People can say pretty dumb things when someone close to you dies, this week, Kent examines one of those things and the idea behind it to help us get a clearer picture of how Christians should view death and how to help you learn to grieve.When you give at Harmony, you are investing in life change and are Advancing the Kingdom!  GIVE TODAY, text any amount to (859) 459-0316  to get started (or give online @ my.harmonychurch.cc/give .

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OPENING ILLUSTRATION: Over the past few years, we have all been dealing with grief at extraordinary rates.  I don’t know very many people who have not experienced some kind of loss.  I want to pre-warn you, today's sermon is about death and grief and I want to give you permission to be sad and to let yourself grieve today as I talk.  We will even keep the lights low in the audience so you don’t have to let anyone see you…

I was thinking about the first time I really experienced loss in a meaningful personal way.  It was my Grandma Crockett.  My grandad had been laying in bed next to her and realized that she was not responding right.  I started rubbing her chest hard and calling out for her to wake up.  She wouldn’t open her eyes but was breathing.  He called the ambulance and the next thing I knew we were all in her room standing over her.  She had an aneurysm in the brain - blood leaking out and causing swelling.  My family didn’t quite know what to do, and since I was a pastor, I was put in a chair up near her to talk and pray with her.  I’ve been in a lot of rooms when people have died, but this was the first one with someone I had loved deeply.  Someone who had been in my life for as long as I’d been alive.  

I remember that night as I watched her take her terrible last breaths and her eyes opened looking at me feeling how wretched the whole thing was.  It was the first funeral I had to play any part in as a pastor.  And it was terrible…

There is a period in your life - a window of sorts, where people will typically experience the grief of the loss of aging grandparents, and I was now in that window.  It wouldn’t be too many years later that my Grandpa Wagner would pass away.  

I was a little more aware at that moment.  He had been in the hospital and been dying - as nurses and doctors tell you to go tell him goodbye.  And then miraculously he came back from it.  Literally, within a day they didn’t know what to do and sent him home because he seemed so strong.  I’ll never forget eating a sandwich with him in those days after and telling him, “Grandpa, you’ve been such a good grandpa, thank you.  I love you!”  Literally, a handful of days after going home and me eating that sandwich with him, he was back in the hospital and within hours slipped from this life with the terrible breathes of death.  

And this is where I remember people started talking…  They probably did with my grandma, but not to me…  But with my grandpa, people started saying things…People say dumb things all the time when people die - if you don’t know what to say by the way, just say, “I’m so sorry for your loss”

But one of the most insidious things people say that betray’s a bad idea about God is:

“God must have needed him more than we did”

This sermon series is called, 

Bad things Good Christians Believe

because there are things you can believe as a Christian that will literally shape the way you se