After the Columbine shootings, John Piper wrote up 21 ways to love and comfort the hurting
by trusting wholly in God's sovereignty over all things. He revised
them after 9-11. I posted this a couple months ago, but I want to again
in light of the Virginia Tech incident that is still developing. As lovers of an all-powerful
God, let us be prepared to love people in their pain by empathetically
and mercifully pointing them to a God who is in control.
21 Ways to Minister to Those Who Are Suffering
(Bible verses to accompany each item on this list are available in the full article.)
1. Pray. Ask God for his help for you and for those you want to
minister to. Ask him for wisdom and compassion and strength and a word
fitly chosen. Ask that those who are suffering would look to God as
their help and hope and healing and strength. Ask that he would make
your mouth a fountain of life.
2. Feel and express empathy with those most hurt by this great evil and loss; weep with those who weep.
3. Feel and express compassion because of the tragic circumstances
of so many loved ones and friends who have lost more than they could
ever estimate.
4. Take time and touch, if you can, and give tender care to the wounded in body and soul.
5. Hold out the promise that God will sustain and help those who
cast themselves on him for mercy and trust in his grace. He will
strengthen you for the impossible days ahead in spite of all darkness.
6. Affirm that Jesus Christ tasted hostility from men and knew what
it was to be unjustly tortured and abandoned, and to endure
overwhelming loss, and then be killed, so that he is now a sympathetic
mediator for us with God.
7. Declare that this murder was a great evil, and that God's wrath
is greatly kindled by the wanton destruction of human life created in
his image.
8. Acknowledge that God has permitted a great outbreak of sin
against his revealed will, and that we do not know all the reasons why
he would permit such a thing now, when it was in his power to stop it.
9. Express the truth that Satan is a massive reality in the universe
that conspires with our own sin and flesh and the world to hurt people
and to move people to hurt others, but stress that Satan is within and
under the control of God.
10. Express that these terrorists rebelled against the revealed will
of God and did not love God or trust him or find in God their refuge
and strength and treasure, but scorned his ways and his Person.
11. Since rebellion against God was at the root of this act of
murder, let us all fear such rebellion in our own hearts, and turn from
it, and embrace the grace of God in Christ, and renounce the very
impulses that caused this tragedy.
12. Point the living to the momentous issues of sin and repentance
in our own hearts and the urgent need to get right with God through his
merciful provision of forgiveness in Christ, so that a worse fate than
death will not overtake us.
13. Remember that even those who trust in Christ may be cut down
like these thousands who were in New York and Washington, but that does
not mean they have been abandoned by God or not loved by God even in
those agonizing hours of suffering. God's love conquers even through
calamity.
14. Mingle heart-wrenching weeping with unbreakable confidence in
the goodness and sovereignty of God who rules over and through the sin
and the plans of rebellious people.
15. Trust God for his ability to do the humanly impossible, and
bring you through this nightmare and, in some inscrutable way, bring
good out of it.
16. Explain, when the time is right, and they have the wherewithal to think clearly
that one of the mysteries of God's greatness is that he ordains that
some things come to pass which he forbids and disapproves of.
17. Express your personal cherishing of the sovereignty of God as
the ground of all your hope as you face the human impossibilities of
life. The very fulfillment of the New Covenant promises of our
salvation and preservation hang on God's sovereignty over rebellious
human wills.
18. Count God your only lasting treasure, because he is the only sure and stable thing in the universe.
19. Remind everyone that to live is Christ and to die is gain.
20. Pray that God would incline their hearts to his word, open their
eyes to his wonders, unite their hearts to fear him, and satisfy them
with his love.
21. At the right time sound the trumpet that all this
good news is meant by God to free us for radical, sacrificial service
for the salvation of men and the glory of Christ. Help them see that
one message of all this misery is to show us that life is short and
fragile and followed by eternity, and small, man-centered ambitions are
tragic.
