My prayer is that we would receive God’s comfort, care, and love while we mourn. Praise our Heavenly Father that through Jesus, He offers us eternal life. What more could we ever ask for? What an incredible blessing! At the same time, my prayer is that each one of us would not waste the moment either. Rather, we would do self-inventory to respond wisely even in the midst of our deep suffering, sadness, and sorrow.

Over the past few weeks, an entire handful of friends and past students have died. All of them my age or younger. All of them followers of Jesus. As I have worked through each of these deaths – some I have mentioned before here and here, I have been tracking some thoughts that have been helpful to me. Over the past few days, I have been writing and thinking. Today, I want to share some of these to perhaps help you as well. Many of you readers have been impacted by these same deaths.
We Grieve with Hope
One of the great blessings that we as followers of Jesus Christ enjoy together is our hope. Paul explains:
But I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you sorrow as others who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus.
For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words. (1 Thess 4:13-18).
Oh yes, we grieve; however, we grieve with hope. The world grieves with ignorance. They may hope and believe many things about the afterlife, but at the end of the day, they truly have no real hope. But, not us! We grieve with hope. Our grieving is based upon the Word of God, God’s covenant faithfulness, and trust in God’s love.
Our loved one who has gone to heaven to be with the Lord is more alive than ever. Paul also wrote, “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord” (2 Cor 5:8). Immediately. No purgatory. No delay. Those who have a personal relationship with Jesus immediately go to be with Him in heaven.
What if our loved one inconsistently followed Jesus at best? There’s good news for us there too. We do not go to heaven based upon our faithfulness to Him; we go to heaven based upon God’s faithfulness to us (1 Pet 1:3-5). Consider the Apostle Peter’s words:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and that does not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, who are kept by the power of God through faith for salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. (1 Pet 1:3-5, emphasis mine)
Thankfully, if we have followed Jesus, going to heaven does not depend upon our faithfulness, it depends upon the faithfulness of God.
We are Better in a Funeral Home than at a Party
The Bible teaches that we are better off in a funeral home than at a party. In King Solomon’s wisdom, he wrote:
Better to go to the house of mourningThan to go to the house of feasting,For that is the end of all men….
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In the end, Christ was not crucified because He washed the feet of the marginalized and disenfranchised. He was not crucified because He said, “He Gets Us.” He was crucified because He preached a message that every single man, woman, and child must repent and believe, or they shall perish in Hell forever. That is the message this world despises, and ultimately, why the He Gets Us Super Bowl commercial, and ministry as a whole, falls woefully short. Even more sadly, all of this message is lost on an unbelieving world—not simply because the message wasn’t actually preached, but they also have no concept of the significance of Jesus Christ washing the feet of His disciples. 

By now, the He Gets Us Super Bowl commercial has been a topic of much contention amongst Christians and non-Christians alike online. The commercial itself is simple and artistically done—showcasing several photos of people washing the feet of those whom society might consider those on the “outside.” In the end, the only text offered up is equally as simple, “Jesus didn’t teach hate. He washed feet. He gets us. All of us.”
The intended message is not all that hard to miss for those who understand what Jesus did as He washed His disciple’s feet just before His death. It was an act of selfless servitude, demonstrating the very reason why Jesus Christ came in the first place. His life was one wherein He emptied Himself to serve the sons of men, even Judas, who would later betray the Messiah for a measly sum of 30 pieces of silver. While all authority and power had been granted to Jesus Christ by the Father, He humbled Himself in the form of man and took on the apron of a slave.
It is no wonder why the image of the very Son of God washing the feet of His disciples has remained as such a powerful reminder of Christ’s humility and love. And yet, this same image adopted by the He Gets Us campaign that recently aired during the Super Bowl, for all intents and purposes, has caused no shortage of outcry. What should be a relatively simple message to convey has become a point of controversy—not in the broader public, but amongst those within the church.
Many have been quick to say the controversy in the church is much the same as it was when Jesus upset the religious leaders of His own day. The purported rationale has been that just as Christ upset the status quo in the synagogues, so too does this message in the church today. In fact, you might just find a fairly large contingent of people who would argue that the modern-day church is not much different than the whitewashed tombs of Jesus’s own day, with the Pharisees and Sadducees.
To be sure, there is some warrant for this charge when one considers particular examples of blatant hypocrisy—but that is the ill-defined problem of our day, isn’t it? Much that gets labeled as “hypocrisy” isn’t such at all, but rather, it is the oft-cited reason for why Jesus’s own Words are rejected and labeled, as in the He Gets Us commercial, as “teaching hate.” And that’s the rub. We have not reached a point where the Son of God is taking on human flesh once more to reveal just how short we’ve fallen from understanding His holy Word; we’re at the point in our society where we have two functionally (and ontologically) different gods we worship. One is the true Christ, one is not—and both sides argue over who is getting the details right.
What I would argue is that the same root reason why people fawn over depictions of Christ in popular culture (e.g., The Chosen) is the same issue we find present here. There is a wide-sweeping epidemic of biblical illiteracy, and the people behind ad campaigns like ‘He Gets Us’ intentionally play at this ignorance. This is not a new phenomenon, when we consider how Christians have been portrayed in popular cinema for the past several decades. The popular portrayal is anything but a genuine Christian who actually seeks to live in submission to God’s Word. Rather, they are often portrayed as bigoted, backwoods idiots who can’t string a few coherent sentences together—and they’re massively hypocritical to boot (Picture Angela from the American version of The Office).
Now, again, some of this might be warranted when you look at the masses of American Evangelicalism who have claimed the Christian faith, yet seemingly done nothing to be in submission to Christ. I find it much like the teenager in my high school days who carried around a skateboard, but couldn’t even ollie—the one we colloquially called a “poser.” The problem is not that such “posers” exist; they do in virtually every clique in life. The problem is that they tend to take the predominate focus when it comes to the Christian world, almost as if it is an “easy out” for those who wish to turn their noses up at the Christian faith in general.
The interesting dilemma to me though is that the Jesus portrayed by “the posers” that the broader public despises—is the exact same portrayal of Jesus they wish to laud in the public square. This is the Jesus who is light on sin and judgment, heavy on grace and love—but not a grace and love that actually requires justice—it is a grace and love that requires a tailor-fit God who essentially adopts the same quasi-standards of morality that mankind does (provided He changes with the times, of course). He is not the God who is jealous, just, holy, and requires justice be met—He is the God who “Gets Us,” and He Gets Us in such a way that we never actually come to the point of repentance and faith.
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The point of the indoctrination, though, isn’t only to create more “gender-nonconforming” students. It’s to break down family structures and parental authority. The goal isn’t simply to teach and encourage transgenderism in our schools. It’s to lay claim to the students themselves, over and against their parents and families, for purposes that go far beyond the promotion of gender identity. After all, you can’t very well reshape society according to your utopian vision if something as solid as a family is standing in the way.

Evidence continues to mount that a concerted effort is underway between major hospitals and public school systems to indoctrinate children with transgender ideology and push harmful, sometimes irreversible, medical procedures on minors — sometimes without the knowledge or consent of parents.
The point of the indoctrination, though, isn’t only to create more “gender-nonconforming” students. It’s to break down family structures and parental authority. The goal isn’t simply to teach and encourage transgenderism in our schools. It’s to lay claim to the students themselves, over and against their parents and families, for purposes that go far beyond the promotion of gender identity. After all, you can’t very well reshape society according to your utopian vision if something as solid as a family is standing in the way.

The solution is to break down the family. Most recently, Christopher Rufo reported this week that the largest children’s hospital in Chicago has partnered with local school districts to promote a radical transgender agenda, including sexually explicit materials that push “kink,” “BDSM,” and “trans-friendly” sex toys for children.

In his customary muckraking fashion, Rufo has obtained insider documents from Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago detailing a collaboration between transgender activists at the hospital and public school administrators throughout greater Chicago. The primary training document, a presentation titled “Beyond Binary: Gender in Schools,” encourages teachers and school administrators to promote “gender diversity” in their districts by affirming students who mistakenly believe they are members of the opposite sex, teaching a “non-binary understanding of gender” in classrooms, and aiming to disrupt “entrenched [gender] norms in western society” in hopes of creating a more “gender creative” world.
Don’t laugh, though. As outlandish as this might sound to most people, the targets of all this are impressionable students, many of whom are susceptible to such messages for the simple fact that they are dealing with the turbulent — albeit altogether normal — emotions and angst that accompany adolescence.
It’s worth quoting Rufo at length to get a sense of how lurid this program is. At the end of the “Beyond Binary” presentation, which was circulated to teachers in at least two Chicago school districts…
the hospital recommended a “Binder Exchange Program” to assist teenage girls in binding their breasts, a “kid friendly website for gender affirming gear,” which sells items such as artificial penis “packers” and female-to-male “trans masc pump[s],” and an “LGBTQ friendly sex shop for teens” that sells a range of “dildos,” “vibrators,” “harnesses,” “anal toys,” “trans-friendly toys,” and “kink & BDSM” equipment. The links include graphic descriptions of sadomasochism, bondage, pornography, and transgressive sex.
In addition to these materials on gender theory, Lurie Children’s Hospital has also publicly released a policy guide for school administrators, encouraging districts to adopt a “gender-affirming approach” to the curriculum; provide “gender-affirming children’s books” in school libraries; and allow students to compete in athletic events, use restrooms and locker rooms, and sleep in bunks during overnight school trips in accordance with their “gender identity,” rather than their biological sex. The hospital also encourages school districts to designate special “Gender Support Coordinators” to help facilitate children’s sexual and gender transitions, which, under the recommended “confidentiality” policy, can be kept secret from parents and families.
Rufo rightly identifies part of the dynamic here is the creation of a “school-to-clinic” pipeline. A cynic might say the motive is simply profit, since every transgender patient represents a lifetime of medical interventions and surgeries.
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