The Church of Eleven22 - S01 E15 - Mary, Martha and Lazarus

Episode Date: April 14, 2020

When Jesus brought Lazarus back to life, He displayed His power over death. Today, we can experience a new life through that very same power. Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” — John 11:25

Hey, church family. It's time for Devo. Again, if you got your Bible, we're going to be in John Chapter 11. It's a very famous event, and it's one that helps me understand what Jesus does in the face of tragedy and gives us some clues and cues on how we should face tragedy. So John chapter 11 says this verse one now a certain man was ill Lazarus of bethany the village of mary and her sister martha it was mary who anointed the lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair whose brother lazarus was ill so the sisters sent to jesus saying lord he whom you love is ill now think about this imagine here at work somebody runs into your office or wherever and they say hey hey hey the one that you love is sick. Not the one that loves you, but the one that you love, who would that be?

So Jesus knew exactly who they were talking about. Lord, the one whom you love is ill. But when Jesus heard it, he says, this illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God so that the Son of God may be glorified through it. First and foremost, just know this. God does not waste a hurt. God does not waste of pain. That God, in his sovereignty, leverages all things to work together for the good of those that love him and are called according to his purpose. And there is no higher good than the glory of God. I know sometimes we look at the things going on right now, the events in our world, and we say, Lord, the one that you love is sick. We're sick. And so can you help us? The people that you love and came and died for are sick, will you help them? And then Jesus would

say, hey, this is going to end okay. This is going to end for the glory of God. Now you would think that when he says this, then this would be a very short encounter here in the scriptures, and everything would go great really quickly. Well, it takes a minute. Verse five. Now, Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So, when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was. Now, let's just, look at that word. So. So means because. So in our finite, understanding, these two verses don't make sense. Jesus, it says now, Jesus loved Mary, Jesus loved Martha, Jesus loved Lazarus. Therefore, because Jesus loved them, he did not answer their prayer request the way they prayed it. That doesn't make sense. It would make more sense to us

if it said yet, Jesus loved Mary and love Martha and love Lazarus. However, when he heard that Lazarus was he stayed two days longer in the place where he was. How many of you know that God's timing is not our timing? That God is never late, but he's rarely early. And how many of you know that God answers every single prayer request? In fact, Tim Keller says this, that God answers every single one of your prayers the way you would answer them if you knew everything that God knew. You see, Jesus's delay was because he was going to display his glory, not in spite of it. It says, then after this, he said to the disciples, let us go to Judea again. And the disciples said to him, Rabbi, the Jews were now seeking to stone you.

And are you going there again? And 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 anyone walks in the night, he stumbles because the light is not in him. After saying this, after saying these things, he said to them, our friend Lazarus, has fallen asleep, but I go to awaken him. And the disciples said to him, Lord, if he's fallen asleep, he will recover. Now Jesus had spoken of his death, but they thought he meant he was taking rest in his sleep. And then Jesus told him plainly, Lazarus is dead. I think Jesus is so patient

with his disciples. And for your sake, I am glad that I was not there so that you may believe, but let us go with him. And so Thomas called the twin, said to his fellow disciples, let us also go that we may die with him. You see, Jesus at this point in John, he's already been threatened. They've been trying to kill him. The religious leaders wanted to stone him. Eventually he would be crucified.

And what Jesus was saying all this day and night talk is this, you cannot number my days. Before the foundations of the earth, the father has planned out in accordance with his will, my very own life. And no one can take my love. life from me, I only can lay it down. And he knows that his hour has yet to come. And so he walks with bold confidence into this scary situation. And then you see that the disciples follow. Now here's what he walks into. Verse 17. Now when Jesus came, he found that Lazarus had already been dead

in the tomb for four days. Now here's why this is important. It's for a number of reasons. But it was kind of a folklore in the first century that Hebrew people believe that your spirit would hang around for two days. It'd hang around one day for sure, two days maybe, three days, but four days, for sure you were all the way dead. That you weren't kind of dead. There was no chance of resuscitation, that you were all the way dead. And now Lazarus has been in the tomb already for four days. Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles off. And many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them concerning their brother.

So when Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and she met him. But Mary remained seated in the house. And Martha said to Jesus, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. What an honest prayer. If you remember Mary and Martha, these are the sisters that when Jesus,

Jesus came to their house. Martha got really, really busy. I think Martha's type A. If you're into enneagram stuff, Martha might be an eight or a three. She gets stuff done. She's type A. She's driven. She likes Liz.

She likes to check stuff off. She was the one that was working and working and working to prepare dinner and prepare things for Jesus' arrival at their house. And Mary is the one that just sat quietly at Jesus' feet. And then Martha is the one that complains to Jesus about her sister just at his feet. and what we see here is we see how they deal with grief in very different ways. You see, Martha doesn't even wait for Jesus to get all the way to the house

that she gets up and she goes running to Jesus and she accuses him. Jesus, what are you doing? What are you doing? If you would just do what I had told you to do, then this would not be there. Have you ever been there in your prayer life? And I have been there a number of times. a number of times. There have been parents whose children were hanging on for dear life,

hooked up to machines at the hospital, and I just beg God, God, would you just save them? And when he does it, in my mind, I thought, Lord, I don't understand. You love us, and why would you not just, God, I've already got this figured out in my mind how you would be glorified and how this would work out for you. And sometimes we can run to him with this kind of

prayer, Lord, if you would have been here, if you'd just do what we ask, then my brother would not have died. And she goes on to say, but even now, I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you. And Jesus said to her, your brother will rise again. Notice what he does. He does not rebuke her for praying honestly. And Martha said to him, Martha's going to get all theological. I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day. and Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. And whoever, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.

Do you believe this? And she said to him, yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the son of God, who is coming into the world. I want you to notice this. Martha is a type A driven intellectual woman. And Jesus meets her exactly where she is. You see sometimes when, as a pastor, when I meet with people in times of crisis,

honestly, one of the things that helps some people, it's the minority, but some people is to talk through the theology, the theological realities of what's going on. And so Jesus goes into a theological disposition, of what the resurrection is and that he is the embodiment of the resurrection and anybody that believes in him that we will be resurrected because he is the proto toko the prototype of the firstborn of the dead and therefore as he was resurrected we too will be resurrected and this is where he meets

her he doesn't tell her how she should feel he doesn't tell her how she should mourn he just meets her exactly where she is and then he meets the other sister And when she had said this, she went and she called her sister Mary, saying, in private, the teacher is here and is calling for you. And when she heard it, she rose quickly and she went to him. Now, Jesus had not yet come into the village, but was still in the place where Martha had met him. And when the Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, when they saw Mary rise quickly and go out, they followed her, supposing that she was going to the tomb to weep there.

You see, one of the things that they were doing in the first century is there were like professional weepers and so if you had a big funeral, you would hire a bunch of people and they would come over to your house and they would like wail and tear their cloth and sit in ashes and those kind of things. Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet saying to him,

Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. She says the same words, but you can almost feel the different emotion here. And when Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved and his spirit and greatly troubled. You see, one of the problems when we get really familiar with Bible accounts like this is you already know what's going to happen.

So don't skip by this too quickly. That even though Jesus knows what's going to happen at the end of this account, even though Jesus knows what's going to happen at the end of the COVID-19 crisis, that when his people are moved, then he is deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. Listen, if there is something that has brought you to tears because it was troubling to you, then it brings Jesus to tears because it troubles him.

Because if it's important to you, it's important to him because you are important to him. And he said, where have you laid him? And they said, Lord, come and see. And then the shortest verse in the Bible, maybe you know this one. Jesus wept. Now think about this. Why would Jesus weep? Why would Jesus weep? Jesus knows, okay, spoiler alert,

just a couple of verses, Jesus is going to raise Lazarus from the dead, and it's going to be a big, fat, happy ending. So why would Jesus weep if he knows within, I don't know what, 10 or 15 minutes, that it's going to go from a funeral to a party? The reason is because Jesus is eternal, which means he is eternally present in the right now. The name of God that he gave to Moses is I am. am. So God is not skipping ahead until tomorrow. God is with us right now, and Jesus weeps. Let me just

explain this to you. Sometimes you'll hear me say, I don't care about your feelings. Well, what I mean is not that I don't care that you have feelings. I just don't want you to be lorded over by your feelings. But God has given us this incredible gift of emotion and feeling to navigate this thing called life. In fact, in the book of Ecclesiastes chapter three, there's this whole lot. list of feelings. And it says, the Bible says, there is an appropriate time to cry and there's a time to laugh. And there's a time to mourn and there's a time to dance and there's a time to weep and there's a time to shout with joy. And what I have found is that if we don't allow, if we don't allow ourselves to cry when it's time to cry, then we will not be able to laugh when it's time

to laugh. And I don't know who made up this idea that somehow to withhold emotion was a sign of strength. Like you lose somebody really close to you and you say these things like, I just got to be strong for my kids. Where in the world did you come up with this idea that not crying equals strength? Withholding emotion is not strength. It's just inauthentic. You see, Jesus, the strongest man who has ever walked.

I mean, on his shoulders, he bore the sin of the entire world. and in this moment, Jesus navigated life with emotion. And he cried. And he cries when we cry. And so he says, Jesus wept. And so the Jews said, see how he loved him. But some of them said, could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man

also have kept this man from dying? The answer is, of course he could, but he had a plan that these people didn't understand yet. and then we get to the good part. And then Jesus, deeply moved again, spligitomai is the word, like from the guts. He came to the tomb. It was a cave and a stone lay against it, and Jesus said, take away the stone. And Martha, the driven one, the sister of the dead man,

she said to him, Lord, by this time there will be an odor for he has been dead for four days. Literally in the King James Version, it said, Lord, he stinketh. And Jesus said to her, did I not tell you? that if you believed, you would see the glory of God. And so they took away the stone, and Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, Father, I thank you, that you have heard me. He's praying out loud so that everybody can overhear what he's praying. He says, I knew that you always hear me,

but I said this on account of the people standing around that they may believe that you sent me. And when he said these things, he cried out in a loud voice, Lazarus, come out. And the man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips and his face wrapped with a cloth. And Jesus said to them, unbind him and let him go. I think the King James says, take off his burial cloth. You see, they would bury people in about 100, 125 pounds of like this linen wrapping.

They didn't embalm the body. They would take about 100 pounds of spices and cloth and they'd wrap it all over the body to try to keep the odor down. and Jesus stands before this grave. They roll away the stone, and Jesus calls out Lazarus's name. Some commentators say the reason that he called out Lazarus is because if he would have just said, come forth, then, you know, all the dead people in that grave would have come hopping out. And then Lazarus comes hopping out of the grave.

You can't walk. His feet are bound together. And then Jesus says these words, take off the grave clothes. You know why? Because he's living. Living people don't wear grave clothes. And so when Jesus brings us from death to life through salvation, then part of his instruction is that we take off our old self, that we put off anger and rage and sin and debauchery,

and we take those things off, and we put on his righteousness. He closed us in his righteousness, and we don't have to do the things that we used to do because we are not the people that we used to be. And so in this crazy time, just know that Jesus is in this with us, And he weeps with those who weeps, and he laughs with those who laugh,

and all of this will be to display his glory. And for those of us who have been resurrected in Christ, like Lazarus, now Lazarus was just resuscitated. But when we get saved, we are resurrected with him. To never die again, not spiritually speaking. May we take off the grave clothes that used to be on us, and may we put on the righteousness of God, and may we walk by faith.

faith in the one that has been so faithful to us. Let's pray. Your Father in heaven, Lord, we thank you that you meet us exactly where we are. Lord, we thank you that you met Martha with a theological dissertation on what salvation is and what resurrection is. God, we thank you, that you just sat with Mary, put your arm around her and that you would weep, those who weep, and God, I thank you that you meet us exactly where we are. But God, like Lazarus, I thank you that you don't leave us where we are. You don't leave us dead in our own trespasses, but by your gospel, you call us out of the grave. And you instruct us to be unbound by the things that bind us in our death, and that we would be set free to live in you and be clothed with your righteousness. God, we love you

like crazy because you love us first. And we pray it in Jesus' name. Amen. Thanks.