Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

Now a certain man was sick. Lazarus of Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha. It was that Mary who anointed the Lord with fragrant oil and wiped his feet with her hair whose brother Lazarus was sick. Therefore the sisters sent to him saying, “Lord, behold, he whom you love is sick.” When Jesus heard that, he said, “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”

Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that he was sick, he stayed two more days in the place where he was. Then after this he said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.” The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, lately the Jews sought to stone you, and are you going there again?” Jesus answered, “Are there not 12 hours in the day? If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble because he sees the light of the world.

But if one walks in the night he stumbles because the light is not in him. These things he said and after that he said to them, “Our friend Lazarus sleeps, but I go that I may wake him up.” Then his disciples said, “Lord, if he sleeps, he will get well.” However, Jesus spoke of his death, but they thought that he was speaking about taking rest and sleep. Then Jesus said to them plainly, “Lazarus is dead, and I am glad for your sakes that I was not there that you may believe.

Nevertheless, let us go to him.” Then Thomas, who is called the twin, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go that we may die with him.” So when Jesus came, he found that he had already been in the tomb four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles away, and many of the Jews had joined the women around Martha and Mary to comfort them concerning their brother. And then Martha, as soon as she heard that Jesus was coming, went and met him.

But Mary was sitting in the house. Then Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he may die, he shall live.

And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” But she said to him, “Yes, Lord. I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.” And when she had said these things, she went her way and secretly called Mary her sister, saying, “The teacher has come and is calling for you.” As soon as she heard that, she arose quickly and came to him. Now Jesus had not yet come into the town, but was in the place where Martha met him.

Then the Jews who were with her in the house, and comforting her, when they saw that Mary rose up quickly and went out, followed her, saying, “She is going to the tomb to weep there.” Then when Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she fell down at his feet, saying to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Therefore, when Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her weeping, he groaned in the spirit and was troubled. And he said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus wept.

Then the Jews said, “See how he loved him.” And some of them said, “Could not this man who opened the eyes of the blind also have kept this man from dying?” Then Jesus again groaning in himself came to the tomb. It was a cave and a stone lay against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of him who was dead, said to him, “Lord, by this time there is a stench, for he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not say to you that if you would believe, you would see the glory of God?”

Then they took away the stone from the place where the dead man was lying. And Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me, and I know that you always hear me. But because of the people who are standing by, I said this, that they may believe that you sent me.” Now when he had said these things, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth.” And he who had died came out bound hand and foot with grave clothes, and his face was wrapped with a cloth.

Jesus said to them, “Loose him and let him go.” Then many of the Jews who had come to Mary and had seen the things Jesus did believed in him. But some of them went away to the Pharisees and told them the things Jesus did. Then the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered a council and said, “What shall we do? For this man works many signs. If we let him alone like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and nation.” And one of them, Caiaphas, being high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all, nor do you consider that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people, and not that the whole nation should perish.

Now when he said this he did not say on his own authority but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation and not for that nation only but also that he would gather together in one the children of God who were scattered abroad. Then from that day on they plotted to put him to death. Therefore Jesus no longer walked openly among the Jews but went from there into the country near the wilderness to a city called Ephraim.

And there remained his disciples. The Passover of the Jews was near. Many went from the country up to Jerusalem before the Passover to purify themselves. Then they sought Jesus and spoke among themselves as they stood in the temple. “What do you think? That he will not come to the feast?” Now both the chief priests and the Pharisees had given a command that if anyone knew where he was, he should report it that they might seize him.

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Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your scriptures. We thank you for this text. We thank you for the indwelling Holy Spirit. We pray now that you would transform our lives that Jesus would speak to us through this text in this exposition that we would be changed that we would be, Lord God, matured that we would find a renewed commitment to one another to serve the body of Christ by loosing the sins that so easily beset us. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen. Please be seated.

“Death, be not proud, nor yet canst thou kill me. From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, much pleasure. Then from thee much more must flow, and soonest are best men with thee do go. Rest of their bones and souls delivery. Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men. And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, and poppy or charms can make us sleep as well, and better than thy stroke. Why swellest thou then? One short sleep passed, we wake eternally and death shall be no more. Death, thou shalt die.”

These words of John Donne really reflect much of what happens in John 11. Now the gospels were written sequentially over a period of 30 or 40 years. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The gospels are presented to us sequentially in the text of our received Bible and they build one upon the other. And so when we get to John’s gospel, we’re familiar with Matthew, Mark, and Luke. We know all the story. And we come to John.

And as we move through John’s gospel, we hit a pivotal turning point. Now, chapter 11, chapter 12 will be Jesus with kind of a picture of the coming Last Supper with the disciples. Chapters 13-17 are Jesus with the disciples and then the crucifixion. Clearly, we are at the end of the first half of the narrative of Christ’s works, the three years of his public ministry. Clearly, John portrays all of this as a new creation in the beginning and then the story begins to unfold.

This miracle, while not really the last of the book—the last will be the resurrection of Christ himself—but this last sign to the people prior to the Savior’s death and resurrection, it is the culmination of the four gospel records of the signs and miracles that Jesus Christ did. If we think of the miracles of Christ, they all come to a giant crescendo with this particular miracle tied as it is to the specific decision on the part of the council to crucify Christ and as certainly given as it is as a precursor of our Savior’s own resurrection.

But this is the climax now as we’re reading through the gospel accounts. This has a tremendous climactic sense to it. And Jesus now has moved through the countryside for three years, is bringing much joy to many people, doing all kinds of signs and wonders, healing the lame, making them walk again, giving sight, raising people that were dead. This is not the only resurrection from the dead. On two other occasions, our Savior in the synoptic gospels raises people from the dead, but it is from their immediate death. It’s like just right after they die. Here we have a man raised to his stinking dead four days in the tomb. Here we have a tremendous picture of the ultimate rolling back that Jesus will accomplish by his death and resurrection of the greatest curse upon mankind, his death for his sins.

Here we have Jesus come to the tomb of Lazarus. It takes us there slowly. The suspense builds. It takes, you know, 40 verses to get to the tomb. He seems to take his time very deliberately, which we’ll talk about in a couple of minutes. But here he comes. He comes to the tomb. He asks it to be open. Now, the tomb might have had a number of people lying in there. Typically, these tombs had eight or twelve different people or more lying around in cut out slabs. And we see Jesus face to face with death, the death of men for their sins. And we see Jesus getting ready to face his own death, which will happen as a result of his service to his people, of his love, for friend Lazarus.

He will lay down his life. He is laying down his life by doing what this gospel connects to the decision to crucify him. And Jesus comes and faces death, the stinking tomb is opened and the smell of the bodies must waft out. Not only you see a picture of where we’re all headed, folks, being laid out, carried by six as it were, we see Jesus also giving to us the effects of death because he’s not just in front of a tomb and not just in front of a tomb that stinks with death, but he is in the context of mourners who for four days have wept and bewailed their loss.

We see Mary and Martha weeping. We see Jesus himself greatly troubled and angered against death and weeping himself. We see the encounter with death here. And what the end of this picture is that death is overcome by the Lord Jesus Christ. Remember that these signs in the gospels are not just little pictures of sort of who he is to prove he’s Messiah. They are the actual rolling back of the effects of the curse, all of which will definitively take place in his own death, resurrection, and ascension, making us who we can be in Christ. But this is the picture of that and this is the tremendous beauty of the work of the Lord Jesus Christ in facing right down death’s ugly throat in rolling it back and causing Lazarus to spring forth from the tomb.

“Come forth Lazarus.” Now that’s not the last thing that Jesus says to Lazarus. The next thing he says is, and he tells other people to do this, unwrap him. The wrappings are important here. Take those wrapping things off Lazarus so that he can walk in the newness of life. Jesus is the resurrection and the life that’s lived in the power of the resurrection. And I want to talk today about the implications of this command that Jesus gives to his followers to unwrap Lazarus’s bonds.

Now, we talked last week about the center of the travel portion of this narrative being the declaration that he is the resurrection and the life. “He that believeth in me shall never die, right?” And so we know that this is prior to Jesus getting to the tomb. This is the evaluative perspective as some call it. This is the explanation of what all of this is about. Now Lazarus doesn’t come to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ the first time coming out of that tomb. He’s a friend of Jesus. He knows Jesus. But Jesus says that we can legitimately look at the resurrection of Lazarus and what happens there as a picture of our movement from death to life being delivered of our sins through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So he gives us the freedom to interpret the event of the raising of Lazarus in a way that is a picture of the newness of the Christian himself who believes in Christ and comes to saving faith and is delivered definitively from eternal death and punishment in hell. That is our rightful place for all of us sinners and into the resurrection and not just resurrection in terms of eternal life but living out that resurrection life as well.

So I want to talk about the unleashing of Lazarus. I want to talk about the loosing, the command of our Savior to loose him. I would say that Jesus tells you and he tells me today, loose him. Think of those in your sphere of influence in the context of the body of Christ. Loose them from their sins. Loose them from their fear of death. Loose them from a horrific self-love that blinds us to what’s best for us and what is glorifying to God the Father. Loose them from lives lived impatiently before God, thinking that we know better than he does.

God would have us deal with one another by assisting one another in our sanctification. Jesus brings us to life sovereignly, but then he works through the power of his people to cause us to grow in grace. And I want to talk a little bit about that. Now, it’s interesting that the story has these bookends, this anointing of Mary. We talked about this last week, beginning of chapter 12, where we identify one who anoints Jesus with her tears at his feet. Back in chapter 11, actually chapter 12, we’ll see as we get there in another month or so that Mary anoints Jesus and some object to it and he says she’s preparing me for my burial. So we’ve got Mary’s anointing of Jesus and in relationship to that preparation for his burial.

And then we could see this as well with the unwrapping of Lazarus’s burial garments. I mean, there’s a sense in which we could take chapter 12 alone for now and look at chapter 11, beginning with a discussion that Mary will prepare Jesus for his death by anointing him. And at the end, we are to release the bands of death one from the other in terms of the application of God’s word having us go free in Christ and there is a relationship there that we want to understand as well this preparation for death as well as a preparation for life. So we want to look at this text today and talk about it in terms of this loosing.

Now this word here that Jesus uses to loose him is used in several ways and I just want to point out a couple of verses. In Acts 2:24, speaking of the resurrection of Christ, we read that God raised him up having loosed the pains of death because it was not possible that he should be held by it. So another place where this loosing from the pains of death is described of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ himself.

Jesus says in 1 John 3:8 that the entire purpose for which he came was the destruction of the works of the devil. “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested that he might destroy the works of the devil.” Now that word “destroy” means absolutely loosen. Same word, same root word as this word “loose him.” Satan has his ties around us.

You know, I thought as I thought about this sermon for the last couple of weeks about—I don’t remember if it was the Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit, but in one of those two, there’s a spider that captures some of the little people, the hobbits, wraps them up in a web, and then one of the guys got to go through with his sword and cut the webbing off of his friends lest they die in that state.

Well, Hebrews tells us that sin easily besets us and it’s difficult to run the race when we’re bound about. Lazarus can’t run, can’t even walk as long as his grave clothes remain upon him. We can’t really run the race as long as we’re all tangled up with our sins. The devil has these works in which he wraps us up so that we cannot effectively do the work that is glorifying to God and of benefit to mankind.

And Jesus came to be the sword, the word of God, that is that sharp two-edged sword to cut off those bands that hang about us and prevent us from running the race with perseverance. Jesus came not just to bring us to eternal life, not just to assure our place in eternity, but he came that he might make us effective people for him. And he tells us by way of picture in the Lazarus account that you and I are necessary to one another to help the sanctification process to unleash, loose the bands of death, the results of our sins that beset us round about.

Jesus is in the process of maturing his people, of destroying the work of the devil definitively and progressively in your life. And we are called upon one to the other to accomplish that loosing purpose. In Matthew 20:28, we read that the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many. And that word “ransom” is the same Greek root word, loosing for many. Jesus came and shows us that the way to loose one another’s sins is by serving one another, not seeking our own self-interest or our own well-being, but rather serving one another.

And we apply the definitive, once-for-all ransom or loosing work of the Lord Jesus Christ to the bands of death that so easily beset us in Hebrews 12:1-2. I want to talk about three specific ways in which we’re to loosen each other’s bonds. We are to loose each other. First, we’re to loose him from the bond of idolatrous joy and the fear of death.

There’s a, you know, it’s an odd story in a way because in order to release us from death, Jesus takes us right into the heart of death in this narrative in John 11. The mourning, the grief, the disappointment, the loss, the fear of Thomas that they will die. Death is everywhere in the account. Now, we know that the end of the story is better than the beginning that Jesus will accomplish the rolling back of death. But we must face death before we get to the removal of the fear of death. And we live in a culture today that does not want to face death. Death is hidden away. Death isn’t seen. We go to the nursing home. We go to the funerals. They don’t die in their own homes anymore. We don’t have families that see each other die all that frequently. Death is hidden away. We’re like whistling past the graveyard in this culture. Worse than that, we’re not even admitting the graveyard exists all too often. We simply shut our eyes and pretend that death is not a reality for us.

Well, we need to understand that is idolatrous joy to have the sort of mirth that denies the accounting that’s necessary for mankind that all men are destined to die in the context of their bodies. This is no joy at all. This is idolatrous foolish mirth. We’re told in Ecclesiastes, and I want to use several verses from Solomon in these sermons, one for each of my three basic points here.

We’re told that a contemplation of one’s own death is good. Ecclesiastes 7:1-6 says, well, beginning in verse 2, “Better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting. Better to go to the house of mourning.” Jesus takes us to the house of mourning today in the text, does he not? And it is good for us to go there, not just to rush to the end where everything’s taken care of, but to go to the house of mourning. And Solomon, the wisest man to live apart from our Savior, says better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting, “for that is the end of all men. The living will take it to heart.”

We loose each other’s bands, sins, as we remind one another of our impending death, and as we remind ourselves of our impending death. We recognize the need to understand our death. It is a good thing to see death. Jesus actually says in our text today that he is glad that he didn’t get to Lazarus and heal him before he died. Did you notice that as we read through the text?

“I’m glad for your sakes that I wasn’t there. I’m glad that Lazarus is rotting away in the tomb. I’m glad I didn’t make it in time to save him from having to go through the death of his body.” Now, maybe that’s a bit pushing the envelope a bit. But Jesus says he’s glad that he was not there for the sake of his disciples. It is good for us to see death and to think about death and to contemplate death in the context of our lives. It is a good thing for us to understand these realities. Jesus says he was glad. And we’re given here, I think, in Ecclesiastes an understanding as to why it is. We’re supposed to take it to heart.

If we deny our death and if we never think of our impending death, then we just sort of walk through life and what we do is of fairly little significance. But Ecclesiastes says no, it’s very important for us to think about death, to go to funerals, to understand to go to the funeral in the scriptures here at Lazarus’s to think about death because we’ll take it to heart. “Sorrow is better than laughter. For by a sad countenance, the heart is made better.”

See, under the sun, in the fallen world that Solomon is addressing in Ecclesiastes, it is good to be sorrowful at times because death is real, sin is real, and we should understand the implications, the connection between the two. “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise than for a man to hear the song of fools. For like the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool. This is vanity.”

Now, we’re a church that stresses joy and celebration. Praise God that we do. This meal is primarily joy, but it is also a sober reflection on the reality of the death of our Savior and our sins that required his death, resurrection and ascension. It is good to understand that there is a context in the worship service as a proper place for a contemplation of the death of Christ and a reminder of our own required death because of our sins and because of the sin of our forefather Adam.

It’s interesting that Edward the Confessor wrote this: “Weep not, I shall not die and as I leave the land of the dying I trust to see the blessings of the Lord in the land of the living.” You notice what he said there? “As I leave the land of the dying, I trust to see the blessings of the Lord in the land of the living.” We usually talk about this as the land of the living, right? But Edward the Confessor had it right. This is the land of the dying. This is the land where everyone you see today, tomorrow, the rest of your lives here, everyone you see are in the process of dying. That’s the reality. And it’s no good to whistle past the graveyard. It’s no good to think that it’s not going to happen. And in fact, it is good for us to contemplate death, to put eternal realities in mind and to recognize that we have transactions to do with God and what we do in this life is important and will be evaluated by our judge when we die.

It is good for us to understand we live in the land of the dying. Death is the ordinary universal experience of all men. Death is a reality since the fall. The sort of death that we go through. What do you do? What will you do when the time of your death comes? Have you prepared for your own death?

You know, most cults are simply a perversion of some biblical truth and there’s the Tibetan Book of the Dead that all of life is a preparation for one’s death and it’s goofed up and it isn’t about Jesus and all that stuff and it’s wrong. But the grain of truth in that is that Solomon tells us that it is good to consider our death. It’s good to go to the house of mourning, to the house of funerals and to remember that we shall die and we’ll have to give an accounting to God. It is important for us to get through death by facing death the way Jesus does in the text for us.

Samuel Rutherford said, “Fancy your death.” Think about it ahead of time. Nicholas Ridley, the martyr, the great Anglican, said, “Let death be premeditated.” Think about your own death. In other words, let it be premeditated. Thomas Goodwin said, “Die speculatively, thinking about it ahead of time.” “If a man would live well, let him teach his last—let him, excuse me—let him fetch his last day to him and make it always be his company keeper.” This is from Pilgrim’s Progress. The Interpreter to Christian tells him that in part two of Pilgrim’s Progress and Alexander White said, “I sometimes do it myself. I go into the Dean Cemetery and I think I see the gravestone of myself, Alexander White, when my days are over for preaching Christ.”

You know, the Puritans would hang their death clothes in their closet, the ones they would be buried in, as a constant reminder to them that they lived in a world that is dying, that they had to experience death, they had to face death, they had to own up to death. One of the ways we loosen our sinfulness is to put ourselves in an awareness of the eternal truths that an accounting is coming and death will be ours. And there are many stories of men on death row who through a contemplation of their death have been brought then to salvation through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. We loose one another’s bonds by having us contemplate death.

But secondly, under this outline, we do this through a contemplation of one’s own sleep. I mean, the text makes a big deal about this. Early on, it doesn’t just use the word sleep for death, which many texts do. Throughout the New Testament, we see these references to death where it’s called sleep. But here, it kind of is pointed out in the beginning of the narrative. Jesus says he sleeps and I’m going to go to wake him. And they say, “Well, if he sleeps, he’ll be okay.” No, I’m not saying sleep. I’m saying death. So it kind of makes a big deal out of it. And you know, there’s a typical confusion thing on the part of people around Christ. But I think what we can see in this is a prefiguring of what’s going on because Jesus prefers his normal way of talking about what’s going to happen to Lazarus and what’s going to happen to all of us who must face death is Jesus his normal first way he starts to talk about it is he’s asleep and I’m going to wake him up.

You see what’s happened here? “Death, be not proud. Death, you know, I shall not die but you shall die. You’re the you have no power over me with the application of the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.” So John Donne wrote that death for us is not death anymore. It is a contemplation of our sleep not just some sort of linguistic thing going on where the Greeks talk about death and sleep. No, this is the inspired word of God. And the inspired word of God says it is useful to us first to face the fact that there’ll be an eternal accounting but secondly then not to fear death but to rather say that death has been overcome by Christ. And for us death is the cessation of life. And for the Christian, the one who has been raised to life through belief in the Lord Jesus Christ, there is no cessation of life for you.

Now, there will be a sleep of your body. If you died tonight, there’ll be a while at which you’re with Jesus and the saints without your body. And when he returns, your body will be raised. But understand that, you know, to be absent from the body, Paul says, is to be present with the Lord. And so sleep or transition is the wondrous truth. This is a great chapter of great blessing. It’s climactic in the rolling back of death. And it describes death as nothing more than sleeping and waking up. That means that every night when we go to bed is a reminder of our own death. And it’s a reminder to trust God in the context of our impending death. The same way we trust God to take care of us while we sleep at night.

Death has been transformed definitively for believers into a passage, a tunnel, a short transition point to eternal life with the Lord Jesus Christ. Imagine Lazarus, you know, after this, he’ll die again. Legends say he lives for many years after this. We don’t know, but Lazarus eventually dies again in the body. And now imagine that he goes through a period of time where he knows his death is coming the second time around. He will be far less fearful of that, will he not? Because of the work in his own life that the Savior had done in bringing him back from the dead. Lazarus is going to say, “No big deal.” You see, that’s what we’ll say if we understand and believe this text. If we appropriate the story of Lazarus for ourselves and we recognize that Hebrews tells us that Jesus tasted death so that all those who through fear of death were in bondage to sin and death could be released, loosed.

You see, we unleash each other’s bands that restrict us and are involved in our sin as we remind each other of the work of the Lord Jesus Christ and that for us as Donne says death is no more. All death is sleep. Now the whole thing has been transformed. Let’s us talk about these things the way the Savior chose to at least in this particular text. Lazarus sleeps. I’m going to wake him. So when one dies in the Lord they sleep, but God will awaken their body. And he’s already awake with God in eternity.

Hebrews says that one of the reasons we sin is because of our fear of death. One of the strongest wraps around us is fear and a fear of our death, the death of our reputation, the death of provision. You know, we won’t be provided for. Our bodies are going to die. Our name is going to die. Fear of death on every side. And so we take matters into our own hands and we fight and we resist. And God says that we can unleash each other from that fear of death with our words and with our deeds we can speak to our children, one another reminding each other that Jesus has conquered the ultimate enemy death. I mean if you can’t be killed in the body what possible thing can Satan do to you? Not much. All pain is painful primarily because it’s a picture of impending death. Transforms all of that to us as we’ll talk about here in a little bit so we loose one another as we encourage each other to contemplate our own end and thus live our lives better because of it and to contemplate that end is not a fearful thing for us.

We have been released from the fear of death and as a result we are released from bondage to sin. Gamaliel II in a discussion of the burial practices of this time that I was reading in a commentary said that for a long time among the Jews you had to buy expensive burial clothes and all this stuff and then a guy came along Gamaliel II who decided that people should be buried simply and cheaply and so he made by example and by way of instruction that burial clothes should be light linen objects that are cheap. But the reason I bring this up is because he referred to them as traveling dresses. Traveling dresses. So those burial clothes that the Puritans would have sitting in their closet, a reminder to live well today. You don’t know when you’re going to meet your maker. Are better yet not seen as burial clothes, but as a traveling dress as a picture that God has moved us definitively ahead.

Now the end result of that is courage. When we unleash the fear of death or the, you know, putting it away from any thought of consideration of our own end. When we do that for one another, what we unleash in each other is courage. The courage that Thomas has here in the text. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen. He’s afraid that they’re going to go right back to where they were going to try to be stoned before. And Thomas says with good reason, not because he’s silly or a doubter. He says, “For good reason, let us go with him that we may die also.” See, Thomas has courage. And it’s not the courage again of whistling past the graveyard. It’s the courage of saying, “Bad things are probably going to happen here, but I’m going to do the right thing.” Thomas isn’t cheerful because he knows that no problem can beset him. He’s determined to have courage in the face of what may be very difficult times for Jesus and his disciples.

When we unleash the fear of death from one another, when we unwrap it, take the wrapping off your kids and help them not to be fearful of death, then what you produce in them is a courage that enables them in mission. Thomas was to accompany the Savior in mission. And he had to have courage. He had to have a determination to stay the course in spite of whatever might happen to him to accomplish mission.

We’re sent forth into this week. We’re sent forth beginning of every day on a mission from Jesus to be the best workers we can be, to be the best mothers and dads we can be, to be the best daughters and sons we can be, to be the best brothers and sisters we can be, to learn our multiplication table and our phonics and everything else. Those are all missions. Christ at the beginning of the day and we have courage to perform those missions as we recognize that Jesus has dealt definitively with our great enemy death. He has made it into sleep for us.

Thomas’s actions were described as stro by R.H. Stman as not expected faith but loyal despair. And sometimes that’s the way it is for us—loyal despair. A story is told by Gilbert Franco of an officer friend of his in the 1914 to 1918 war. And what this man did was he was a balloon observer. You’d have a battlefield forming up and they would take a guy out and tether him with a stake fixed balloon position close to the enemy lines so that he could from this height see whether the bombs, the shells they were lobbing over at the enemy lines hit well enough or not. And he would have a system to communicate back, you know, further north or whatever it is.

Now this was a very dangerous position because there’s no defense up there. You’re sitting up there in a balloon. You’re a fixed spot where the enemy can see you. They know what you’re doing. And of course, they’re going to do everything they can to shoot you out of that balloon and to kill you. So it was a very frightful position to be engaged with. And this friend of Franco talked about this. He said that every time he went up in that balloon, he was sick with nerves, but he wouldn’t quit. He wouldn’t quit. This is courage.

Courage doesn’t mean, you know, not thinking there’s any danger. Courage is aware of the danger that there is. The real difficulty is the fact that people will likely shoot at you in some way. You’re going to have problems in opposition, but to have courage to not quit, to stay the course anyway in the mission that God calls you to that day. God would have us assure each other of the definitive work of the Lord Jesus Christ in changing death into sleep. He would have us unleash each other’s sinfulness to either ignore that there’s a terminal point to what we do and so live our lives for ourselves or of being so fearful of it that we sin by way of trying to hold on to this life as opposed to entering into the mission that God calls us to do courageously and boldly for him.

So that’s the first loosing. The second loosing I want to talk about is a loosing from the bonds of idolatrous life. So if the difficulty is an improper contemplation of death, a denial or a distortion of what it is, a fear of it. The second thing we want to unleash each other from is idolatrous life. And specifically, I’ve got a couple of areas in mind here. The first has to do with timing.

Life is a series of events and a series of decisions taken in time. And so if we’re going to move from death to life, we’re going to talk about the times in which we live and the time that God uses. It’s interesting here and the first application under this section is from impatience. And again here we talk from the preacher Solomon from Ecclesiastes 7:8. “The end of a thing is better than its beginning. The patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit.”

The end of the matter is better than its beginning. Well, John 11 certainly is a big giant blinking neon sign about that, is it not? The beginning is difficulty. Mary and Martha are weeping. Lazarus dies alone without the Savior with him. Thomas is doubting what’s going to go on. We’re going to get killed if we go over there. Everything looks bad. Jesus makes them all wait. You notice how he does that in this gospel.

Remember his mother said, “Well, they need wine. Hey, my own time is when I’ll give them wine.” Later, his brothers say, “Let’s go up to the feast. I’ll go on my own time. I’m not going to go with you.” And we wonder what’s going on. And here Jesus specifically because he loves Lazarus doesn’t go for two days. Jesus in John’s gospel is never operating on somebody else’s time schedule. He operates, you know, very distinctively on his own time. And he doesn’t move his time to fit our time. But what he does is he has us reconsider what our time is, what our schedules are to fit his time. And one way he does that is by assuring us that the end is a good thing. We can always pray confidently in the words of Ecclesiastes that the end of a thing will be better than its beginning because this is the way the world works. We can’t understand from the beginning what’s going to happen and we doubt what’s going to happen.

We’re impatient about things. Jesus over and over in the context of the account of this gospel and certainly here talks about timing and he’s going to mode things in his own time and he cautions people by way of example at least not to be impatient. We can unleash each other’s sins by reminding each other to submit to the Savior’s plan that the end of a matter is better than its beginning. Be patient in spirit because if you want to move God to your timetable, that’s pride. That’s pridefulness. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You have no idea moment to moment what’s going to happen in the world. God knows it all. He’s determined from before the beginning of time.

We’ve been reading in Ecclesiastes Doug Wilson’s commentary on it, The Joy at the End of the Tether. And the big deal in Ecclesiastes the way Wilson sees it—Doug Wilson, I say Jordan, but Doug Wilson—is that Ecclesiastes is about God’s sovereignty. Things are meaningless apart from that. But given an understanding of God’s complete sovereignty, they are joyful and delightful. Everything is beautiful in its time. The events that happen here in the account of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, beautiful in their time, are they not? That’s why Jesus could be glad. We’re glad too that he didn’t go right away and heal Lazarus, aren’t we? I am. Because this story is a beautiful one that takes us to a loss of a vision, death of vision to a resurrection of vision through the work of Jesus Christ.

It’s like our lives, you know, sometimes you’ll drive around looking for some place and you can’t find it. You drive, you drive, can’t figure and all of a sudden, boom, you’re right there in front of the place. This happened to Howard L. and I when we were in Prague, you know, we were trying to find our hotel. We finally stopped and asked some girl and she says, “Yeah, it’s right there.” And we’d stopped right across the street from it. Okay. Well, God does that because that’s the way it is. We don’t know what’s going on in our lives, but we must trust that God does and he will get us to the place right in time for whatever it is he’s planning. You see, our impatience must be put aside. It’s to be unwrapped from one another. And we can help each other by saying, “Don’t be impatient. You see, trust in God’s perfect time. He knows best, not us.”

That’s the way Jesus does things in this particular gospel account. And it’s what he wants us to understand about his timing. The illustration that Wilson uses in Joy at the End of the Tether and many people have used it is a tapestry. The old kind of hand-tied tapestries. We are under the sun. We are under the tapestry most of the time. We see a bunch of knots and goofy looking things and it doesn’t look beautiful at all to us. We don’t understand the plan. And particularly from the process of being tied into one of those knots, we don’t get it. But from above the tapestry, there’s a beautiful picture that God has woven using every grain of sand, every leaf that trembles, every sparrow that falls from the sky. God is painting a beautiful tapestry that it uses every single event in human history and in the natural world. And we can’t see it from this side, but we’ll be patient if we recognize it from that side. It is beautiful.

Remember flying up to Seattle years ago, raining here in Portland, cloudy, depressing. I used to live in California. It was depressed. Took many years to get used to the rain and the clouds. But you know, you go up to those clouds on one of those planes, you get up there and boom, the sun is shining. Heavenly perspective. God is in control. He’s ruling in the affairs of man. And while it looks like clouds behind every appearance of a frowning God at us that clouds are, God’s providence really is smiling and beaming upon us, seeing us and measuring the events of our lives in relationship to the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Behind every supposed frown that we perceive—he didn’t come quick enough, he left me alone to die, he left my brother die, didn’t even come pray with him, now he’s going to take us back and he’s going to get us killed—what is going to happen? We ring our hands. We get impatient. Please come quickly. But no, God says, “Be patient. His sovereignty is working. Wrap. Take that sin away from yourself. The sin that so easily besets you, so easily besets me and our children and our friends is impatience. It’s a desire to see God meet our timetables instead of our ours.”

Notice the prayer of Jesus here. So confident. He doesn’t pray, “Please raise Lazarus.” No, “I know you hear me. You’ve always heard me. I’m praying for the sake of these people.” He is calm. He is controlled. And he does the next thing that he knew he would do. He brings beauty. Lazarus, Mary, Martha, everybody’s going through real trials. I’m not saying that whatever you might have been impatient about this last week wasn’t a sore trial. I’m not saying it wasn’t difficult, but I’m saying that at the end of the day, it’s sin to be impatient about these things. And we want to submit to God’s timing.

Now Jesus also says here the counterbalance to this is you don’t want to waste time. He says there’s twelve hours in the day. Walk in the light of the world. Walk in Jesus. In other words, he said the same thing when he healed the blind man. When it’s light, when we have opportunity, we should be seeking opportunities to make the best use of our time. If we’re anxious about something that we have too much work today, maybe it’s because we didn’t work enough yesterday. We’ve got to be, you know, very disciplined in our use of time. But ultimately, our great sin is to be impatient over time. And this impatience frequently comes from a result of a doubt of God’s sovereignty, his love or his justice.

You know, here this is why we get impatient. We doubt. Sometimes it’s just our own wicked, rebellious, volitional sin. We just want our own way and we stomp our foot and that’s that. But usually that’s not the way it is with us. Usually we have to assure each other of God’s love. This isn’t happening because God hates you, Dennis. This isn’t happening because, you know, God is upset with you, Matt. No, this is the providence of God because he loves you. And when we tell each other that and remind each other the great love of God, what goes throughout this whole story?

Why is it, you know, what is Jesus’s motivation over and over? Mary doesn’t go to Jesus and say, you know, Lazarus loved you a ton. We wish you would have come. She says, “Lazarus whom you love is sick.” She knew that God’s sovereign love is the only one worth mentioning. It’s not whether we love God or not. It’s his love of us. And having mentioned love of God, then we can relax. Then we cannot doubt that love when it’s reinforced to us by one another. We speak of the love of Christ to one another. And when we do this thing, we tell each other and remind each other of God’s care. We need to do this over and over and over again.

We need to tell each other that God weeps. You know, shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept.” One of the greatest bullets in your gun to shoot against the Greek thought that frequently overcomes us in this culture. This was a horrific idea to the Greeks. To the Greeks, the whole point of God is he’s removed from all these earthly passions. He is completely stoic. He’s got this face that’s neither smiling nor frowning at us. See, this book is written to Greeks, this Gospel of John. And one of the greatest things that this gospel is, one of the greatest pieces of news in this gospel is that two-word sentence, that verse, “Jesus wept.”

Because I don’t care how sovereign God is, how many knots in the tapestry. If his thought toward you is not love, care, empathy that moves him to weep, then it is of no comfort to us. You see, you must reassure each other. I must reassure you and myself of God’s absolute universal sovereignty, but also of his amazing love for you. We are given to doubt that love. And when we doubt that love and find ourselves alone, we don’t care if God is sovereign or not. We’re just ticked off about the whole thing.

God wants us to reassure each other over and over and over. He loves you. Now, Jesus does two things in the story of Lazarus. He speaks the word, “Come forth,” but he also does things. He actually accomplishes the resurrection of Lazarus that he can’t accomplish. Jesus weeps. Jesus has deeds and Jesus has words. How we unwrap the sin that easily besets us from one another is by our words. We tell each other Jesus loves you. I know it was tough with you this last week. God has seen you through this thing. It’s through our empathy for each other as well. Our actions toward each other where we weep for one another. There is a time for weeping or deeds as well as our words, our modeling.

Jesus models correct behavior in this chapter. And we’re to model a calm assurance in the timing of God that the end of the matter will certainly be better than its beginning. He who is patient is better than he that is prideful. And he that is patient is the one who understands and does not doubt about either the sovereignty of God or the love of God for his people.

Tremendous, you know, temptations to people in Oregon City, the friends of the two girls that were murdered to impatience and to somehow in an anger that doesn’t rest in the finished work of Jesus. Tremendous temptation because the other thing we doubt is God’s justice. We see what happens and we get so angry properly. There’s a proper sense of anger over the sins of the last six months in the city and they are many and manifold, lots of blame to go around. But at the end of the day, we have to trust God and understand that this also is part of the tapestry that he’s weaving that is beautiful and it’s time.

God says that he loves us, that his justice is being worked out, that the wheels of God’s justice grind very slowly. They grind exceedingly fine, and all sins will be made retribution for. We can trust in God’s justice, his comfort, his care for us. We can, as we go through our lives, assure each other of God’s sovereignty and his love. And when we do that, God says we’re unwrapping these sins that easily beset us.

You know, Mary again, Mary, Martha, Lazarus, Thomas, they’re all worried. They all have troubles, but at the end, they are all absolutely delighted. At the end, their brother is raised up. He is restored. The brother recognizes in a deeper way his love. And we have these tremendous things that happen in the context of this chapter. Martha’s christological confession of Christ brought to a deeper place through this very tragedy that God and his sovereignty put her through. She comes to confess with a deeper sense of who Jesus is. This christological confession. Mary’s adoration clearly portrayed for us here.

So we’ve got one sister giving to us the christological confession that we’re supposed to enter into. The other sister giving the anointing, the adoration, the falling down at the feet, three times feet mentioned with her in Jesus, the adoration of our Savior and the worship of him that comes ultimately through this process of events that are taking place that are quite painful for her. And we have Thomas mustering up the courage to go forth and do what he’s going to do. Thomas is the great missionary to India. He’s the one that no doubt on that missionary journey remembered back many times his fear of death and yet the empowerment of God to go ahead with courage in the face of difficulties as he went to India to preach the gospel there.

Thomas was encouraged for mission when we understand the love of God and his sovereignty for us and that the end of the matter is always better than its beginning. Now we have patience so that we can disciple the nations. To disciple the nations is to impose the authority of God through baptism and to teach them his word and obedience to that word. And we bring a discipline to ourselves and a discipline to the world as we unleash the sins of impatience and doubt of God’s love and sovereignty and then submit to the gentle yoke of Christ.

“He that cannot control his spirit,” the Proverbs tell us, “is like a city without walls.” If we do not raise our children to believe the love and sovereignty of God, and as a result, they become impatient. They have no defense against the wicked ways of the serpent. There is a lion that prowls the street. His name is Diabalos, the accuser, the slanderer, and our children should be firmed up against it. They’re to be conquering heroes for the Lord Jesus Christ. And they will be conquerors if they can control themselves and be patient with God, not doubting his love or his sovereignty, knowing the end of the matter is better than its beginning. Then they’re more than conquerors through Christ.

We disciple the nations as people that have a context for our patience and for our lack of doubt. Being firmly rooted in the story given us in capsule form here in John 11. The love of Jesus Christ. He weeps for us. He has empathy for us. He is moving all things together for the well-being of those who are called as Christ people.

It’s an interesting verse I’ve thought about the last few weeks. We know that all things work together for good that are called, right? And I usually think of that as I have a whole series of events and I cannot imagine how they’re being used for my well-being. But this last week or two, I was thinking, well, you know, maybe part of what I should be thinking about is how the events in my life are maybe used to assist somebody else, another portion of the elect of Jesus Christ. Do you see the difference?

We can look at Romans 8:28 and kind of remind us, yeah, yeah, God loves us and he’ll do anything for our good. Or we can say entering into to the Savior here who lays down his life that others might live. We can say, well, maybe part of the reason I’m going to have to die—Lazarus could think—is for the well-being of Mary. Her devotion to Christ is going to grow. The well-being of Martha, her faith is going to be brought to a deeper confession of who he is. It’s for the well-being of Thomas. You see, all things work together for the well-being of Thomas in this event because Jesus is going to come afterwards. He’s going to raise me and he knows this will be the stroke of death against him and the disciples. And yet, Thomas is going to be moved a deeper courage.

So we interpret the events of our lives in relationship to God’s sovereignty, his comfort to us. P.T. Forsyth said this: “It’s a greater thing to pray for pain’s conversion than its removal.” It is more of grace to pray that God would make a sacrament of it. A sacrament of our pain. Sacramental pain is what Forsyth talked about. We always want the thing removed. God says, you know, I think Forsyth is right. Even difficult times, knowing God’s love for us. Jesus wept. Knowing his absolute sovereignty. These men were going to put Jesus to death to stop God’s plan. And of course, they accomplished God’s very plan in doing it. Knowing these things, we can turn our pain. We can convert it into sacramental peace and grace from God.

The end result of unwrapping impatience from each other and doubt is an unleashing of optimism and discipling the nations. Our children should be taught this kind of self-control from the littlest day. I’m lately advising people that their kids at the at the dining table is a place to teach them this kind of discipline and submission. Don’t give them the food they want sometimes. Postpone their dessert at first for little periods of time, then for longer periods of time. Make them wait for fulfillment to teach them to have patience under God’s sovereignty. Not to frustrate them ultimately beyond what they’re able to take, but to build a sense of anticipation so that they can receive with Psalm 131.

“My heart is not lofty, nor my eyes lofty, neither do I concern myself with great matters, and things too wonderful or profound for me. Surely I have calmed and quieted my soul. Like a weaned child with his mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me. Hope in the Lord.”

We must train each other to do these things that will produce a discipline that will disciple the nations. Bring them under the subjection of baptism and the authority of Christ in that way and teaching them to observe all things that he has commanded us.

There’s a third, more deadly sort of thing than the death we talked about earlier. We have an interesting verse in the Song of Solomon chapter 8, verse 6. I preached on it before. It’s a odd verse in the Hebrew. Hard to understand what it’s saying. We read, “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm. Love is as strong as death. Jealousy as cruel as the grave. Its flames are flames of fire, a most vehement flame.” Love is strong as death. Yeah. Ah, it’s a wonderful thing to remember in the context of our story. The love of Jesus for his people is stronger than the death of Lazarus. But the wrong kind of love is just as powerful. Well, it’s not just the wrong kind of love also has a strength to it that’s stronger than death. Men will die because of the wrong kind of love. And we see that pictured for us in the account here given to us of the council.

They say as they get together, “If we don’t do something about this. The Romans will come and take away not the place, the temple and the nation, our place and nation.” And in the Greek, the word “our” there is placed forward for emphasis and refers to both the place and the nation. The Sanhedrin thought that these things were theirs. They were motivated not by interest for the temple ultimately or the nation. They were motivated by their own selfish interests. They were engaged in self-love. Caiaphas knows this. And so when he talks to him, says, “Hey, don’t you know that it’s better for us, not for the people, not for God’s cause. It’s better for you and me if one man die for the sins of the nation.”

The text tells us about the strength of Christ’s love and its overcoming ability in terms of death of his people. But it also tells us of the council’s love that is greater than death. They will go to their own death rather than give up their delusion and their self-love that drives their delusion. So the third cord of sin that we need to unwrap from one another and assist each other in the course of our lives is the sin of self-love, idolatrous love, love that is strong as death in a negative way.

We see the Sanhedrin here motivated by that kind of selfish love and as a result of that they put to death the very source of life. They assure the judgment of God through the Romans and destroying the temple and the nation because of their sinful action. They love death. The Proverbs say because they hate God. They love themselves so much that they will strike out at God himself, the source of all life, and promulgate death in the nation in the name of their own self-love. Not just Jesus, of course. They also plot against Lazarus to put him to death. Horrible man, aren’t they? Rotten, stinking, self-deluded, self-loving sinners of the worst kind are pictured for us here at the end of chapter 11.

But what about you? And what about me? Do we think that apart from the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, we would be anything different? I don’t think so. Scriptures are full of references to fallen man as lovers of self, lovers of pleasure. Adam and Eve, as soon as they fall, they love themselves. Because of the love for themselves, they’re deluded. They can’t see the very sin that God is bringing them to conviction for.

Self-delusion flows out of self-love. And that’s the state of fallen man. That’s the state of you or me, brother and sister. And we need help. This is the biggest reason we need help because the self-love creates self-delusion and we don’t know when we’re sinning and we need each other to take that bandage off of us. The sin that so easily besets us because we don’t even see it. We walk around with wrappings we can’t even identify anymore.

Now in moments of clarity, God gives us the grace of the Spirit and we know we know that we really in the old man hate each other. We don’t love anybody but ourselves. Everybody does anything for our that’s against our convenience. We don’t like it. The only people we do like ultimately in the old man are those that love us and do things for us. But self-love is a great motivating factor for us. And all the greats throughout history have recognized this.

Calvin, let’s see if I have a quote from Calvin here about this. Calvin said that it was his own self-love that made him malicious to other men. And he identified this as one of the worst besetting sins of mankind, self-love. And Calvin saw himself a hatred of other men based upon his love of himself. He knew that apart from the redeeming work of Christ, it was clear that his own self-love would have prevented him becoming a Christian or do anything else worth doing.

The saints throughout history have recognized the sin of self-love and this self-love leads to a self-delusion. Let me read you a couple quotes from evolutionists here. This guy is a paleontologist and he’s talking—he’s in favor of evolution but he’s bemoaning the fact that the record won’t prove it out. “No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. It never seems to happen in terms of looking at the record. Aiduous collecting up cliff faces yields zigzags, minor oscillations, the very occasional slight accumulation of change over millions of years at a rate too slow to account for all the prodigious change that has occurred in evolutionary history. What we do see the introduction of evolutionary novelty. It usually shows up with a bang and often with no firm evidence that the fossils did not evolve elsewhere.

Evolution cannot forever be going on somewhere else. Yet that’s how the fossil record has struck many a forlorn paleontologist looking to learn something about evolution.”

See, he’s so sad that the record doesn’t support his presupposition. Does it cause him to question his presupposition? Of course not. It’s a religiously held view. Why? Because the last thing we want, fallen man wants, is a Creator God, who is in charge of everything and who has brought this to pass. Romans 1, fallen man suppresses the truth of God and unrighteousness. He hates God. He loves himself.

This is a quote from Richard Lewontin, a Harvard genetic professor, in his piece in the New York Review of Books, he says why he rejected out of hand the view of those who see the hand of a Creator in the natural world. So this is why he doesn’t believe in creation. “We take the sight of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs. We take the sight of science in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its promises in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so theories. Because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It’s not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the natural world. But on the contrary, that we are forced by our pre-commitments to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation in a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.

Moreover, that materialism is absolute for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.”

We cannot allow a divine foot in the door. Neither could the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the council. Based upon their self-love, they became self-deluded. They could not allow that foot, that divine foot in the door. And when it appeared, they struck out at it and killed it. That’s what we do. That’s the sin that so easily besets us, our self-love. And as a result, our inability and our undesire inability and our lack of desiring to serve other people.

Alexander White translated Richard Goodwin saying this: “Self in this life is just another and a truer and a keener and a more homecoming name for sin. My sin, Goodwin said, is myself. Myself. My own love for myself. My self-delusions.” God says that he wants us to take that band of sin that so easily besets us away from one another with our words and with our deeds. And when we do that, brothers and sisters, we have the courage to enter into mission. We have the patient submission to God’s will to disciple and to discipline ourselves in the nations. And when we take off self-love, we have unleashed then the empathetic service to community that Christ pictures for us here in the context of his service, laying down his life for the sake of the well-being of others.

Jesus is portrayed in the Gospel of John as bringing about a whole new world, a new creation of people that are dropping the encompassing the constraining effects of sin, who have been called back to life in Christ and who serve one another by unwrapping impatience by unwrapping fear or an avoidance of the thought of one’s terminal point of his body by unwrapping the self-love and unleashing a population who have courage to mission discipline for discipling the nations in an empathetic service to one another in the love of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Jesus is creating a whole new world. The anointing and wrapping that I talked about earlier you see what we’re going to help each other to do as we unwrap the burial clothes is we’re going to anoint one another for our deaths. You understand that correlation? We’re unwrapping the effects of our sin and death, but we’re anointing now not crude bandages. We’re giving each other perfume in our tears that we’d be equipped to lay down our lives with courage, with discipline and submission to the great God who loves us and would accomplish service for one another by living for others rather than ourselves.

We lay off the burial clothes that we might put on the anointing perfume to one another. You know, the town of Bethany here had its name changed to a term that means city of Lazarus. The city was changed. Would never be the same. The name of the city had to change because now everything that happened in the city happened as a result of what Jesus did there one day when he visited there in time and space. God moves the world along. He changes the city and he does it one person at a time. Each of us looking at each other and our families and our friends and the church and removing the restraining sin that so easily besets us that we might run the race.

The end result of that is the changing of the city. Oregon City will be a different place in a thousand years from what it is now. It’ll be a place inhabited by the praises of God. That’s in the process happening now. God and his tapestry allowed a horrific thing to happen here. Yet, one of the immediate results of this was last Wednesday night a Christian evangelistic service held or last Thursday night held to commemorate the death of the two girls transmitted live over the three major stations in Portland to the greater Portland area. Hundreds of thousands of people no doubt saw a clear—I’m told at least a clear and powerful presentation of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and the wonderful tapestry that he is weaving even in the context of knots that look exceedingly bad from underneath.

God says that we can have great hope for the future in terms of the city. God is changing the city. He does it one person at a time. As we pray, would you commit with me today? Just kind of think of yourselves as that person standing next to Lazarus being told by the Savior, “Take the wrappings off so that he can live out this resurrection life.” Can you imagine yourself in that setting? Can you commit yourself to applying that image this week in the life of a family member that you’ve may have God may have laid upon your heart, your children, your parents, your brothers, your sisters?

Can you commit to serving them by helping them to be unleashed from the sins of impatience and doubt? The sin of of cowardice instead of courage, the sin of self-love as opposed to loving service to one another. May God grant us grace as we come forward and as we commit ourselves to be those that loose the bonds of each other. May he give us grace and power so that we can exhaust our mission, complete our mission to the world, discipling the nations and creating an energetic, empathetic service in the context of community.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for this day. We praise your holy name for John chapter 11 and we pray that it may transform our lives. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.