In the sermon 'Dealing with Sorrow,' Tom Penning discusses the Christian approach to handling sorrow and grief. He begins by humorously acknowledging his own doubts and insecurities, before moving into the main theme: the biblical perspective on sorrow. Penning suggests that Christians often feel guilt about experiencing sorrow, mistakenly believing it reflects a lack of faith. He argues that the active and passive obedience of Christ—His life of sinless obedience and His suffering on the cross—provides a framework for understanding and addressing sorrow. Penning highlights Isaiah 53:1-6, emphasizing that Christ bore our griefs and carried our sorrows, which suggests that He not only understands our pain but has already dealt with the root cause of all sorrow: sin. The sermon encourages believers to confront their sorrow at the foot of the cross, understanding that Christ shares in our grief and provides hope and joy beyond our present pain. Penning concludes by urging Christians to embrace their sorrow as a means to draw closer to Jesus, who has already conquered all reasons for sorrow, and to find comfort in the shared experience of grief within the community of faith.

Good morning. I have a couple of confessions to give you before I actually start to speak. First of all, I don't know what a devotional is. As I thought about it when I was asked to do the devotional instead of a sermon, I think that what a devotional means is you don't have to have three points, but I do. You don't have to reference Greek or Hebrew, But I am.

And it can be shorter. But it's not. Secondly, it is hard to Preach or devote to presbytery. It's also good to preach or devote to presbytery. I was so insecure about it, having decided the day after I was asked that for once at one of these events, I was actually going to preach something to you, instead of normally what the lazy part of my brain, which is the larger part of my brain, does is say, oh, I preached a sermon two years ago that probably would apply here somewhat.

I'll just pull that out of the file and use that. I said, no, no, I'm going to actually write something for this group. I am on my third sermon. This one was written last night. I think that's good because as you well know, if you've ever heard me speak about this, it is my goal when I preach to have the congregation fall asleep so that I can.

And then the alarm goes off, oh, okay, thank you very much, Third Point. And since I wrote it when I was half asleep, I'm a little worried that it'll come across as sleepy. I called a friend this morning and preached them this over the phone and got their stamp of approval. So here we go. Many years ago, when I lived in the outback of South Dakota, I had flown to Wichita for an unimportant reason, and the flight was late coming back.

And when I flew from Wichita, I always had to fly into a bigger city than what I lived in, Rapid City, South Dakota. It's where Mount Rushmore is. And I would have to drive three and a half hours through the wilderness and I mean wilderness We would go an hour and a half sometimes without seeing another vehicle let alone a house This was the wilderness and my usual practice when traveling long distance like that was to have plenty of snacks along the way because I like to snack because it's less boring than not snacking. But this particular day the flight was late Every fast food or junk food place along my route in Rapid City itself was already closed. It was one o'clock in the morning.

So I went on in despair because I had no snacks. And there were countless times where I reached over to the seat next to me where I usually can expect to find junk food and felt the disappointment. At first I was angry at myself for not having thought ahead Realizing perhaps I should be prepared like a good boy scout and other times I was mad at those stores for not staying open later and other times I was probably mad at you. I was mad at everybody because I didn't have these snacks and I you're laughing but this was a serious and somber situation I finally arrived in lemon South Dakota pulled into town and reached into the back to get my backpack and I found that my dear wife before I left Had put two bags full of snacks in the back seat. I had the answer to my problems right there in reach the whole time.

What I'm going to be talking about today I think might be a similar situation. A problem that most of us have struggled with this year that we have had the solution right there in the back seat And I hope that we find it what I'm talking about this morning Is sorrow Now I realize that this is In addition to presbytery family camp and it's supposed to be cheerful and upbeat and I'm sure that I was asked to speak today because I'm expected to do 17 or 18 funny jokes to make You laugh, but I am done joking this morning other than two more times but This is a serious subject I'm talking about sorrow We are familiar with sorrow Trying not to meet many of your eyes looking around the room, I know of many of your sorrows. I don't know of many more of your sorrows. But we, and not distinctly or uniquely we, but we as the people of God, and we as the CPC, and we in this room, have sorrow. Sorrow and grief.

And here's my Greek reference. If you want to have an interesting corollary to my message this morning, Look up the difference between sorrow and grief. I'm going to use them interchangeably today because for our purposes they aren't that different, but they are different. We have sorrow. Please raise your hand if sometime this last year you have not had any sorrow or grief.

Now I want you actually to think about your sorrow. I know we don't usually do this. We we Christians think that we aren't supposed to have sorrow. We don't do sorrow very well, do we? I think we don't do it very well and I don't mean that by the way as a personal criticism to any of you.

I'm not saying I see how you dealt with sorrow and it wasn't very good. That's not what I'm saying. That wasn't one of the jokes by the way. But we don't as Christians as if I can use the phrase reformed biblical Christians we don't do sorrow very well. And in Any idea or experience or gestalt or worldview, if we don't have a well-formulated biblical concept of what this thing means, what we end up doing is borrowing from somebody else.

And we don't have a well-thought-out, biblically-described concept of sorrow, at least not that we reference very often, and so we've borrowed from others. Think about how we tend to treat sorrow in our lives and in our churches today. We think it's not Christian to have sorrow. We feel guilty when we have sorrow. We think it shows a lack of faith.

And even if we have it, even if you might admit, yes, I have some sorrow, you're certainly not going to express it. Because then you're really not being a Christian. Then you're being a whiner or complainer. Don't you know that Jesus loves you and does good things for you all the time? How dare you talk about sorrow?

And even if we don't actually say it that cruelly, the subtext, oh the subtext, when someone in our midst expresses sorrow shouts that Sometimes I think we even make this mistake in our circles particularly we have find we define gender roles in a way that negate our expression or experience of sorrow. Men, you're just supposed to keep it in. Blank face. Women, you're supposed to express it a lot. A lot.

And when either of us do that sort of thing, we just think it's okay. And neither of them is. What I'm going to try to do this morning is describe a biblical viewpoint of sorrow. First Thessalonians 412 gives us a hint. That's not what I'm speaking on today or preaching on.

First Thessalonians 412 reminds us that we aren't to grieve like others grieve. Inherent within that, and I know most of you have used this in a talk or a sermon or to advise a friend, say, see, it's okay to grieve, you know, to grieve as others grieve, but there is a way that we are to grieve and It is a way that is substantively and I think wonderfully different Than the way the world grieves there is a distinctive Christian way of grieving And because it has to do with Jesus, it's wowsa, that's a theological term. It's Jesus. Tying in with Christopher's sermon last night. Wow.

Let's see if we can get there. Isaiah 53, 1 through 6. And no, my calendar is not broken. I do not think it's Christmas, even though this type of passage is often preached at Christmas time. We are not going there.

I'm going to cheat, actually, before I actually read it to us and say where I'm going with part of this. I find that this passage from Isaiah 53 verses 1 through 6 in case you didn't catch it before speaks about the active and passive obedience of Christ. Everybody say that. The active and passive obedience of Christ. Excellent.

Let me describe what I mean by that. The act of obedience of Christ is what he did when he obeyed through his life all the way to the cross and then a wonderful exchange takes place. His act of obedience means that his righteousness, his perfectness, judicially gets exchanged for your sinfulness. That's the act of, that's what happened on the cross, right? They switched.

So you now in God's eyes are judicially righteous, and he in God's eyes was judicially guilty, and then was killed for it, and the slate is wiped clean. That's his act of obedience. His passive obedience I think is more exciting. The first one has to do with justification. I believe the second one, the passive obedience, has to do with sanctification.

Passive obedience is this. For his 33 years, We know that he was tempted with every temptation that is possible to man, right? And he successfully stood. What happens with his passive obedience is every time that you sin, every time that you fail, his success in that is also exchanged. So in God's eyes, which are the only eyes that count.

When you this morning got greedy about the sausages, still not the joke. When you got greedy about the sausages, God saw instead Christ's generosity. That's what I believe it means to wear the robes of Christ. He sees Jesus being perfect. What a wonderful exchange that is.

I see that in this passage. Go ahead and let your minds rumble around in there as we're reading the passage, but there's something that is more pertinent to hear. Intertwined in there, interwoven in there, is the idea of how our Christ, how my Jesus, deals with our sorrow and our grief. And I'll give you a hint that it's the same way. Now, of course, we're not saying this to free us from the responsibility of obedience, but we're saying this because actually it frees us to obey.

And the same thing will also be true when you consider grief. So I'm gonna read Isaiah chapter 53 verses 1 through I think 6. Since what we are reading is not just a very nice description of how to get out of sorrow, but is the holy and inerrant word of the one true living God. I ask that you stand in honor of our God who gives us his word this morning, Isaiah 53, one through six. Who has believed what he has heard from us, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

For he grew up before him like a young plant, And like a root out of dry ground, He had no form or majesty that we should look at Him, and no beauty that we should desire Him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And as from one whom men hide their faces, he was despised and we esteemed him not. Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. Yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted, for he was pierced for our transgressions.

He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought to peace, and with his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned every one to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all." This is the word of the Lord. Amen.

Please be seated. I'm going to read Isaiah 53 verse 4 again. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. I Was told by my friend that this is a good point to interject a small comedic relief comment and I will say Stop calling me surely All right, I'll tell them it didn't work. I've come to understand that this verse is describing how Christ deals with our sorrows in similar ways to how he deals with our sin.

In the same way that that great, comforting, powerful set of doctrines that we understand helps us deal with our sin, it also deals with our sorrow. There is an active and passive work that Jesus performed to deal with our sorrows. Let's take a look at that actively first. On the cross, Jesus Christ took every reason for sorrow and destroyed it. Because every reason for sorrow and grief harkens back to something to do with sin.

Maybe your sin, maybe your friend's sin, or your spouse's sin, or somebody else's sin, and maybe even it's only Adam's sin, but every sorrow has its roots in sin. And what did Christ do to sin on the cross? Gone. Smashed. Defeated.

Destroyed. I think that Isaiah knew he would have problems understanding or rather accepting this. And that's why he inserted that word, surely. He doesn't say that with the other things, I think, because we can get our heads around the intellectual theology of the act of obedience of Christ allowing our salvation but he does it with our sorrows too. As he destroyed sin he destroyed every reason for sorrow.

It has been born. It was carried. It's gone. Wow. In that sense, we have no reason to sorrow.

Now I'm not saying, please, please don't hear me as saying, now don't you dare therefore feel sorrow. That's not what I'm saying. I am saying feel it at the foot of the cross. Feel it at the foot of the Cross alongside Mary, feel it at the foot of the Cross alongside Christian who laid his burdens of sorrow and grief at the foot of the cross. Surely, he has borne our grief and carried our sorrows.

Passively. And I like this one a lot. I'll admit to you, I had never thought of it this way until like five days ago. And my wife, when I said this to her, she said, there's your sermon for presbytery. And I said, no, I can't do that.

I only came up with this five days before presbytery. You got to be well prepared to speak at presbytery. And she kept telling me, so you doing that grief thing? I say, no, no, no, not doing that grief thing. And then middle of night, I couldn't not do the grief thing.

Because of the wonderful passive work of Christ, where he takes our suffering and our burdens, smashes them. Here's how it works. It has struck me as odd that we like to have memorials for sad things. I actually have an example of not this in my bottom left drawer of my desk. It's a box that when I want to feel depressed, I open it.

It has every bad letter I ever received or wrote. It has reminders of every huge life-wrecking sin that I have found in my life, some of which I've been caught, some of which not. They end up getting written and put in there. And if that's what a memorial is, then we're doing something wrong, because I need to burn that box. We have memorials because they let us know that others also grieve for what we grieve.

In Australia, there was this practice that seemed so weird to us until we figured this out. If you're in Australia and your child died, You would set up in the corner of what was their bedroom, what we called a shrine. Pictures of them, things from their past. And it struck me that if I did that in my house, I would become morbid. But not them.

Because they have that shrine set up and everybody who comes to that house gets invited, oh come on over here, hey look at this, see this, they know that their grief is shared. That's why we put memorials up to great battles. That's why we have cemeteries with markers. Because we know that we aren't the only person looking at it. We know that we aren't the only person feeling the sorrow of our grief.

That's what happens with Jesus. Jesus feels your sorrow. I know that sounds like I'm a TV evangelist, and notice I didn't say it with a southern voice, because it's not meant to be said like that. Jesus Christ feels, felt, will feel your sorrow. And I saw a couple nods, so I'll take that as acceptance to go on and push it a little further.

The most memorized verse in the Bible is wrong. Jesus wept. You see what that's saying? Jesus wept. And he was weeping for Mary and Martha.

And he was weeping for that town where Lazarus lived. And he was weeping for himself. He wept. He grieved. Surely He has borne our grief and carried our sorrow.

He weeps with us. He grieves with us. And somehow, in that way, just like the passive obedience of Christ fixes that part of our sin his passive participation in our grief frees us in fact Jesus being Jesus with more knowledge than we have and more humanity than we have, feels our sorrow even more than we do. Every tear that you have shed this year, he has shed countless tears for. We do not grieve as the world grieves because they grieve alone and without hope.

But we grieve alongside the one who knows grief better than us, who knows our grief better than us, and says, I grieve with you. And at the same time, smashes and takes away every reason for that sorrow to even exist in our lives and I know I'm gonna say this because we have to say it because it's so true it sounds so glib and if you had just been experiencing grief two seconds ago this is not the first thing I would say but I guarantee you this is where I would head the conversation. After you are in heaven, 7, 322 years, The sorrow that you feel today Will not even be a memory There's an amusement park outside of Atlanta And in that amusement park, there's a ride called the Great Gasp. And in the Great Gasp, you get in it and you're buckled in kind of a harness and you go up like three miles. On the time that we went there, I was in my final semester of seminary.

I wasn't sure what I was going to do for a living. I was on my way to take part in a wedding. I wasn't ordained, so I was not doing the wedding, but I was taking part. I think I was doing a reading, but this was a wrong wedding. I was not in favor of it, but I was weakly doing it anyway and feeling guilt and feeling sorrow and there were other problems.

I could go on and on. This was one of the worst weeks of our life and some friends of ours said oh when you're driving through here on the way somewhere Stop by here's free tickets. So we went And I strapped in the thing and we went up and as I'm going up. I'm remembering my sorrows And when you get to the very top, they release you. And they call the ride the great gasp because it's a great gasp.

And for 3.5 seconds. I did not remember one of my troubles Heaven heaven Heaven is the great gasp of your life. Your sorrows have been born. They have been carried. Now, yes, of course, I am not saying don't grieve.

Did I say don't grieve? I need more force than that. Did I say don't grieve? And I am not trying to add to your sense of guilt if you do grieve. Please grieve.

But I am offering you Jesus in a part of your life that you probably haven't seen him acting before. Objectively, it's simply this. Let your sorrow drive you to Jesus. Just like everything else that happens, right? Every good thing, every bad thing we all know happens because we have a sovereign God whose goal is to have us love Jesus.

Everything that happens, happens for that. Your sorrow is of course a part of that. And is this not really what joy is? Joy is not just silly happy. Joy is in the context of your pain knowing your Savior.

In the context of your sorrow, knowing that He has already wrecked it and felt it more than you can. But we need to feel and express. And I'm going to say admit, because most of us need to admit our sorrow, rather than just express it because we don't think we should admit it. You see my point there? It's like this.

If I were to walk up to Gary, I would walk up to Gary and say, hey Gary, guess what? I just received word that that million dollar debt that you are owed, that you owe, Just got paid by some rich guy Gary would say oh wow Actually, Gary would say oh Wow, does he somewhat he's somewhat restrained All right joke to sorry Gary He would be excited. He'll be glad right? But what if instead what if he knew? About the debt What if he'd been trying for six years to finagle his way out of it?

What if he'd borrowed from Peter to pay Paul? What if he'd had three extra jobs along the side? What if he'd done everything he could to try to avoid this debt and he knew that the hammer was coming? And when he heard the knock at the door, he was expecting it to be the sheriff taking him to debtor's prison. Do you have that in Texas?

No. Taking it to Indiana where they do. And then somebody says, oh by the way Gary, that debt's been paid. There would be a man who feels joy. Now we understand that concept when it comes to your sin.

This is why we push so appropriately to be aware of your sin. To, I don't mean this in a bad way, to embrace your sin so that grace may abound. Oh, oh, people of God, embrace your sorrow because he's taken it. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. I'm going to finish with a quote, which you also need to have in a sermon, right?

From an ancient, rarely utilized theologian, Charleus Brownius, who continually reminds us of this very concept when he says in almost every comic strip, good grief. Please pray with me. My Lord and my God, I thank you once again for my Jesus. Thank you that he has borne my sorrow and carried my grief and borne my grief and carried my sorrow. Lord, I thank you for the freedom that this gives me.

Freedom to focus on my sorrow and its reasons and its pain and its hurt because then I get to give that to my Jesus. Lord help us to hide no longer from our sorrow. Help us to embrace our sorrow, not because we find some self-comfort in it, but help that embracing enable us to push it to Jesus, who has already taken it on the cross and destroyed every reason for it, and who has also already grieved for it with a grief that was like the shedding of blood from his eyes. Lord, I thank you that in you though we are in sorrow, there is no sorrow. Pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.