![]() ![]() Thanks for posting and sharing this your wonderful seminal sermon here. And I know if that if I keep believing and trusting in Jesus, when I die He will love me like that too, and take me to Heaven where we will all be happy forever." Let's pray that everyone embraces Jenny's plan and keeps believing and trusting in Jesus. ![]() Jenny, wanting to have the last word and speaking on behalf of her classmates, had no more questions, only this comment: "What Jesus did for Lazarus was really cool, and it showed how much He loved him. The deeper meaning of what Jesus said is that death has no power over us for those who believe that He is the resurrection and the life. Bradford's class that there was more in those words than meets the eye. Most people are familiar with the story of Lazarus, yet only a few can recall what Jesus told the guards at the tomb after Lazarus came forward - "Unwrap him and let him go free," He said. Having listened to Jenny and her questions, I set aside the topic I had originally intended to speak about, and shared more about Jesus and Lazarus and what happened after "Jesus wept." We talked about the soldiers rolling back the stone to the tomb and Jesus then raising Lazarus from the dead and what that meant for all of us today. When my grandfather died last year, everybody in my family cried, and me too." "Jenny, I can't know for certain," I said, "but I would think that when his best friend Lazarus died, and he went to visit Martha and Mary, then that may have been his saddest time." As soon as I said that, another student raised his hand and shared, "That's probably right. With a squint in her eye and furrow in her brow, I could tell that Jenny wasn't sure if I had just pulled the number three out of the sky to appease her and then get on with the class, so she had a follow-up query: "Chaplain Tom, if Jesus cried three times and it's in the Bible, which time do you think made him the saddest?" It was obvious that Jenny had the affirmation and attention of her peers as their eyes drifted back and forth between the two of us during the exchange. I said,"Jenny.that's a great question.and most Bible scholars would say that scripture reveals three times when Jesus cried." Before I had an opportunity to share with them a little bit about what a hospice chaplain does, one of the students, Jenny, raised her hand and asked, "Chaplain Tom, do you know how many times the Bible says that Jesus cried?" I had a feeling that Jenny already knew the answer to the question before she asked it, and that she was just checking out the accuracy of my biblical knowledge. There were about fifteen boys and girls, bibles open and ready to go. Bradford's 4th grade Bible Study class as a guest speaker was a special privilege. It is salvation for the whole man and for every man and the sorrowing heart of humanity has never seen more clearly the divinity of the Son of Man than when it has seen His glory shining through His human tears.Being invited to Mrs. A "God in tears" has provoked the smile of the stoic and the scorn of the unbeliever but Christianity is not a gospel of self-sufficiency, and its message is not merely to the human intellect. John's Gospel is "The Word was made flesh," and He is for us the Resurrection and the Life, because He has been manifested to us, not as an abstraction which the intellect only could receive, but as a person, living a human life, and knowing its sorrows, whom the heart can grasp and love. Men have wondered to find in the Gospel which opens with the express declaration of the divinity of our Lord, and at a moment when that divinity was about to receive its fullest manifestation, these words, which point them still to human weakness. ![]() He is conscious of the power which He is about to exercise, and that the first result will be the glory of God ( John 11:4) but He is conscious also of the suffering hearts near Him, and the sympathy with human sorrow is no less part of His nature than the union with divine strength. They are on the way to the sepulchre, near to which they have now arrived. The present word means not the cry of lamentation nor the wail of excessive grief, but the calm shedding of tears. Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(35) Jesus wept.-The word is different from that which is used to express weeping in John 11:33 but this latter is used of our Lord in Luke 19:41. ![]()
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