When You Lose It All | The 6:30 | Wayne Massey

The word of the Lord came to me, son of man, with one blow I'm about to take away from you the delight of your eyes. Yet do not lament or weep or shed any tears. Drain quietly, do not mourn for the dead, keep your turban fastened and your sandals on your feet. Do not cover your moustache and beard or eat the customary food of mourners. So I spoke to the people in the morning and in the evening my wife died. The next morning I did as I had been commanded. When then the people asked me, 'Why don't you tell us what these things have to do with us? Why are you acting like this?' So I said to them, 'The word of the Lord came to me.' Say to the people of Israel, 'This is what the sovereign Lord says. I am about to desecrate my sanctuary, the stronghold in which you take pride, the delight of your eyes, the object of your affection, the sons and daughters you left behind will fall by the sword. And you will do as I have done. You will not cover your moustache and beard or eat the customary food of mourners. You will keep your turban on your heads and your sandals on your feet. You will not mourn or weep or will waste away but will waste away because of your sins and grown among yourselves. Zekil will be assigned to you. You will do just as he has done.' Sorry, when this happens you will know that I am the sovereign Lord. And you, son of man, on the day I take away their stronghold, their joy and glory, the delight of their eyes, their hearts desires and their sons and daughters as well. On that day a fugitive will come to tell you the news. At that time your mouth will be opened, you will speak with him and will no longer be silent. So you will be assigned to them and they will know that I am the Lord. This is the word of the Lord. Thank you, Liz. Sharprey, as we turn to that passage, Lord we thank you for your word. We thank you that it is living and active and that it is sharper than a double-edged sword and it has truth always for us. And so we open our hearts, we open our minds to your truth this evening in Jesus' name. Amen. I want to talk this evening about why when you lose it all, you can still have hope. It is not a really solitary reading that one, is it? Put it mildly. A couple of weeks ago, a couple of weeks out, I am always looking at the road to coming up just to see where we are, the readings, who is preaching, reminding the people a few weeks out. Are you okay? So a couple of weeks ago I saw this, me, it was the 24th. I read it and I remember the first thoughts that I had as I read it again was like, who picked this reading and who put me down to preach on it and the answer to both questions was me. So it is my fault. Human beings generally are quite optimistic creatures. I was talking to somebody this week who said, oh, we had an email from somebody in our organisation that basically said, we live in one of the worst times ever and it is all, we are all doomed like the guy from, if you know of Dad's army. And actually that is not true. You and I live in one of the best times to be alive in terms of health, all that kind of stuff. But we have this sense sometimes, some people go, oh, everything is going wrong. And actually the truth of the matter is, actually sometimes the world isn't like that. But also the truth of the matter is that as human beings we are not really wired to think about the worst case scenario all the time. Because if we did, we wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. Most of us don't get up in the morning and go, if I go through my day to day, this might happen to me, that might happen to me, this might happen to my loved one. Most of us don't do this. There's something about how we are wired to try and make the best of our days. Some of us at times will find ourselves in those places. But generally we don't wake up and we don't go the worst possible case scenarios are going to happen to me today. Which is why when we are hit with bad news or when loss happens to us, it comes like sometimes I kind of like a train wreck into our lives. I didn't go into that appointment thinking that I would be told this about my health. Or once it happened to me, I didn't go on holidays thinking when I got back I would get a lesser from work saying, I was going to say you're fired, I wasn't fired, your position has been eliminated. You know, we don't think like that. And then suddenly loss happens. And one of the things about human life is at some point in our lives and quite often more than once in our lives, that will happen to us. Loss will occur. And a whole range of losses. Sometimes it is a really big loss. Health, a loved one, a job. Sometimes it's accumulation of small losses and then another loss comes in and that kind of kind of just breaks us. But this can and does. And I can will and does happen to us. What strikes me about Ezekiel 24 is it confronts that aspect of human life head on. What happens when you lose something or someone and what do you do with it? It is a really hard passage. But it's one I believe that if we sit in has truth and hope for us all. Amen. So I've got four points tonight. The first point is simply this is that loss in your life raises questions. It does not offer answers. Loss raises questions. It's not something that we can easily find answers for. Every single world view. So there's so that it's one of the things you could do with this passage straight away as you could go. This is awful. What kind of God opens up something like the word of the Lord came to me. Son of man with one blow. I'm about to take away the delight of your eyes. There's a mass and will come on to what's going on. But there's a massive challenge here. What kind of God people will say. It allows. There's a famous clip of Stephen Fry being interviewed and talking about an insect that burrows out of an eyes. Burrows through our eyes and would make a child blind and he goes what kind of God. And the person who's interviewing him just sits there and nods and goes, "Oh yes, that's very wise." Where's what they should have said is, "Well actually Stephen, every single world view has got to deal with this. The fact that in our lives we experience hope and despair, joy and pain and delight and suffering and sometimes all at the same time. And we need an every single world view has to have an explanation for why that is. And it's far extreme a humanist and an atheistic worldview says there is absolutely no meaning in it. Full stop." So the only explanation is this is just how life is and there is no meaning. I put it in a sound like I had once was. I once put it to Richard Dawkins, an interviewing him for the BBC long story about, I didn't work for the BBC by the way, about he was on about adaptation of species and survival of the fittest. And I said, "Why don't you apply that to human beings?" Actually, we live in an overpopulated planet. Some of us are cracking on and doing well and some of us are suffering famine. Why don't we apply your principle to them? And he got incredibly cross with me and said, "That's appalling. We have to care for our fellow human beings." And I said, "Why?" And interesting enough, and he's got a much bigger brain than me. He couldn't answer it because from his philosophical point of worldview there is no answer because ultimately his worldview ends up with the reductionist worldview. This is everything is material. Nothing really matters. And actually why shouldn't survival of the fittest apply to all species? Didn't end very well, but that's another story. But it's this sense that every worldview must have it. And the Christian worldview does, and we're going to get there. Let's name the beginning as E.C. 24. It opens really, really hard. The word of the law come. He basically, the Lord says to E.C. "I'm going to take away your wife to delight you, Verizon." And then the second set of instructions about when you mourn, you're not to do all the public stuff. You're not to look like you're mourning. You're supposed to just carry on with life as it is. I found myself doing a really dangerous thing with the passage, as I read that, wanting to fill in the gaps. So actually this isn't really what the text says. The Lord said, "I will take." No, no, no, it's just language. The text doesn't give me the permission to do that. It simply says the Lord is doing this. The other thing I then was going, "Well, maybe there's some form of punishment going on either for E.C. or E.C. or it's a consequence of something." And again, the text doesn't say anything. It just simply says, "With one blow, I'm about to take away the delight of your eyes." The danger sometimes we do at Scripture is we shy away from the hard bits, and we shy away from the clear bits, or we then begin to kind of dance around them and put a little bit of cultural kind of spin on them that kind of makes us feel more comfortable. And I don't think we can. I found something I read that was really, really kind of challenging, which is this is a real reminder that everybody suffers. The Bible never says that a life of faith is easy, and actually here we have in Ezekiel, of the godliest. yng N UI ond cael gall o'r Wrestling floer ran kadleud бу hon, mae Yng gotudedu wedych yn dwi'n established redais deit dym him mae'n ll BirdsydwB beth Calmethio'r fra ffb iawn cyffredion sylethau ac o'n mynd ar ti gweith. Mwr llwysgu cyfrannu'n defnyddoedd cyffredio roebgesig a hymemi gyda'r eising brofys economision i ni. Yar o nhw c تھo binaud y cyng Dos lol a oolan? Mae'n gweithio'r ymg i'n gweithio'r ymg i'n gweithio'r ymg i'n gweithio. I'n gweithio'r ymg i'n gweithio'r ymg i'n gweithio'r ymg i'n gweithio. Mae'n gweithio'r ymg i'n gweithio'r ymg i'n gweithio. i'n ffordd bod yn y'n ffordd ar gyfer hynny. Mae'n ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd, ac mae'n ffordd i'n ffordd, yn ffordd i'n ffordd i'n ffordd. Mae'n ffordd mae'n ffordd diwyr a'i ffordd amser ei ffordd. Mae'n ffordd ar gyfer hynny, yn ffordd ar gyfer hynny. Mae'n ffordd ar gyfer hynny, 'iddym yn ffordd yn ffordd ar gyfer hynny. Mae'n ffordd ar gyfer hynny, 'iddym yn ffordd ar gyfer hynny, 'iddym yn ffordd ar gyfer hynny. Mae'n ffordd ar gyfer hynny. pan i'n mynd. This is not in funny sense like more punishment. It's an act of love to enable restoration and renewal. C.S. Lewis wrote that pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. That actually when these moments happen, we go, "What is going on? There must be something more here." And so this message through the life of Ezekiel and through what's going on in Jerusalem is a message from the Lord to these exiles to say, "In me you will find what you need and what you long for, even when you're not in Jerusalem. In me you will find what you need and what you long for." Now, the Bible teachers are just a quick tangent that this is not all suffering. All suffering has, I think, the ability to point us to go, but not all suffering is sent by God in order deliberately to cause that to us. And sometimes we don't even get our answers. Joe, bless him, never gets a clear explanation as to why he suffered. And sometimes this side of eternity, you're never going to get an answer, but you do get the signpost to God. You do get this sense of what's going on here and to whom can I turn. And that is what the Lord is doing in this passage is Ezekiel suffers. And then he doesn't mourn and sets up this kind of strange thing. That then when it happens to the people, it says, "Is Ezekiel says that I might be a sign that he is the Lord, that actually it is a calling back to him." So when we experience loss that shakes us and God wants us to open up to His X-ray and then see it as a sign pointing back to Him, to the one who loves us. And when we do that, we will find that our loss is transformed into hope by Jesus, that our loss is transformed into hope by Jesus. So Ezekiel's loss and his response is the Lord says is to be a sign and to be a sign of the invitation to come back to Him. I mean, if you read the whole of Ezekiel, I can't sometimes really feel for the guy because he's more than just a preacher of God's Word. He kind of lives out God's words. And here he is truly living it out. And his life and his suffering here is to act as a sign to the people. But it's more than just a sign about what God is doing then in the temple. It is ultimately a sign pointing to Jesus. Ezekiel operates as a kind of type of Jesus. And he is one who is faithful to God's Word. When God tells him what he wants Him to say, he says it when he tells him what's gonna happen, Ezekiel follows him like that. As a signpost, it points to Jesus who is faithful to his father to the point of death. And Ezekiel in this chapter is called to suffer, to reveal to the people the truth that they need God. Jesus comes to suffer, not to reveal, but to save us and to bring us back to God. And Ezekiel is told that he will be a sign that the God is the Lord. Jesus says, Jesus is a sign. And he says, I will give you the sign of Jonah that as Jonah was three days in the whale, so the Son and Man will be three days in the grave. Ezekiel suffers a loss in order to wake the people up. Jesus loses his life in order to save us. Ezekiel warns of the coming judgment of God. Jesus bears that judgment upon himself. And because he lives and dies and then lives again, we are drawn into a new life by the Spirit, the life of eternity that starts now, and it is a life of hope. So if I was to return to the question of loss and suffering and what happens, what do you do when you have a life that has got both joy and pain? And if we spend, I don't think this side of eternity, you're ever going to get a sense where you've got your all your philosophical questions lined up. Or actually with some kind of big theological stuff going on. We don't, there's so much that I think when we get to eternity, we will understand because we will see it differently. And the invitation sometimes is to sit with our doubts, but to sit at the cross, because the cross reveals what God is doing in the midst of our pain and our suffering and our loss. Is he is coming to us as one of us, and he is taking all of that upon himself, and he is dying in our place. So when we lose and when the rug is pulled out from under our feet, we have a God who knows what that feels like. We have a God who's lived through it on our behalf so that we can find hope in him. And what that does through the Spirit is, it may not answer all your questions, but it will transform your experience of God. Because with him suffering isn't the last word, he is. And I was thinking about this, the two best arguments that you could have for what this looks like, are what God does in people's lives. So time and again, one of the privileges of my job is to walk with people closely through stuff. And time and again, I've walked through stuff with people who have had the most unimaginable loss, and at the same time have described a closeness and a presence of God like they've never felt before. So a former member of this church, Lanny talked about when his first wife was shot in Sudan, and as she died, he said, "I've never been so angry in my life "and yet I've never experienced the joy of God "so deeply in my life at the same time." And actually this is time and again, you hear stories of Christians who, when pitched into unimaginable loss, have become so aware of God's love and His presence and His faithfulness to them, and that is transformed them and also the world around them. And again, that almost is the best argument I think that the world who goes, well, what kind of God, when they see Christians suffer and go, how did you do that? How did you live through that? How did you seem to have hope and peace? Friends of ours, who are kind of our age, my friend, his dad passed away at the time and were thinking he was really old, but he was younger than me now. So he wasn't very old at all. And there was this amazing funeral service, and the morning, I think it was the day after the funeral service, the widow had a knock on the door, and next to her, next to her neighbors, a Hindu family, three generations, and the mum and the grandmother were there, and they knocked on the door and they said, I know you only had the funeral yesterday, but we had to come and see you. And we've never been to a funeral like that before in our lives, the first ever Christian funeral. It seemed to be so joyful and so full of thanks and so full of hope, and that's not our experience of death. Tell me where you get that from. And the lives of Christians who are being transformed by grace through loss, say to the world out there, that actually these things don't have to define you. You can let Jesus define you. (upbeat music)