When Someone You Love Forsakes You
Life’s disappointments,
its griefs, its unanswerable questions sometimes cut deep into the human heart,
don’t they? There’s not an adult on this planet who has not learned from
personal experience just how deeply any number of life’s circumstances can tear
at our souls. But perhaps the deepest cut, the most grievous of them all comes when
a loved one turns his or her back on you. Who rejects you. Who forsakes you. And
it doesn’t matter what you do or say, nothing changes the person’s mind.
And oh! At times such
as these, when the soul weeps because of grief, the testimonies of millions of
Christians throughout the ages demonstrate again and again – there IS balm, there
IS comfort, the IS strength that can be given us by the Holy Spirit through
God’s word.
The world wants us to
think there is no comfort for us from God. Or hope. Or strength. And that is
precisely why I want us to look closely this afternoon at God’s word – which
assures us of that balm and hope and strength and encouragement even when
someone we love forsakes us.
And just a word of
caution here at the outset of my message: It’s easy for us who have been abandoned
by someone we love – it’s often easy to blame ourselves for the abandonment.
Satan is good at twisting our thoughts into assuming the blame for the sins of
another. Don’t let him saddle you with that lie.
The title of today’s
message is: When Someone You Love Forsakes You, and the first thing I want to
remind us about is this: God knows from personal experience all about
rejection – an ‘over the top’ response to something God has done, or not done,
that gives a person the excuse to turn and walk away.
That’s important to
remember that God knows about rejection because remembering will do for
us at least two things: 1) It can comfort us to know God grieves with us. And
2) We can learn from God’s example how we can deal with rejection.
First, it
can be a comfort to know God knows from His own personal experience the pain of
rejection: Ezekiel 6:9 (God speaking to
Israel) Then those of you who escape will remember Me among the nations to
which they will be carried captive, how I have been hurt by their adulterous
hearts which turned away from Me, and by their eyes which played the harlot
after their idols . . . .
And then there is this
sad episode in 1 Samuel, after Israel clamored for a king to rule over them instead
of their God-appointed judge. We pick up the story in 1 Samuel 8:7 “The Lord said to Samuel,
“Listen to the voice of the people in regard to all that they say to you, for
they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me from being king over
them. 8 Like all the
deeds which they have done since the day that I brought them up from Egypt even
to this day—in that they have forsaken Me and served other gods. . .
Our Father in heaven understands
rejection – as does God in the Flesh, Emmanuel – ‘God-With-Us,’ whom we know as
Jesus the Messiah. There is a reason the prophet Isaiah called Him: “ . . . despised
and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; And like one
from whom men hide their face. He was
despised, and we did not esteem [value] Him.
(Isaiah 53)
Yes, we can be
comforted to know God really does understand our grief, and secondly, we can
better follow His example as we cope with the grief caused by being forsaken by
someone we love.
Know this also: It is okay
to cry. Jesus cried over His beloved
sheep in Jerusalem who’d rejected Him: Luke 19:41ff 41 When He
approached Jerusalem, He saw
the city and wept over it, 42 saying, “If you had
known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace! But now they have
been hidden from your eyes. 43 For
the days will come upon you when your enemies will throw up a barricade against
you, and surround you and hem you in on every side, 44 and
they will level you to the ground and your children within you, and they will
not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not recognize the time
of your visitation.”
The Lord knew what
would happen to those who’d forsaken Him – He knew that within a few decades the
Roman army would ravage their way across Jerusalem.
Yes, it is okay to weep,
not only for your own loss, but because you know their rejection of you will likely
come back around and devour them sometime later in their life.
St. Paul talks about
that spiritual law in his letter to the church at Galatia: Galatians 5:14ff 14 For the whole Law is fulfilled in one
word, in the statement, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 15 But
if you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one
another.
“Sin,” it’s been wisely
stated, “will take you where you do not want to go, keep you longer than you
want to stay, and cost more than you want to pay.”
Yes, it is good to
weep, BUT never forget this: You don’t weep alone. Jesus catches every tear in
His bottle. As the psalmist David wrote of God in Psalm 56:8 You keep track of all my sorrows. You have
collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded
each one in your book.
When David refers to tear bottles, he draws our attention to an
common practice in both ancient and modern Middle Eastern and Egyptian societies.
Mourners catch their tears in small vials and place them at gravesides or some
other place of great meaning to illustrate their love for the one who is gone. When
David said of God, “You
keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle.
You have recorded each one in your book”, David
reminds himself, and he reminds us in 2021 America, that God does know of
our pain. He always feels and empathizes with our sorrows.
2. Yes, it is good to
cry when a loved one forsakes us. But what else can we do? We can continue
to love them. With God’s help, continue to love them, even if we must love them
from afar.
God knows about loving
from afar. Here is what He tells Israel through the prophet Jeremiah 31:3 “The Lord appeared to him [to Israel] from far away. I have loved you with an
everlasting love; therefore I have continued my
faithfulness to you. (Jeremiah 31:3 NRSV).
Did you catch that? The forsaken lover – God, in this text – broken
by Israel’s abandonment, continued to love them, even from a distance. That’s part
of the message of the Prodigal Son.
We’ve talked about the Prodigal many times – and I return to it
for a moment to make an important point. The Lord Jesus doesn’t give us much
detail about the Father’s anguish over his son’s demand. But I think we can
extrapolate from our own life’s experiences and from the rest of this story how
the father grieved over his son’s decision. The father, knowing he could do
nothing to change the boy’s mind, gave
him his share of the inheritance – and let him go.
But did the father ever stop loving him? Of course not. The father
always loved his son – although now he had to love him from a distance. I
imagine the father worked his farm every day with one eye on the horizon,
hoping for his son’s return.
Loving from
afar is also exemplified in the relationship the Lord Jesus had with – of all
people – Judas. You’ll find the story in John 13:
Now before the Feast of the
Passover, Jesus knowing that His hour had come that He would depart out of this
world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them
to the end. 2 During supper, the devil having
already put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, to betray Him, 3 Jesus, knowing that the Father had
given all things into His hands, and that He had come forth from God and was
going back to God, 4 *got up
from supper, and *laid aside His garments; and taking a towel, He girded
Himself.
You know the rest of
the story. The Lord proceeded to wash each of the disciple’s feet. Including Judas’ feet – even though the Lord
knew what the man was about to do. And Matthew tells us what happened when
Judas led the soldiers to the Garden of Gethsemane. Matthew 26:49-51 49 Immediately Judas went to Jesus and said,
“Hail, Rabbi!” and kissed Him. 50 And
Jesus said to him, “Friend, do what you have come for.” Then they
came and laid hands on Jesus and seized Him.
Jesus washed Judas’
feet, and called him, “Friend” – even though His friend had betrayed Him for a
couple of dollars. I want you to get this: John tells us that Jesus loved
Judas even to the end.
So, when we are
forsaken it’s good to weep, and to love, even from a distance. And what else
can we do when we are forsaken? What others
example does God give us as we follow in His steps?
3.We can pray. Don’t
ever stop praying for the person who has hurt you. I think praying for that
person will be easier if we remember the spiritual battle we are BOTH locked in.
Satan has always – even from the Garden of Eden – the devil has always sought
to destroy the family. And in the destruction of the family, he knows it’s then
easier to pick off one by one members of those families.
Remember, Satan
has blinded their spiritual eyes, he has dulled their spiritual ears and
hardened their spiritual hearts for the ultimate destruction of their
souls. Pray! Only weapons of spiritual
warfare are effective in this kind of battle for their soul – and for yours.
But what can we do
about a person who had forsaken us and has already died? Pray.
Pray that God had mercy on them before they died. And hold on to
your confidence that God did, in His mercy, give them one last chance to repent
– even as they lay on their hospice bed or in an intensive care unit in some
hospital.
I was reminded again as
I prepared this message, of the Good Thief on the cross next to Jesus. It’s
very unlikely that any of that man’s relatives – including his mother or father
– were at that cross watching him die. They would have feared to be associated
with him, or the Romans might take THEM into custody and crucified them as well.
And so, while it is
likely none of his family heard his conversation with the Lord Jesus and the
other criminal crucified with them, you and I know of the conversation: (Luke 23:39ff)
One of the criminals who were
hanged there was hurling abuse
at Him, saying, “Are You not the Christ? Save Yourself and us!” 40 But
the other answered, and rebuking him said, “Do you not even fear God, since you
are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41 And
we indeed are suffering justly,
for we are receiving what we deserve for our deeds; but this man has done
nothing wrong.” 42 And he was
saying, “Jesus, remember me when You come in Your kingdom!” 43 And He said to him, “Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise.”
God’s mercy extends to
every man and woman to their last breath. So pray that God had mercy on your
loved one who died without reconciling with you. Pray that God offered him or
her that one last chance to seek forgiveness from the Lord of love. Here is
what the Scripture tells us of His mercy:
2 Peter 3:9 “The Lord is not
slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not
wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.”
And Ezekiel 18:32 Speaking to a faithless Israel, God said
this: 32 For I
have no pleasure in the death of anyone who dies,” declares the Lord God. Therefore, repent and live.”
4. And finally, what else
can we do when someone we love forsakes us?
Prepare your heart
ahead of time for reconciliation. Now let’s be realistic – reconciliation might
never happen. We all know of families who have never reconciled. God has gifted
all humanity with free will. He will never force us to do what we choose not to
do. It’s the precious gift He has given us – knowing all the while that even He
would suffer heartache when those He created, when those He loves, exercised
that gift to turn away from Him.
But, if it should happen, and the one you have
loved from afar, the one for whom you have prayed perhaps for decades, wants to
reconcile – receive them with open arms. Don’t ever hold their earlier decision
against them.
1
Corinthians 13: 4 Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does
not brag and is not arrogant, 5 does not act
unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into
account a wrong suffered, 6 does not rejoice in
unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; 7 bears
all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love
never fails.”
Life’s disappointments,
its sorrows, its unanswerable questions cut deeply into the human heart. And as
I said at the beginning of this message, perhaps especially grievous is the
wound caused when someone you love forsakes you.
God knows from personal
experience your grief. He grieves with you. But perhaps more to the point of
this message, God has also given us a godly way to cope with our hurting heart.
Believe God hurts with
you. And cry. And love. And pray. And be ready to reconcile. In doing these
things, we will be following the godly path, the godly examples He has given us
in His word.
It was the psalmist who
said – and may the Holy Spirit sweeten those words to our wounded souls: “Weeping
may last for the night, but a shout of joy comes in the morning.” (Psalm 30:5)
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