Sermon Tone Analysis
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Introduction
This week marked a movie milestone.
How many of you remember the movie The Princess Bride?
I imagine that many of you, if I asked, could probably quote this movie line-by-line.
It is inconceivable, but that movie turned 30 years old this week.
For those who may not be familiar with it, and I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it, the story follows a beautiful young princess and a handsome farm boy who fall in love but are separated before they can marry.
The rest of the movie chronicles the often comical situations that bring the two back together.
So, why do I bring that up?
There is one moment where the young woman, Buttercup, thinks her love has been killed by a man known as the Dread Pirate Roberts.
As she confronts him and he seems to make light of her suffering, she yells out to him, “You mock my pain!”
His quick reply is, “Life is pain, highness.
Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
I think, this morning, that you and I would likely agree with that statement.
Both in our individual lives and in the world around us, we are confronted daily with different levels of pain.
As we see it all, we may even find ourselves discouraged and ready to give up hope.
However, the Bible gives us a powerful picture of a man who dealt with pain most of us cannot imagine.
Turn in your Bible to , where we are going to meet a prophet named Jeremiah.
As we watch him wrestle with the pain he was facing, we will draw out three lessons to help us and others deal with pain.
This morning, my prayer is that this message will be extremely practical for you.
I don’t know what you’re facing, but I do know that God brought you here for a reason.
I want you to leave here with hope, not some kind of dreamed up hope that you will actually be strong enough to overcome it, but true, unshakeable, genuine, biblical hope.
Let’s set the stage for what is going on.
The nation of Israel is God’s special people.
He placed his temple in the middle of the land he gave them, he gave them his law, and he promised all the nations of the earth would be blessed by them.
However, as time went on, the people turned farther and farther from the God who set them apart.
God sent prophet after prophet to warn them that if they didn’t turn, he would send devastating judgment on them.
Jeremiah, who wrote both this book and the one before it with his name on it, was one of the last of those prophets.
For years, he warned the people, and they refused to listen.
Finally, God sent destruction to the city of Jerusalem, and it was horrific:
Devastated and broken, Jeremiah wrote a series of poems about this destruction.
These poems make up the book of Lamentations.
There are five chapters, and most of them deal with the city and its destruction.
However, right in the middle, it seems that Jeremiah turns the focus on himself.
Here was a guy who did pretty much everything right.
He told the people what God told him, he faithfully obeyed, and as a reward, he gets to watch those he knows and loves get horribly, brutally murdered.
That doesn’t sound fair, does it?
Let’s look at to see how Jeremiah handled his pain.
As we do, I want you to take notes so you can better handle your own hurts and help others walk through theirs.
We are going to read this as we go along, so let’s look at verses 1-18.
lamentai
The first step in dealing with pain is...
1) Acknowledge the pain.
Jeremiah doesn’t hold back at all in how he describes what he has endured.
Even though this is poetry, he is still open and honest about what he feels.
He feels that God has turned against him, that God is causing him incredible pain, and that there is no hope or future for him.
Do you ever feel like that?
Do you ever feel like everything is against you?
In those moments, how willing are you to be honest with God about how you feel?
Many of us have a hard time truly telling God what we are thinking or feeling.
Do you think God doesn’t know?
Do you think that God hasn’t seen you suffering?
God knows the intimate details of your every thought:
Do you think God doesn’t know you’re upset or hurting?
Then why won’t you talk to him about it?
Jeremiah did!
Maybe you aren’t willing to talk about your pain because you feel like it isn’t bad enough.
We express that by saying, “Well, at least I’m not going through...”
You may have already done that with this passage this morning!
Sure, we’re having a tough time as a family, but it’s not like I’m Jeremiah here.
Let’s use a physical example that is fresh in our life.
Many of you know that our daughter Emma was climbing on something she shouldn’t have been, fell off, and broke her arm.
When it happened, there was a third-year medical student there who said, “Something is wrong with it; you need to take her to the hospital.”
Can you imagine if I had looked at Emma and said, “Well, honey, it’s not like it’s cancer, and you probably won’t die from it, so just forget about it.
Look at what this person is going through…doesn’t that make you feel better?”
She had a broken arm!
She needed help, and it would have been wrong for us to dismiss her pain because it wasn’t as bad as someone else’s.
Could the same principle apply to our emotional and spiritual pain?
I’m not saying that you need to make a mountain out of a molehill; I am saying, though, that you need to acknowledge that you have moles!
Be open and honest with God about what your frustrations are, even if they aren’t “as bad” as what someone else is facing.
You may need to talk to God about whatever you are feeling and figure out that he loves you in spite of your frustration.
There is a principle I learned from Pastor JD Greear, which is that in Christ, there is nothing you have ever done that causes God to love you less, and there is nothing you can do that causes him to love you more!
He loves you unconditionally, so be honest with him about what you feel.
Yes, you may be reading the situation wrong, but you may not be able to figure that out until you come to him and lay it as his feet.
Never forget that God knows what it is to hurt:
God is big enough to handle your pain, but don’t stop with this step.
If you stop here, it will make you miserable forever.
We can properly deal with pain when we push on to the second step:
2) Remember the truth.
The entire tone of the passage changes in verse 19.
Read with me verses 19-33.
After giving some space for his pain, Jeremiah refocuses on what is true.
Remember: truth isn’t dependent on how you feel.
If I say that I feel like this music stand is green, it doesn’t change the fact that it is black.
No matter how genuinely I believe it is green, it is still black.
In the same way, there are truths that don’t change at all, regardless of how you feel.
The first truth Jeremiah draws on is that:
A. God knows.
Look back at verses 19-20.
Jeremiah calls on God to remember the suffering he has gone through.
They have led him into a deep depression, but they have not escaped the sight of God.
Listen to me clearly this morning: God knows exactly what you are going through.
He sees you, and he knows.
We talked about this on Tuesday in our small group here at church.
In Exodus, God’s people were enslaved for a really long time before it seemed like God was ready to intervene.
They were crying out because of their pain, and here’s how the text summarized it:
Just like God knew what they were going through and God knew what Jeremiah was going through, God knows what you are facing.
In the New Testament, we have the promise that God knows when even a tiny sparrow falls out of the sky, so of course he knows what is going on with you!
That plays out in the second truth Jeremiah held on to:
B) God hasn’t changed.
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