“We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, concerning those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve like the rest, who have no hope.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Something a little different this morning. I’ve recently been reminded about how hard loss can be. Saying goodbye to loved ones when they close their eyes on this life is one of the hardest things we will face in this life. It leaves us disoriented and struggling to make sense out of…everything. Tomorrow starts to feel pointless, and hope seems nowhere to be found. And yet, if you are follower of Jesus, there’s this thing Paul said about not grieving like those who have no hope. Why? Let’s talk about it for a bit, and then I’d like to share a song with you that puts the hope Paul is talking about in a way that helps us to grasp it a little better.

Death has long been the thing we fear above everything else. And I say “we” there in reference to humanity as a whole. We have always feared death because for centuries it represented the great unknown. Notice I switched to past tense there. I did that because on this side of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, it doesn’t represent the unknown any longer. Still, though, for those who have not embraced the reality of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, that unknown remains. So, death represented (and still represents for many) the unknown. We fear the unknown. Therefore, we fear death.

To deal with this fear, we made up stories about what came on the other side of the grave. Every worldview has an explanation. Some of them are more colorful and encouraging than others, but they all have them. The trouble with this, though, is that somewhere in the back of our minds, we always knew these were made up. No one crossed that threshold and came back to tell us about it. About the only way to avoid the fear of death is to embrace nihilism, which, when followed to its logical end, just hastens our journey toward death. There’s nothing good here.

But then Jesus came walking back out of the grave. He crossed the line completely and came marching boldly back over it to assure us that He was the Lord over life and death, and that when we close our eyes on this life, if we have placed our trust in Him, we will still be in His care. There’s more, and it gets better. Not only will we still be in His care, but we will get to join in His defeat of death. That is, death may claim our current physical bodies, but like Jesus prototyped for us, we will one day receive new bodies that won’t wear out or break down. They will be bodies fit for eternity.

There’s still more here, and it gets even better. It’s not simply that we will one day share in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead with our own resurrection body, and that’s that. We will get to share in this incredible gift alongside all those who have died in Christ before and after us. Paul talks about that later in this very passage. On the day Christ returns and the great resurrection happens, if we are still alive when it happens, those who died before us will rise up and we will be gathered together with them to serve as Jesus’ welcome party in a great reunion that won’t ever end. In other words, we will see them again.

Because of this incredibly good news, we don’t have to grieve loss without hope. Saying goodbye in this life does not need to mean saying goodbye forever. We have hope in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. There’s just one caveat here: all of this only applies to those who are in Christ. This great hope isn’t available anywhere else or by any other means. If you haven’t placed your faith in Jesus, don’t wait a moment longer. If you have, do everything you can to make sure everyone you love has too. Make sure that reunion coming with His return will be a very sweet one indeed.

This is all good to think about and talk about, but sometimes hearing about it is more powerful. To that end, here’s a song to get your Friday started from one of my favorite bands of late. This is a husband-and-wife duo called The Gray Havens. They have some of the most Gospel-soaked music I have ever heard. This song called, See You Again, is no exception. It’s about grieving with hope. Listen carefully. Listen several times. Rest in the hope we have in Christ. Happy Friday.