Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast. As you know, if you’ve been listening for a while, we get heartbreaking emails regularly. And that includes this one, from an anonymous woman: “Pastor John, I’m a new widow, a mother of two young boys in my mid-thirties. My husband passed away suddenly and unexpectedly from what we did not know at the time was bacterial pneumonia, which quickly became septic shock. He also had an underlying heart condition. He died one week before his 34th birthday. He was normal one day and home with the Lord three days later.

“My question relates to the issue of blame and God’s timing in his death. We had thought his ailments were a flu bug or COVID and didn’t realize the severity of what was truly going on. We had responded by following telephone guidance from a Christian homeopathic provider who had also assumed COVID, someone we trusted but perhaps should not have. As I grieve, I can’t seem to stop blaming myself. I desperately want reassurance to know that I didn’t hurt my husband, let him down, or by our actions shorten his life span. I tried to care for him and protect him as best as I could, based on the knowledge I had at the time. We didn’t know we were wrong. Once we were in the ER and discovered he was facing septic shock, I prayed fervently for the Lord to rescue and heal him.

“I guess I’m left wondering if I should continue to feel responsible. I need help to trust God, if he was responsible, and if so, that he is still good despite taking my soul mate and my best friend home at such a young age, and difficult-to-understand time. I would greatly appreciate any help you can offer.”

The reference to COVID makes me realize how recent and raw this loss is. This didn’t happen five years ago. So I want to be so careful. I think the fact that she is reaching out to us in this fairly public way is a good sign that she hasn’t despaired of discovering new things in God’s word that might ease the pain. I think she’s right in that, that there are new things I’m sure she hasn’t yet seen that God wants her to see for her own help and comfort and hope. I think there will be new, fresh things, in fact, for her to see for the next fifty years.

She will see things in God’s word fifty years from now that will shed light on this heart-wrenching loss in such a way, even at that distance, to make the love of Christ and the memory of her husband even more precious. I am seeing things at age 76 that are shedding light on sorrows that I experienced 60 years ago. I still am getting new light on the meaning of those years. So, I expect that for her.

Another Question

I think the way I would like to come at this is to raise this question, and it may sound surprising: What would you do, how would you think, if you knew that it was your fault that your husband died? Now, I’m not suggesting that it was at all. Clearly, it was not your fault. But I’m asking you to make an experiment in your mind.

What if you had failed to put the emergency brake on the car and it had rolled over him and killed him while he was working on it? What if you were helping him clean one of his hunting guns and it accidentally went off and killed him? What if you fell asleep at the wheel and crashed and only he died in the wreck? What if you mixed up one of his medications?

Or maybe, instead, just ask how would you counsel somebody in that situation. Because there are thousands of people in that very situation. They don’t just wonder if they could have done more to save their loved one. They know they caused the death, accidentally.

Now, I suppose I could join the chorus of everyone around you and say what is obvious — namely, you did all you could. Nobody is doubting your love and your care for your husband. Everybody knows you are not responsible for his death, and I do join that chorus. But I don’t think you wrote to us just for me to say the obvious that everybody else is saying: “It’s not your fault.”

Mercy for the Guilty

So what I want to say is that, if the Bible has an answer for how you would press on in life with freedom and hope and usefulness, and even eventually joy, even if you had caused his death, then how much more can you be assured that God will help you press on in life with freedom and hope and usefulness, and eventually joy, when you did not cause the death and were helpless to stop it?

Most of the time, we turn to Genesis 50:20 to remind ourselves that all the bad things that happened to Joseph turned out for good by God’s design. Remember, he said, “As for you” — you brothers, you rascal brothers who caused all this trouble — “you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.” So we usually focus on Joseph and all the bad things that happened to him. But very rarely do we ponder what that verse means for Joseph’s brothers, who really were guilty of multiple sins that caused Joseph’s misery.

Here’s what Joseph says in the next verse to those brothers: “‘So do not fear; I will provide for you and your little ones.’ Thus he comforted them and spoke kindly to them” (Genesis 50:21). Wow. This does not mean they are not guilty. They are guilty. But it does mean that God has a future and a purpose for them, even though they were guilty. They were the guilty ones, and they caused all that misery for seventeen years of Joseph’s life. Through one of them, amazingly — Judah — God would even bring a Savior into the world.

“There is a future and a hope. No suffering of God’s loved ones is in vain.”

Now, Paul handled his own guilt as a murderer the same way. He saw that God had a merciful purpose in it for other guilty people. He said in 1 Timothy 1:16, “I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost [of sinners], Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life.” In other words, somehow Paul was able to transpose the horrible-sounding guilt of persecution and killing at his own hands into the beautiful music of mercy through him to other guilty sinners to whom God would show amazing patience.

Mercy for the Innocent

Then change the focus just slightly from situations where someone really was guilty, but God made a future for them, to the man born blind in John 9. Now here, the apostles assume that someone must have sinned. They just must have sinned for this calamity to come upon this blind man — like you perhaps from time to time are tempted to think, “Did we do something wrong? Can there be a catastrophic loss like this without someone having done something sinful?”

So they asked Jesus, “‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him’” (John 9:2–3). Now that is an amazing answer. And surely it applies to your situation. “Who sinned? Who was neglectful? Who put their trust in the wrong place? Who reacted too slowly? Who failed to see the symptoms? Who’s guilty here? Where’s the sin? There’s got to be sin here.”

To which Jesus answers, “It was not that you or your homeopathic advisor or your doctors or your husband sinned or were neglectful or put your trust in the wrong place or reacted too slowly or failed to see the symptoms. Rather, it was that the works of God might be displayed in him.” To which you ask, “What works?” Well, for starters, your persevering faith in the reality and power and wisdom and goodness of God. That is a miraculous work of God.

Ten Thousand Ripples

But it might be helpful for you to think on this: When your husband died, God set in motion ten thousand effects that you can’t see. Some of them will become manifest in a year or two, and some of them in fifty years. Your husband’s death did not take God off guard, nor was it meaningless or absurd or without profound purpose — a holy purpose, a sacred, precious purpose. “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints” (Psalm 116:15). “Your eyes saw my [husband’s] unformed substance [while he was being knit together in his mother’s womb]; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for [him], when as yet there was none of them” (Psalm 139:16).

“When your husband died, God set in motion ten thousand effects that you can’t see.”

His days were written down with divine wisdom, and the ten thousand ripple effects that flow out from his life and his death will not be in vain. Some of them you will know in this life. Most of them you won’t. You are being tested, but God has promised not to test you beyond your strength. “God is faithful, and he will not let you be [tested] beyond your ability, but with the [test] he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it” (1 Corinthians 10:13).

Christ’s Own Peace

Jesus promised his disciples that they would have trouble in the world, and he also promised peace in the midst of it. “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

So that’s what I want to leave you with — the promise of peace, Christ’s own peace. “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid” (John 14:27). There is a future and a hope. No suffering of God’s loved ones is in vain.

Audio Transcript

Good Monday morning. You may remember that last year Pastor John and I recorded five podcast episodes in Nashville, at the Sing! Global 2022 Getty Music Conference. We recorded live before a couple thousand of you who were there. A lot of church leaders and worship leaders and musicians were in the house. It was a great experience. And they were very engaged, as you’ll hear. Today we feature one of those recordings, on getting the Sunday-morning worship vibe right.

Let’s get more specific into musical worship and how you begin a Sunday morning gathering. Let’s talk about the call to worship for a moment. Steven is a listener to the podcast in Indiana. He writes in with a question about the call to worship. “Hello, Pastor John, and thank you for Ask Pastor John. It has helped me think through a lot of pastoral issues over the years. I don’t exactly remember where I heard it, but I remember you saying that Paul’s claim that Christians are ‘sorrowful, yet always rejoicing’ (2 Corinthians 6:10) — that dual claim informed how you framed your welcome and call to worship in the opening moments of the Sunday morning gathering. You believed it was your calling to set the tenor of the corporate gathering in such a way that whether people were coming from a glorious wedding feast last night, or whether they just arrived from the hospital with a dying spouse in the ICU, that this moment of worship together should feel relevant to both groups. Can you expand on how your call to worship did this on Sunday morning?”

Whether my call to worship did it, some others will have to judge, but that certainly was my aspiration. It starts like this. The leader, let’s just say the pastor, who’s going to welcome people into this event right now called corporate worship — at that moment, he’s setting the tone for what he thinks should take place here.

Weight of Glory

He ought to be profoundly aware that to be a human being, a consciousness in a universe created by, governed by, upheld by, guided by a person — God, three in one — is an awesome thing. To be a person is an awesome thing. To be a human being is a staggering reality.

So you start there. You say, “I’m alive. I exist in that kind of personal universe, created in the image of the one who made and upheld everything.” You just let it sink in. You exist, pastor! This is awesome! Then add to that the fact that God exists, Christ exists, the Holy Spirit exists. The incarnation — unspeakable — happened. The Son of God lived. He died. God died for sinners. He rose again. He reigns in heaven today. The Holy Spirit inhabits his people. Faith connects us with God. There’s a hell to which people are going. There’s a heaven, an eternal joy to which we’re going.

These are staggeringly glorious realities — all of them beyond imagination, beyond speaking. He should be utterly overwhelmed with the weight of glory. That’s where you start.

Another World of Joy

And if you start there, you don’t welcome people with slapstick. You don’t. I mean, we just get an hour a week, basically, and we’re dealing with the greatest and most glorious and weighty things in the world. People have been saturated with television, saturated with movies, saturated with social media all week long. I find it incomprehensible that pastors would think, “Well, what we need to do is sound more like that entertainment.” That’s just the opposite of the way I think. I’m desperately pleading to God for words and a demeanor that would communicate another world of joy than that.

“I’m desperately pleading to God for words and a demeanor that would communicate another world of joy.”

And I have the suspicion that most people today younger than me — younger than 76 — have grown up mainly in a world of entertainment, and they are shot through with the whole world of this world. And happiness and joy and gladness and pleasure and well-being are all in those categories, so that if I try to present an alternative to that, it will only sound like morose, dismal, glum, boring.

They have no categories for an alternative. If you say, “Not that — not that chipper, superficial, chatty, slapstick, casual, talk-show-host demeanor,” then the only thing they can think of is dull. That’s tragic — as if there were no such thing as 2 Corinthians 6:10: “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.” So that’s one way to come at it — namely, it is a mysterious and glorious thing to be a human being. And the realities of the Bible are the greatest realities in the world. And the emotions that correspond to them are infinite in joy, infinite in horror as we contemplate hell, and they’re not trivial.

This Morning’s Tragedies

The other way I came at it was this: I tried to keep my finger on the pulse of the tragedies of the world. So, my people have heard this week — and if they haven’t, they’re watching the wrong newscast — that Pakistan today is one-third underwater, some of it ten feet deep. A thousand people have been killed, three million are displaced, and it is desperate. One-third of America would be the east coast to the Mississippi, underwater.

This is what I’d be saying to my people. I’d be saying, “Folks, as we gather, we know that this has happened.” And I would just say, “That’s the world, folks. That’s this morning’s world.” And if you don’t have a theology that can turn that into serious joy, you don’t have the right theology. Because if knowing about Pakistan can only ruin your day, all your days will be ruined. There’s always a Pakistan. It’s just one of a dozen horrors that are going on right now. So that’s a piece.

Pulse of the Room

Then lastly, I’ll just say, I try to keep my finger on the pulse of this people right now in this room and what they’re dealing with. For example, I can remember this one. Our Fighter Verse was Psalm 34:20, “He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken.” We always recited our Fighter Verse. I tried to weave it into our welcome.

“The realities of the Bible are the greatest realities in the world.”

Well, there’s a boy sitting in the third row with a cast on his arm. He’s probably 9 years old. And I’m saying, coming out of my mouth from the word of God, “He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken.” What are you going to do about that — ignore it? Now, I hadn’t seen him until I got down there. I didn’t have this plan, but I spotted that cast. And how easy it would have been to joke. I don’t know how you would turn it into a joke with a psalm, but somebody would.

And I walked back to him. I said, “Whoa.” I think I knew his name. I can’t remember right now. “What happened?” This is in the welcome to worship. And then I said — let’s call him Timmy — “Timmy, you know what I think the psalm means?” You’ve got to decide for yourself what that psalm means, because Psalm 91 and Psalm 34, they say things like that.

I said, “I think that means he will never let your bone be broken unless he’s got something amazing planned that he wants to do through that broken bone. So watch out for it.” Something like that. Now that was serious. It was light in the sense that he’s a 9-year-old, so I’m not going to sound real heavy. But it was a powerful moment for me and for our church.

So, a human being is big. God is big. The world is horrible. Pain is in your church. How can you be chipper? How can you create silliness as the modus operandi of welcome to worship?

If you choose to resist evil and you choose it firmly, then ways of carrying out that resistance will open up around you.

In the 1979 book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, Philip Hallie writes, “During the four years of the German occupation of France, the village of Le Chambon, with a population of about three thousand impoverished people, saved the lives of about five thousand [Jewish] refugees (most of them children)” (xiii).

“This village, as a whole community, worked to save the innocent.”

Hallie’s book is more than a historical retelling of a rescue effort. I would describe it as an ethical forensic analysis, looking for the root causes that explain why this village, as a whole community, worked to save the innocent. What amazes me most is how three thousand people together agreed to give themselves to the rescue.

Rescue the Perishing

It’s inspiring, to be sure, to read of individuals who answered the call to “rescue those who are being taken away to death” (Proverbs 24:11). German Christian Fritz Graebe, for example, delivered hundreds of Jews to safety during the same time period. He came to be known as “the Moses of Rovno.” The work broke him physically, depleted his resources, and forced him to cut himself off from his family lest they be endangered by his actions. He said it was the Golden Rule that guided him. Graebe’s life testifies to the truth of Isaiah 32:8: “He who is noble plans noble things, and on noble things he stands.”

It’s a further wonder to me, beyond the heroics of individuals, how families risked their lives during this time. Exposure multiplies as the number of people involved increases — and the blow falls not just on any group, but on their family.

My admiration for Casper (Papa) Ten Boom and his family starts here. Proverbs 24:10 says, “If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small.” The day of adversity in view in this passage is not the day you lose your job, or even the day you find out your loved one has cancer, painful as those experiences are. No, the day of adversity is when you witness the intentional killing of innocent human beings. On that day, if you shrink back in fearful self-preservation, your faith is weak and God-belittling. The opposite is expected. “Rescue those who are being taken away to death” (Proverbs 24:11).

Casper was in his eighties when the Germans seized the Netherlands. His daughter Betsy was exceedingly frail her whole life. Corrie, the youngest, was in her fifties and was a watchmaker. Yet they ran to the point of the spear and rescued over five hundred Jews from death before being betrayed and imprisoned. Only Corrie survived.

Wonder of Le Chambon

The stories of individuals and families risking their lives are truly remarkable. How much more wondrous, then, that a whole village — with its spectrum of personalities and beliefs and its wide range of maturity, spiritual and otherwise — should agree to risk their lives and coordinate their efforts to rescue five thousand Jewish refugees.

Le Chambon’s residents were descendants of Huguenots (French Protestants of the Reformed tradition). “During hundreds of years of persecution, her pastors and her people were arrested by the dragoons of the king and then hanged or burned either in Le Chambon itself or in Montpellier to the south” (25). When the Jews were marked for slaughter, the village, led by the biblically reflective pastor André Trocmé and his pragmatic, action-oriented wife, Magda, held a proud identity and template for resistance.

I came across Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed around 1987. I was a pastor of a small inner-city church in Boston. Five years later, I was leading a citywide effort to organize churches in setting up the first of six ultrasound-equipped medical clinics dedicated to rescuing the innocent, one mother and baby at a time. My wife, Kristen, and several other women provided the original workforce. They met with women and couples in a pregnancy-related crisis and labored to help each one discover God’s provision as a parent or through adoption.

“Rescuing the innocent is not new; it’s just our turn.”

By 2002, I was writing a brief book for my fellow pastors on leading well in this sensitive but preeminent moral crisis. I wanted to examine from Scripture how defending the innocent is an outworking of the gospel itself. I also wanted to provide historical examples to show that rescuing the innocent is not new; it’s just our turn. After I went back to the midwives in Egypt and gathered examples through the ages, I suddenly remembered Le Chambon.

I pulled Hallie’s book from my shelf and was stunned. It was full of scribbled side comments and observations on André Trocmé. His motives, methods, setbacks, and sufferings were heavily underlined. I read several invocations from my past self: “Do this to respond to the SOIB!” (shorthand for “shedding of innocent blood”). Though I had forgotten the source, here were the prompts that explained my own efforts to rescue the perishing. Thirty-five years later, they still do.

Move Toward Rescue

Hallie summarizes a theme in Trocmé’s sermons like this: “If you choose to resist evil and you choose it firmly, then ways of carrying out that resistance will open up around you” (92). Was this not the case with the Samaritan? He drew near to an innocent man about to die, and then figured out how to save him. Fritz Graebe did not look for a book on how to rescue the innocent from slaughter. He resolved to do for others what he would want others to do for him if he was marked for death. He figured it out from there.

Nor did Corrie Ten Boom take a class in crisis-intervention strategies. She and her family felt compelled by the law of love to resist a preeminent injustice whatever the cost. Once resolved, opportunities presented themselves. Similarly, villagers in Le Chambon were mostly poor shopkeepers and farmers. Yet their resolve catalyzed an organizational effort worthy of scholarly analysis.

In God’s kindness, he has given me my own story of moving toward rescue. In 2006, after discovering that Miami had over thirty abortion businesses, almost all of which targeted minority neighborhoods, I felt burdened to go to Miami. I did not know a single person in that city. I sat in a local Panera, mapping out the plague by neighborhoods, and prayed, “Lord, I am here. Now what?” Soon after, a friend from Boston called me. He said, “Call my friend, Pastor Al Pino, in Miami Springs.” A year later, we stood together as we dedicated Heartbeat of Miami, a minority-led, ultrasound-equipped, church-supported pregnancy help clinic. It later expanded into four clinics, and since then, they’ve rescued over 55,000 mothers and babies from abortion.

In 2010, God brought me to China, where abortion, infanticide, and gendercide (the killing of baby girls mostly) is especially concentrated. The infamous one-child policy was in full force. I was able to meet with 75 house church pastors in the unregistered (underground) church in Beijing and present them with the four questions that have proved most helpful to me in “answering the crisis of abortion with the gospel of life.”

Now, after 29 trips to China, I can testify that the Christian leaders there used those four questions to train up an army of good Samaritans (over three million to date) committed to treasuring human life, rejecting abortion, experiencing God’s forgiveness, and rescuing the innocent, one mother and baby at a time.

God Meets Us to Save

We often experience those “it just so happened” moments, when our obedience meets God’s providence. Trocmé was saying, “Count on this happening!”

Let me offer a final example of the wisdom of his advice. Last September, in Bogota, Colombia, I handed out fetal models to 160 Christian leaders who were determined to lead well in resisting abortion.

After lunch, one pastor said that on his way to the restaurant, he met a woman who was clearly pregnant and in distress. He learned that her father was an acquaintance of his and was coercing his daughter into abortion by kicking her out of his home. He went to see her father straightaway and handed him the fetal model just received. The father choked up at the sight. The two then pledged to find God’s provision for his daughter and grandchild. And they did. Baby Violet was born December 15, 2021.

“If you choose to resist evil and you choose it firmly, then ways of carrying out that resistance will open up around you.”