Pastor Rick's Daily Hope

Host (Male): Hello and welcome to Pastor Rick's Daily Hope with Rick Warren. We are so glad you're here with us today. We're going to continue our series called The Keys to a Blessed Life. In these messages, Rick walks through Jesus' Sermon on the Mount and shows us how to live a truly hopeful and purpose-filled life. And here's the final part of how God blesses broken hearts.

Rick Warren: Now there's a third thing that God does in blessing our broken hearts, and that is this: God gives us a church family for support. God never meant for you to go through life on your own. And God says, I didn't intend for you to go through grief. You know, the old statement that when you share a joy, it's doubled, and when you share a sorrow, it's halved? When you carry it all yourself, you're carrying a load that God never intended for you to have. When something bad happens to you and you say, I'm not going to tell anybody about this, I'm going to keep it a secret, I'm going to keep it to myself, you have just broken one of the principles of God's word.

God says we're meant to grieve in community. We healing comes in groups. Healing comes in the church, healing comes in community. We're better together. You weren't meant to carry it on your own. Look at this verse, Romans 12:5, 10, and 15, three verses in Romans chapter 12. In Christ, we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. Be devoted to each other like a loving family. Rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn. Now, these are commands. And if you call yourself a follower of Christ, they're commanded for you. In Christ, we form one body. That's the church. The church is the family of God, and it's the body of Christ.

And the Bible says each member belongs to all the others. Now, I'm not going to ask you to do this, but you could turn to the people on either side of you and say, you belong to me. We might have a few marriage proposals, but we belong to each other. We're brothers and sisters in God's family, and we're part of the body of Christ. And then it says we are to be devoted to each other like a loving family. And how are we devoted? We sympathize with each other. When you have a victory, I shouldn't be jealous, I should celebrate your success. And when you have a defeat, I shouldn't gloat over that, I should mourn with those who mourn.

Now, I'm not going to go into this because you've heard me talk about it a thousand times, but you need a small group. If you don't have a small group, you have no safety net when the rogue winds come. I would not be standing before you today if it weren't for my small group. My small group was there in the darkest days of my life. They were there just being the ministry of presence. They didn't have to say anything, they didn't have to give me any advice, they just showed up. Who are you doing that for? Who knows that you would show up in their crisis? And who has that same kind of commitment to you? You need to get in a small group.

There is no reason at all for you to go through the pain on your own. It's just your own pride that will keep you from getting involved in the support. The Bible says God gives us a church family for support. We're to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn. First Thessalonians 5:11 says, comfort each other and give each other strength. Now, let me give you a couple of suggestions because right now, you're in one of two positions. You're either going through pain yourself and you need comfort, or you're not going through pain and you need to comfort others. You either need comfort or you need to be comforted. You need to be comforted or you need to be a comforter. You either need help or you need to help.

Either way, this is a message that you need to be using. If you're not in major pain right now, you need to be thinking, how can I follow what Jesus tells me to do and comfort the people in pain around me? Well, first you've got to be aware. And if you care, you'll be aware. There are people in pain sitting on your row and you don't even know what their pain is. If you care, you'll be aware. Let me give you two suggestions for comforting people when they go through any kind of loss—financial loss, physical loss, health loss, loss of a loved one, anything. Let me just give you two; write these down. Number one: never minimize another's pain. Never minimize others' pain.

Kay was talking the other day, we were in London, and she was speaking and she was saying one of the words you can delete from your vocabulary when you're talking to somebody in pain is the word "at least." And she told me about a lady, a mother who had lost a child through drowning. And a neighbor came over and in a meaningful attempt to comfort said, well, at least you're young enough to have another child. Are you kidding me? I'm sure what that mama said, I'm not wanting another child, I want my child back. I want my child back. Don't tell me, well, at least you've got three other kids. Are you kidding me? Well, at least you've got your—eliminate the phrase "at least" from your vocabulary when talking to somebody in pain.

It doesn't help. It's like you're trying to minimize the pain by pointing out something good. Just never minimize the pain of others. And I would say again, parents, stop trying to teach your kids to stop it. Don't cry now. You know, the typical reaction when somebody's in pain, we try to fix it immediately. Don't be in a hurry to fix anything. You don't need to fix it, God'll fix it in due time. What you need to do is just be there and be aware and care. So never minimize. The other thing is never rush people. Never rush people. Pain and grief takes time. And nobody can figure out how long the grief's going to take for any particular thing in your life but you.

I can't tell you what's the appropriate time to grieve for anything in your life. You're just going to have to figure that one out yourself. And it's different for everybody else. You know, in marriages, the death of a child is often the predictor of a divorce. In fact, marriages that have the death of a child don't have a pretty good rate of staying together. Kay and I knew that statistic. And when Matthew died, we determined that we were going to let this draw us closer to each other rather than divide us. And it was all because of one thing: showing grace to each other and realizing whatever you're feeling right now is okay.

And I don't try to talk Kay out of her feelings and she doesn't try to talk me out of mine and we just enter into each other's pain. A feeling is neither right or wrong, it's just a feeling. Let me say that one again. A feeling is never right or wrong, it's just a feeling. So husbands, quit trying to talk your wife out of feelings. And wives, quit trying to talk your husbands out of feelings. Feeling is neither right nor wrong, it's just a feeling. And so you show grace to each other and you never rush people. Kay wrote a column or a little post in Facebook about how she was starting to feel people kind of rushing her and saying, when are you going to go back to teaching and when are you going to be back on the stage and and kind of like, aren't you over it yet?

And she wrote this little post. Did it hit a nerve? Over 3 million people reposted it. Why? Because that's the way anybody in deep pain feels. They understand. Don't tell me to get over it. You don't get over it, you get through it. You get through it. So God gives us a family, and we're not to minimize and we're not to rush the people in our lives. There's a fourth way that God blesses broken hearts. All right? He gives us a church family, he gives us his own presence, he grieves with us. Number four: God uses grief to help us grow. God uses grief, God uses pain even, to help us grow.

And he does it in three ways. Here are three verses that illustrate three different ways. First, God uses pain to get our attention. C.S. Lewis wrote, God whispers to us in our pleasure but he shouts to us in our pain. Pain is God's megaphone. Pain is saying, hello! We rarely change when we see the light. We change when we feel the heat. Here's what the Bible says, Proverbs 20:30: sometimes it takes a painful experience to make us change our ways. That's in the Today's English Version. Anybody agree with that verse? Yeah. Sometimes it takes a painful experience to make us change our ways. So God uses grief to help us grow by getting our attention.

Second way, he brings good out of bad. One of the most famous verses in the Bible is Romans 8:28. We know, we know, not guess, not hope, we know that in all things, not some, not just the good, in all things, God works. In all things, God works for the good of those who love him. It's an opportunity to grow in character. Every time you go through pain, you can't control the pain you go through. You may have chronic pain. And that pain may be with you for years and years and years. You can't always control that, but you can decide whether it's going to make you bitter or better, whether it's going to be a stepping stone or it's going to be a stumbling block.

God brings good out of bad. And the third thing he does is he prepares us for eternity. Look at this next verse, 2 Corinthians 4:17 and 18. These troubles are getting us ready for an eternal glory. What troubles? The pain you're going through right now. These troubles, that sickness, that sadness, that suffering, that lack, that loss, that pain, that pressure, that problem—these troubles are getting us ready for an eternal glory that will make all our troubles seem like nothing, like nothing. Things that are seen don't last forever, but things that are not seen are eternal. And that's why we keep focused on the things that can't be seen.

You've heard me say before, you're not taking your car to heaven, you're not taking your china to heaven, you're not taking your clothes to heaven, you're not taking your career to heaven, but you are taking your character. You're taking you. And so God's more interested in your character development than in your comfort. Why? Because comfort's going to be on for trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of years in heaven. This is the get ready stage, this is the learning stage, this is the warm-up act, this is the school, it's a pre-school. And God says these troubles are getting us ready for an eternal glory. That's a comfort. You see, you can handle an enormous amount of pain when you can realize there's a good purpose in it, like labor in having a baby.

But when you don't see any purpose in the pain, then it's easy to give up. When the pain is unceasing, when the pain never stops, when the pain keeps going, you need to see God's purpose. And what is God doing? First, is he trying to get my attention? Second, is he trying to bring good out of bad? Third, is he preparing my character for heaven? Is he giving me an opportunity to grow in Christ-likeness? Things that are seen don't last forever, but things that are not seen are eternal. Number five: the fifth way that God comforts us when we mourn is that God gives us the hope of heaven. And this one has been particularly beautiful and meaningful to me this last year—that this life is not all there is.

That this is just the warm-up act and that we're living for so much more. The amount of time you're going to spend on Earth is really quite small. You're only going to get 80, 90, at the most maybe 100 years. That's nothing, nothing. It's going to be over before you realize it. It's nothing compared to millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of years in heaven. And the Bible says we have the hope of heaven. If there were no hope of heaven, I would be in despair because there's just too much bad in the world. There's too many rapes, too many people getting molested, too many children being abused, too many wars, too many people having being tortured, too many people being burned up by chemicals and all kinds of things.

But the fact is the Bible says, 1 Thessalonians 4:13, talking about believers who die, Paul says, we don't want you to be ignorant about believers who've died. We don't want you to grieve like the people who have no hope. Circle "the people who have no hope." There's two kinds of grief: you can grieve with hope or you can grieve without hope. Let me tell you, you want the first one. As a pastor, I have done hundreds and hundreds—I don't know, maybe thousands. I don't know how many funerals that I've done. I don't know how many times I've stood at the bedside of somebody taking their last breath. I have been at the funerals and looked in the faces of people who had no hope when a loved one died, and I've seen the terror on their face and the despair on their face.

You see, the test of your faith, the test of your belief system, the test of your worldview is not how you handle the parties of life. The test of your worldview is how you handle the failures and how you handle the funerals and how you handle the deaths of life. That's the acid test. And the Bible says we have a hope, and so we grieve, but we grieve with hope. When a Christian dies, why do we grieve? I mean, that Christian is going to heaven, they're going where they were made for, they're going where they're going to spend eternity, and they're going where you're going to go too if you know the Lord. So why do we grieve?

We're not grieving them in a funeral. We're grieving us. We miss them. We're not grieving them. My son Matthew for 27 years was tortured by mental illness, and it was agony. And honestly, when he died, I grieved his extremely painful life more than I grieved his extremely painful death. Because I know today he has no fear, he has no pain, he has no depression, he is—every one of his questions has been answered, he has joy, he has the understanding everything he's always wanted. Why was I made like this? Why didn't I get well? All those questions were answered. I'm not grieving the fact that he's in heaven. I grieve the fact that I miss him. I want my son back.

I miss him now. And so when a Christian grieves, we grieve in a very, very different way than the rest of the world. We grieve with hope. Non-believers grieve without any hope, and that's disastrous. It's devastating, it's debilitating, it's despairing. What is our hope? Revelation 21:4 says this: God will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things will have passed away. I am looking forward to that day so much. It's one of the things that allows me to go to places like Africa and see people starving from poverty, and allows me to go to the inner city and see people being beat up and abused and misused, and allows me to see all the pain in the world, which could be debilitating in its depressing nature.

If I didn't know that one day God is going to settle the score, he's going to even the odds, he's going to balance the accounts. And one day in heaven, God's going to wipe away every tear. And there will be no more death, and there will be no more mourning, and there will be no more suffering and no more crying and no more pain, for the old order will have passed away. That is one of the six hopes that blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Finally, there's one more thing, and this is a big one: God uses our pain to help others. There's a purpose in your pain. This is called redemptive pain.

This is the highest and best use of the pain you go through. God does not want you to waste a hurt. God never wastes a hurt, but we often do because we're not willing to use it to help other people. God uses our pain to help others. This is the highest and best use. Who can better help the mother of a special needs child than another mother of a special needs child? Who can better help somebody who's lost a son or daughter in a war than somebody who lost a son or daughter in a war? Who could better help somebody who's lost a limb than somebody who's lost a limb? Who could better help somebody who has gone through the pain of an addiction or a marriage failure or a molestation or any of the other evils in the world than somebody who went through that?

God does not want you to waste your hurt. This is redemptive hurt. He wants you to redirect your focus. Second Corinthians 1:4: God comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others with the same comfort we received from God. Now, listen very closely. Your greatest ministry will come out of your deepest hurt. Your—you might write this down—my greatest ministry will come out of my deepest hurt. Because you can relate. You can say, been there, done that, went through. I had a mother who was abusive. I had a dad who was distant and left the family. I had a failure in this area or that area.

Your greatest ministry will come out of your deepest hurt. You see, we think the world is impressed by how we handle prosperity, but the world is actually impressed by how we handle adversity. We think that it is our success that gives us credibility to be a witness. But God says no, it is our suffering that gives us credibility. You would not believe the open doors that have happened in my life since Matthew died. And when I began to journal about it on social media, people began to come out of the woodwork, and some people you wouldn't believe, and said, I've never told this to anybody else. We think that fame earns respect, but actually it's faithfulness in tough times.

Now, here's the bottom line. I'll say it again. We're in a broken world, and so every day, nothing works perfectly. And that means every day, you need to be either—you either need comfort or you need to comfort others. Right now, you're in one of two categories. Put yourself in one of them. Right now, you either need help because you're in really bad pain, or you need to help others who are in really bad pain. And maybe, just maybe, God wants to do both at the same time. That's called being a wounded healer. If you wait until you're completely healed to help other people, guess what? You're going to wait a long time because you're not going to be fully healed of everything in your life until you get to heaven. If you're going through a tough time right now, the Bible says, comfort one another and give each other strength. That's what the body of Christ, that's what the family's to do. We're supposed to help you. So we want to help you. Don't carry this on your own. Going through a tough time right now, just stand up, and Tommy's going to come and pray.

Guest (Male): Father, thank you for seeing us. Even though oftentimes we feel that you've perhaps forgotten us, Lord, we know through your word that that's not true. You see what breaks our hearts, you see what keeps us up at night when everyone else is sleeping. You see those places in our hearts that are so hurt, where we feel hopeless and we feel helpless. And God, we know in your word through the promise of Isaiah 61 that you said you comfort all who mourn. You provide for those who grieve, and you promise to bestow and grant on each of us a crown of beauty instead of ashes. And you said to us that you would give us joy instead of our mourning.

So today, we stand before you as a family together, with open hearts and hands before you saying, Father, and asking as you are our daddy. Lord, we pray for healing. There are those who are standing that are in physical pain, that are sick. They have diseases whether it be cancer or hepatitis or AIDS or Lyme or even diseases they may not even have answers for. They're living in medical mystery land. They're just in pain. So Lord, you said you are the great physician and we believe that. So we pray for physical healing now. Lord, we ask for wisdom when we do go to the doctor, that you give doctors the wisdom beyond even their own understanding, that you would bring healing in any way you want in our lives.

And we pray for healing for broken hearts and broken relationships, Lord, that you would—you would reconcile relationships, you would reconcile those relationships in our lives with family and with loved ones and with spouses and with our kids and coworkers and whatever it may be. And Father, we pray for courage. Give us the courage of Job when he said, the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, but I will still bless his name. And in those hard places in our lives when we feel like giving up, Lord, help us remember that our hope lies in you and that no matter what happens in our life, we will bless your name. Make us all in our brokenness living trophies of your grace, that others would see that we have not given up on you, but our hope is in you.

Give us the courage to do what is right no matter how we feel, and give us the courage to ask for help if we need it, and even the courage to accept that help. And Father, we pray for strength. And for some of us we ask for the strength just to get out of bed, just to make it another day. The strength that we find in you. And Lord, we don't ask for strength for tomorrow because tomorrow's not promised, but we ask, Lord, just give us what we need moment by moment and day by day. Give us the strength to face our pain, knowing that whatever we're going through, you're going to go with it through us. We're not alone no matter what season we're in. And Lord, we do ask, we ask that whatever season we're currently in that it would be a short season. Father, we do pray that you would redeem our pain and bring purpose out of it. That you would use what's happened in our lives for your glory and for your honor. Lord, and because of that, you would draw people to us, people that we could help, people that would be willing to look at us and see Jesus because we have not given up on you and we are blessing your name. Thank you that this life is brief and that our struggles are only momentary. Thank you for the hope of eternity. Help all of us, whether we're standing or sitting, Lord, to live in light of eternity with passion and drive and the hope of Jesus Christ. Thank you for the blessing and gift of heaven. In Jesus' name, Amen.

Host (Male): What a great message from Pastor Rick today. There's something I always take away from his message. Here's Rick to tell you how you can help support this ministry.

Rick Warren: Jesus told his disciples that they should live their lives according to five specific purposes. He said you've got to love God with all your heart—that's worship—and love your neighbor as yourself—that's ministry. That's called the Great Commandment. And then Jesus said go make disciples—that's evangelism—baptize them into the family of God—that's fellowship, a sign of fellowship—and then he said teach them to obey everything I've taught you. That's discipleship. And we call that the Great Commission. We believe at Daily Hope that a great commitment to the Great Commandment and the Great Commission will produce a great Christian, a great church, a great company, a great community.

You know, I started Daily Hope so I could spread the good news about Jesus, not just across America but all around the world. And we want people to know that God's word is filled with hope and truth and the power that we need to follow him every day is available to every single one. You know as well as I do that the word of God changes lives. It's alive, it's active, and it breathes new life and new love into all of our lives. So wherever you listen to this, whether you listen on the website, whether you listen on a radio station, or whether you listen through a podcast, you're a part of the Daily Hope family. And I need your help. We could not do this without your support. We're 100% listener-funded. Would you continue to pray for this broadcast and would you continue to support us? And write to me, let me hear from you. I absolutely love reading the stories that are sent to me. So write me, pray for me, and support this ministry. And God will bless it and God will bless you, and we'll get to heaven and we'll thank God for all the people are going to be in heaven because you cared.

Host (Male): You know, when you give a gift to Daily Hope, you're helping share the hope of Jesus with people everywhere. And during the month of June, your gift will be doubled by the $50,000 matching grant. Go to PastorRick.com or text the word "hope" to 70309. Again, that's PastorRick.com or just text the word "hope" to 70309. We hope you'll join us next time as we look into God's word for our daily hope. This program is sponsored by Pastor Rick's Daily Hope and your generous financial support.