John 16:16-33 - "Lament Your Way to Joy"
One thing we’ve lost in our modern world is the ability to lament. To feel grief deeply and to give our sorrow it’s full range of emotion, allowing it to express whatever we’re feeling in response to some adversity we’ve had to suffer, some loss we’ve experienced.
We consider lamentation too antiquated, too dramatic, requiring too much time. We see grief as a “process,” and as in everything else, we’re eager to be done with it and move on to the next thing. For any number of reasons, we’re lazy about our soul care, in too big of a hurry to get back to our routine, our normal life.
The result is that these feelings are not dealt with and they do not merely go away. Instead, they fester and malinger, and pop up later with greater strength, surprising us and causing greater problems than they would have if only we’d addressed them in the beginning. It’s like the old muffler commercial: “You can pay me now or you can pay more later.” I believe unresolved emotions are the leading cause of physical, emotional, and mental illness. Denying and suppressing your feelings causes you pain. You can self-medicate it with business or booze, your doctor can medicate it with pills, but there won’t be any true healing until you face it, give it its voice, and reconcile it with God’s help.
Lamentation is a God-given means of giving grief its voice and thereby healing it. Lamentation is an act of faith. It is Jacob wrestling with God, demanding a blessing in return for the pain of a dislocated hip. It is asking the “Why?” question and holding on tightly to God for an answer. You need to say the words, shine the light on it, and seek God’s healing to turn your grief into joy.
Turn your lamentations into joy by weeping with God.
1. What makes you lament?
Lamentation is a sadness you feel all the way to your bones because you have to live without something you love. Let’s test that definition with some common experiences of loss to see if that is the cause of lamentation.
- Death makes you lament because you must live without a loved one.
- Getting fired makes you lament because you must figure out how to live without income.
- Illness makes you lament because you’ve lost your health.
- Aging makes you lament because you can’t remember what you lost or where you put it.
- Being robbed makes you lament because you lost your sense of security and some stuff too.
We could go on listing fire and natural disasters, etc. But the point is, something or someone important to us is lost and we feel the absence in our soul.
In John 16, what did Jesus’ disciples have to lament? The chief reason for their lamentation as they were going to lose Jesus: “You won’t see me anymore” He said in vs. 16-19. Jesus’ statement didn’t make sense to them and He had to explain it to them. Which is a good thing, otherwise we wouldn’t have this passage. They expected God to send His Messiah and they believed Jesus was that Messiah, but they had no prior conception of a Messiah who would die and be raised from the dead.
The first LITTLE WHILE, where Jesus said they would not see Him (16-17, 19), refers to His sacrificial death on the cross. His death would leave them scattered and shattered by grief as death would temporarily separate them. The second LITTLE WHILE refers to the period between His death and resurrection. After Jesus was raised, they saw Him again and their GRIEF SUDDENLY turned to WONDERFUL JOY (20).
In v. 32 Jesus predicted they would lament because they would scatter and leave Jesus alone. We know from the Gospel that at the moment of Jesus’ arrest, all His followers ran away to avoid being arrested too. Peter was the only one to come back and follow Jesus through His various trials, only to deny that he ever knew Jesus. John was the only apostle to leave his place of hiding and go to Golgotha to witness Jesus’ crucifixion.
Verse 33 warns us about the TRIALS and SORROWS typical to this life and about the ones particular to persecution. This would not have surprised any of them, for such was the lot of humanity and more so to Jews under Roman rule.
2. What makes you joyous?
Joy is a sense of well-being that empowers you. Nehemiah 8:10 says “the joy of the LORD is your strength.” What does joy give you strength to do?
- Strength to lament with gusto, then leave it. You can lament for a bit, facing those TRIALS AND SORROWS, or put them off and be sad for life.
- Strength to enjoy life to the uttermost. Joy makes your good days brighter, it deepens your happiness into something profound, even life changing.
- Strength to endure trials, overcome temptation, forgive, be patient, and return good for evil suffered. What joy doesn’t cure, it enables you to cope with it.
Notice the all-important qualifier: it is the JOY OF THE LORD. Only God gives this kind of joy. We receive it by faith and perpetuate it by obeying his will, principally by loving Him and one another. This kind of joy is the product of the love of God in our hearts. The more we love God and others, the more of this life strengthening joy we will possess.
The longer we live in the joy of the LORD, the more that joy captures our hearts and minds and determines our actions and drives our personality. The joy of the LORD makes us more like Jesus. The Joy of the LORD is the emotional component that gives evidence of the Holy Spirit in us. Everyone who has received Jesus has also received the Spirit.
You can tell a lot about yourself by the things you enjoy. We tend to use our free time and our disposable income on things that give us joy. Our expenditures reveal our priorities and the things we enjoy.
If we examine ourselves candidly, we’ll find the evidence tends to either of two kinds of joy-seeking. Worldly joy seeks entertainment, excitement, diversion, possessions and is, morally speaking, anywhere from selfish to evil. The joy of the LORD seeks opportunities to fellowship, be of service, worship, pray, study the word, love and be loved in unselfish to godly acts. Obviously, there are several activities that can fall in either of these categories. The question simply is, do they promote worldly joy in you, or the joy of the LORD, or some mixture of both? Worldly joy will not support you to the extent that godly joy does.
Let’s look to John 16 for example of the things that gave Jesus’ disciples joy.
- In verse 20 Jesus promised paradoxically that “Your grief will turn to wonderful joy.”
- V. 21 = The process of turning lamentation into joy will be like childbirth in the sense that awful pain becomes great joy when the baby arrives. This image of childbirth as an illustration of laments turning into joy is commonly used in the Bible.
- In verse 22 Jesus promised their SORROW will turn to JOY that no one can steal away. This is a WONDERFUL, ABUNDANT JOY that the world did not give, nor can the world take it away from you.
- Verses 23-24, 26 details the ABUNDANT JOY of “Yes” answers to prayer. One of the most important answers to prayer will be God’s answer to the prayer, “How long?” In this simple prayer God’s people are asking for Jesus’ Second Coming to happen soon. We know this particular prayer is in view here because of the innocent-seeming words AT THAT TIME. That phrase is typically used in the Bible to refer to the Day of the Lord and Jesus’ Second Coming. Using Jesus’ name in prayer is like having personal access to God who grants divine favors to His children.
- The love of God the Father for Jesus, His Son, is intense and personal. Jesus promised that God loved His disciples with that same kind of love (v. 27). Our relationship with God is a source of safety and security that transforms all anxiety we have over our lamentations into a JOY so deep it is unlike anything else we’ve experienced.
- According to verses 29-30, understanding Jesus’ teaching and believing that He came from God the Father give us joy. V. 30 is the immediate fulfillment of v. 23, “At that time you won’t need to ask me for anything.” When the Holy Spirit was given on the Day of Pentecost, the minds of Jesus’ followers were empowered and improved. What they’d previously questioned became clear and unmistakable.
- Jesus offers PEACE that empowers us to OVERCOME THE WORLD (v. 33). This is not a PEACE that exists only when life comes easy; that kind of peace is worldly. Instead, this is a divine, God-given PEACE that is appropriated through faith in Christ. Because it comes from God it will overcome mere worldly trials. There is a kind of peace that comes when our questions are answered, problems solved, stress relieved. Jesus’ PEACE is better than that. His PEACE does not depend on favorable circumstances. It exists in the face of adversity and helps us overcome all kinds of TRIALS AND SORROWS. Jesus can offer this greater kind of PEACE because of His victory over sin on the cross, because He has OVERCOME THE WORLD in the empty tomb.
Turn your lamentations into joy by weeping with God.
The experiences in life that are powerful enough to cause us to seek comfort in a bottle need to be relieved by a relationship with the LORD instead. But let me say one thing I’ve learned about grief this year: Grief is a process without end. When someone or something truly important is lost, you will carry that loss with you the remainder of your life.
That fact does not mean you must be full of tears all your days. It means that as you properly manage the process, as you deal faithfully with your feelings, the spaces between tears will lengthen. The pain will, generally speaking, become less sharp. Your tears and fears will be converted, over time, to joys and confident expectations.
Another caution: time does NOT heal all wounds. Time alone is not sufficient to heal in the same way age alone is not sufficient for maturity. Healing and maturity take time, but time isn’t magical; health and maturity happen because you choose to use your time in meaningful, spiritual ways.
Lamentation requires acknowledging two things: God is real and my pain is real. God wants me to trust Him for Him to lead me into true healing.
RESOURCES:
Grant R. Osborne, Cornerstone Biblical Commentary, Vol. 13, The Gospel of John, 2007, pp. 220-239.
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