Asaph before, Anna trusted that she would find answers to her grief, sorrows, and afflictions in the house of the Lord. In the words of Psalm 73:16-17 “But when I thought how to understand this it seemed to me a wearisome task, until I went to the sanctuary of God.” Eternal perspective and its resulting hope comes not through relaxation, new friendships, or our contemplative walks. It comes through worship that is facilitated by the people of God in the house of God. As the author of Hebrews notes God uses liturgies, songs, sermons, and corporate prayers to stir us up “love and good works (10:24).” If we hope to make sense of our longing, our sorrow, and the goodness of God as we wait, we must enter the temple of the Lord.

And we must do so actively. Once inside the temple, Anna prayed and fasted. She deprived her body of food to represent the brokenness that she felt and to affirm that her salvation did not reside in God’s good gifts but in God revealed through Scripture. To quote Psalm 119:92, “If your law had not been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction.” In other words, the power to keep waiting, to survive the sorrows of grief comes from the Lord through the Scriptures. Moreover, the very ability to understand and obey those scriptural promises also comes from the Lord. He must open our eyes so that we can “behold wonderous things out of” his law (Ps 119:18). Every time her stomach growled, Anna affirmed afresh Deuteronomy 8:3, which declares, “man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”

Not only did Anna depend upon the word of God and his means of grace, but she also knew the God of the temple would act. The great king David had written in Psalm 34:6 that: “The poor man cried, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all of his troubles.” God had acted and saved David from his political enemies. She also knew she was not the first woman to fast and pray in the Lord’s house. Before there was a king David or a temple, Hannah the future mother of the great prophet Samuel, entered the tabernacle (a holy tent structure where the Jews worship the Lord) desperate for a child. Scripture said of her, “She was deeply distressed and prayed to the Lord and wept bitterly.” In taking her sorrows to the Lord, Hannah shows us that those who have been overwhelmed by the waves of grief can and will find hope, relief, and encouragement in the knowledge that “By day the Lord commands his steadfast love and at night his song is with me (Ps. 42:3, 8).” Though her soul was melting away with sorrow, Hannah found contentment, hope, and eventually a son through her prayers. Likewise, Anna remained faithful to the Lord for over six decades and got to see the Christ child because she never stopped taking her concerns to the Lord who sustained her. In the words of John Flavel, “It is not your inherent strength that enables you to stand but what your receive and daily derive from Jesus (130).” To take one’s concern’s to God is more than an psychological, therapeutic exercise. It is an expression of faith in God’s goodness that in turn produces more faith, the very faith that will sustain us as we wait.

The Apostle Peter and What Not to Do

The worst thing we can do as we wait for wholeness is to trade prayer and fasting in God’s house for self-reliance. If we switch out the things of God for shopping, nights out, and vacations, we will find ourselves buddying up to the apostle Peter on the night when he betrayed Jesus three times and then descended into deep despair. As theologian D.A. Carson helpfully notes, “People do not drift towards holiness.” Or as Jesus warned Peter, “Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Because Peter neglected the normal means of grace, Peter found himself not at Jesus’s side as the events of the crucifixion unfolded but fleeing into the darkness of the night. Neither made beds nor vibrant faith come about through magic, well wishes, or happenstance but through intentionality.  If we neglect the means of grace, our waiting will not end in joy but in the unrelenting despair of unnecessary sorrow.

Admittedly, we can attend church, fast, and pray for all the wrong reasons. Jesus cautions us against retooling such things for personal gain, saying, “But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by others but by your father who is in secret. And your father who sees in secret will reward you (Mt 6:17-18).” But the solution to bad rhythms and misuses of God’s good gifts never proves to be the elimination of those means of grace but rather the proper usage of them. We do not abolish speech because of lies nor marriage because of sexual sin. Similarly, we should not avoid church, fasting, and prayer because we or someone else we know fasted or prayed poorly.

And when we do find ourselves reading, praying, and fasting with a cold or faithless heart, we need only to confess those sinful motives to the Lord and ask for fresh love. Grief is not a time for new inventions or indolence but rather a time for pressing into those simple and yet extraordinary means of grace that we were hopefully employing before the tragedy of death struck our hearts.

Our Hope

And we do all of this because the God who hears our prayers promises to answer our prayers precisely because we are poor and needy. One day soon, our waiting will come to an end. We will see the redemption of Jerusalem. For some of us, that answered prayer might take the form of a spouse, a child, or a new friendship. For some of us that moment will come when God reduces our desires and thereby brings them into line with his secret will for us. And for some of us, that moment may not come until we see Christ face to face. But it will come. Just assuredly as Anna saw the newly born savior and bore testimony of that joy to all who would listen, we too will soon see Jesus. And when we do, all grief and sorrow will be made well. Friends do not grow weary in your waiting. Do not neglect the means of grace. Go make your bed, but even more importantly go with Anna to the house of the lord to pray and fast. God hears our prayers!  

Peter Witkowski Memos

Jesus Wept and We Should Too: The Resurrection, Sovereignty and Grief

Jesus wept. This short verse mercifully demonstrates that Jesus can and does as the Bible says elsewhere, “sympathize with our weakness (Heb 4:15).” In that weeping over the death of his friend Lazarus, Jesus legitimized the tears of every grieving husband, wife, child, mother, father, and friend. Jesus knew the soul penetrating pain of our grief.

Should We Grieve?

Though this moment in the biblical timeline grants us the permission to grieve and to grieve deeply, some within the church still find the topic of grief distasteful if not at points unspiritual. They fear that grief could be a denial of the resurrection or of God’s sovereign goodness. Since they know that their loved one is alive with Jesus and that no death is an accident, they view death to be little more than a brief interruption in their daily rhythm. They do not mourn when their husband takes his Sunday nap, why should they now mourn his death?

Such a perspective can be a good and helpful remedy against “excessive grief” or depression. But it cannot banish grief all together, for it was never meant to do so.

Does the Resurrection Banish Grief?

As Martha mourned the death of her brother Lazarus, she tells Jesus, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day (Jn 11:24).” And not only did she have faith in the resurrection, but she also knew the resurrection. Jesus told Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life.” Because Jesus was Immanuel, God with us – the sacrificial lamb who saves us from our sins through his death and resurrection, he can in good faith command: “Lazarus, come out.” John concludes the story with these words: “The man who had died came out, his hands and feed bound with the linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go (11:44).” Jesus did not simply believe in the resurrection. He was the resurrection, the very guarantee and cause of eternal life. In other words, he was the the solution to or the very antidote for death. And still, he wept.

Does Sovereignty Banish Grief?

Moreover, Jesus knew that Lazarus’s death was not an accident brought about by the winds of chance while the heavenly Father was preoccupied with some disaster. The Son in accordance with the Father had ordained the death of Lazarus. Describing the Son’s relationship to the Father, the British pastor Charles Spurgeon noted, “Jesus is to the Father what speech is to us; he is the unfolding of the Father’s thoughts, the revelation of the Father’s heart.” When messengers came from Mary and Martha seeking Jesus’s help – a help that could have resulted in Lazarus’ full recovery, Jesus acting with the Father by the Holy Spirit chose not to come. John’s gospel reports, “Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So, when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was (Jn 11:5).” Jesus understood the thoughts of the Father and knew that his friend would die so that others might believe. He knew that even death glorified God. And still, he wept.

Why Does Jesus Weep?

Why does the resurrection and the Word become flesh, grieve? Why as John reports was Jesus, “deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled (11:38).”  He was moved by love. Allowing the crowd to interpret Jesus’s action for us, John offers the following commentary on Jesus’s tears: “So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” Deep soul wrenching tears do not convey unbelief but love. To grieve is to express that goodness and sweetness has been lost. It does not deny the goodness that is to come nor the wisdom that has brought us to the point of tears and aching, but rather affirms the unsatisfactory nature of this broken world and our longing for Christ to come again (and to borrow another’s phrase) and “make everything sad untrue.” As the puritan John Flavel noted, “There is no sin in complaining to God…Griefs are eased by groans and heart-pressures relieved by utterances.”

In other words, faith does not call the believer to vanquish grief from his psyche but rather grants him the assurances needed to safely express his anguish. He does not have to fear that his soul altering loss will forever trap him in that dark and swirling vortex of depression. Jesus conquered the tomb and has prepared a mansion for us. As Jesus told Martha, “Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet he shall live,  and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die (Jn 11:25-26).” With heaven secured, the believer can confidently lay claim to the promise of Psalm 23:4 which states, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” We do not grieve apart from Jesus but with Jesus, knowing that grief finds its end, its telos, in the steadfast love of our Lord (1 Thess 4:13). He will guide us home. In other words, the resurrection and God’s sovereignty are not antithetical to grief but the very bumpers that keep us from rolling into the gutters of hopelessness as we traverse the lanes of grief. If ever there should be a people that was comfortable with the uncomfortable nature of tears, it should be the people of Jesus.

Jesus wept. May we go and do likewise.

Peter Witkowski Discipleship, Memos, Pain & Suffering

Martyn Lloyd-Jones, April Witkowski & the Myth of the Wasted Ministry

To know something of Martyn Lloyd-Jones is to know that the man yearned for revival. In addition to the sermon series which later became the book Revival, Lloyd-Jones devoted countless other sermons, lectures, and letters to the topic of widespread, simultaneous conversion. More than anything else in his life, he longed to see Wales if not the whole evangelical church experience something akin to what had happened during the days of John Wesley or Martin Luther.

Why Revival

The Doctor’s emphasis upon revival in-part grew out of his understanding of spiritual baptism. In addition to the slow, steady growth associated with the normal means of Christian sanctification, the Welsh pastor taught that God would at times fill a local church with a sweet and special awareness of his spirit which would result in the church members’ exponential growth. This moment of growth would then become the foundation needed for another nationwide revival.

Somewhat ironically, I believe Lloyd-Jones helped to split the British Evangelical movement in 1966 because he so longed to lay the groundwork for such a Spiritual baptism that he pressed his Appeal for the formation of a new doctrinally robust association of evangelical churches with an intense zeal that produced more confusion than action. Thus, his very appropriate call to reform the evangelical church around the essential doctrines of the gospel went mostly unheeded. Sensing that no revival was coming in the years that followed 1966, some Lloyd-Jones’s sermons began to take on a slightly negative undertone. Though forever confident in the return of Christ, he no longer spoke of the restoration of the West but more of how all forms of democracy would eventually end in the tyranny of the French revolution. In one sense, I think Lloyd-Jones went to his grave discouraged for God had not seen fit to bring about a revival in his lifetime.

A Testimony of Faithfulness

Though a national revival never came, Lloyd-Jones’s own ministry in London had not proved ineffective. An old family friend of the Doctor told me the other day that he thought one of the greatest tragedies of Lloyd-Jones’s life was that he so longed for national revival that he missed the extraordinary work that God was doing through Lloyd-Jones at Westminster Chapel. With God’s help, the Doctor facilitated thousands of small revivals all throughout England, Wales, and the world. Thousands if not millions of people came to faith either directly through his preaching or indirectly through his writings and through the ministry of the numerous pastors, missionaries, and church members that he had discipled. I write today of Lloyd-Jones because of his very ordinary ministry at Westminster Chapel produced extraordinary fruit. Lloyd-Jones may have lacked a Reformation, but he did not lack a Wittenberg. The fire of revival burned brightly in the pulpit of Westminster Chapel.

Don’t Discount Today

The fact that Lloyd-Jones seemingly missed the glories of the ordinary forest in his unceasing search for that giant, evangelical redwood of revival should serve as a caution to all of us still in ministry – whether that be professionally or otherwise. The temptation to negate or overlook the glories of today because we are so focused on the dreams of what could be tomorrow did not pass with the end of the last century. How many pastors feel discouraged because their church has yet to cross the two-hundred-person threshold? How many singles discount their meaningful ministry to the senior adults in their church and to the young mothers with those crazy two-year-olds because they are still single and are not engaged in the discipling that come with marriage and the arrival of their own children? How many godly men and women with a bent towards missions believe their lives a waste because they spend their day evangelizing their neighbors a couple of doors down instead of reaching people hidden behinds miles of brush in the amazon? How many faithful brothers and sisters in the secular workforce believe their life counts for nothing because they have yet to start their own business or to reach that corner office from which they could make a real difference in the world?

April’s Fear

In truth, my late wife struggled with this temptation. As her life came to a close, she lamented one afternoon how her cancer had kept her from fully engaging in those things that she longed to do with me as we began our ministry at my current church such as: teach Sunday School classes, coordinate VBS programs, attend services, go on home visits, and counsel the hurting. She felt her life incomplete and feared that she had held me back. But as I told her that day as the sun filled the space around her blue rocking chair in our bedroom, she had stewarded her life well. Over the past four plus years, she had served as my greatest counselor and confidant. With her, I processed life and Scripture. Her life showed up not so much in our Sunday school curriculum or in those stick craft projects that make kids’ ministry so fun but in the subliminal content of my sermons, in the essence of my counseling, and in my visions for the future. Indeed, when she died one of the places, I grieved her loss the most was my office. Though she only set in those black chairs across from my desk sporadically during the last few years of her life, she still shaped all that happened behind that heavy white door the separates me from the back entryway. Ordinary, faithful ministry has an extraordinary influence.

The Power of the Ordinary

But what was true of my dear bride and Lloyd-Jones proves true of all of us. Our lives today will not be defined by our dreams, hopes, or expectations of what is to come (of what may never come) but will be defined by our faithful execution of the life and ministry God has given us in this moment. If we are faithfully serving God today in accordance with his Word and our calling and gifting, our lives are not a waste but rather the very definition of success. In other words, we should not discount the ordinary means of grace at work now, believing that all is a waste until the arrival of the extraordinary. In this respect, I believe the Lloyd-Jones’s insistence upon spiritual baptism proved unhelpful. The normative experience of the early church was not Pentecost but rather the faithful plodding associated with Paul’s missionary journeys.  Indeed, the most extraordinary thing about most of us is our ordinary faithfulness.

If that revival never occurs, or if that spouse never comes, or if the ticket to oversees ministry never arrives, and if we stay at our jobs for another 20 years, our lives still possess profound value in the Lord’s economy. If we are faithful today, we will in time bear extraordinary fruit. Take heart, friends. Don’t grow weary of today.

Don’t miss the forest in pursuit of your giant red wood.  

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