Leading My First Funeral

Not too long ago I came across a book that I knew would be helpful to me as a young pastor but didn’t buy it because it wasn’t something that I was going to need for a few years yet. One month later I found myself purchasing this same book and selecting the “one day shipping” box on Amazon [thank goodness we are prime members!]. What book was it that I foolishly put off buying? Conduct Gospel-Centered Funerals: Applying the Gospel at the Unique Challenges of Death by Brian Croft and Phil A. Newton. I was about to lead my first funeral and I was desperate for some  practical and cross-centered wisdom from someone more experienced than I. How did this come about?

I am an Assistant Pastor which means that weddings and funerals are pretty much left in the domain of our lead Pastor (though he has had me assist him in these duties). This has meant that I generally don’t have to worry about all the particularities that come with

leading these events – until last week that is. Last week my pastor left for a ten day trip and then the spouse of one of my coworkers passed away suddenly. Though this coworker was not affiliated with any church and wasn’t a follower of Jesus, she still called and asked if I would conduct her husband’s funeral. I was honored. And I was terrified. What follows are some things I learned in doing my first funeral.

Do: Get resources such as Conduct Gospel-Centered Funerals: Applying the Gospel at the Unique Challenges of Death by Brian Croft and Phil A. Newton as well as Comfort Those Who Grieve: Ministering God’s Grace in Times of Loss by Paul Tautges. These books really should be read in tandem since they compliment each other so well. Really, if you are a pastor, you should read these books.

Do: Get wise counsel. I spoke with several pastors (including my dad) who have led a number of funerals and found their advi

ce truly helpful. Besides it will help you honor them and them to know that you respect them. I also asked some of my friends who are young in the ministry. I knew that the level of experience wasn’t there but the fact that they were praying for me was encouraging.

Do: Meet quickly with the grieving family. This will help you as well as the family that has experienced the loss. It will help you as a pastor to know them and bond with them on a level that you would not otherwise have. It will also allow you to minister more directly to their hearts since all pretenses are usually gone. It will also help you to get a feel for the person who has passed away. I found this especially helpful since I didn’t know the man at all. In my context the pastor delivers the eulogies so knowing the person who has passed away is especially important. This will also help the family through the grieving process. After a family member has died those

who remain are left to plan and coordinate a thousand little details. Listening to stories and looking at pictures is an important part of the grieving process for many people (at least it seemed to be incredibly helpful for this family). Meeting quickly and listening to these stories will also let the family know that you care about them – not merely about another service that you have to perform. This will allow you greater flexibility to share the gospel both privately and publicly.

Don’t: Correct every theologically incorrect statement. If something a family member says bugs you because it isn’t right – get over it. You can deal with stuff like this later privately in the grieving process if it is appropriate. This goes for the funeral service as well. It is not our duty to correct every false statement made during the time when family and friends speak.

Don’t: Give false hope or certain judgment regarding the eternal state of the deceased when it is unclear. Just be faithful to the gospel
Do: Meet with the funeral home director. I am so thankful I met with the director of this funeral. He has been responsible for over 7,000 funerals and his experience and care were encouraging. As a pastor, your role in the funeral is important. But so is the Funeral Director’s. Don’t sideline him or attempt to undermine him. Instead try to develop a relationship with him for the sake of future funerals and families.by saying something like “only those who submit in faith to the Lord Jesus will be granted eternal life to enjoy God’s presence forever.”

Do: Get resources such as Conduct Gospel-Centered Funerals: Applying the Gospel at the Unique Challenges of Death by Brian Croft and Phil A. Newton as well as Comfort Those Who Grieve: Ministering God’s Grace in Times of Loss by Paul Tautges. These books really should be read in tandem since they compliment each other so well. Really, if you are a pastor, you should read these books. Wait, I said this one already….oh well. Get these books!

Here is a quote from the book by Brian Croft and Phil Newton to whet your appetite.

Faithfulness to the gospel in funerals is obscured in the pastor’s words of comfort about heaven when how heaven is received is not made clear. The gospel is distorted when the pastor preaches the deceased into eternal glory when there has been no credible evidence of gospel transformation in that person’s life. The gospel is likewise contradicted when the man entrusted to facilitate and conduct the funeral service is unloving, impatient, and uninterested in the soul’s of the family that remain. . . . Therefore, gospel-centeredness is when the gospel of Jesus Christ is the primary purpose and the focus of the funeral. It is making sure that the foundation of any hope experienced is rooted in a holy God’s merciful plan to redeem sinners through crushing His own Son on the cross in our place. (p. 18)

Possible Redemption = No Redemption

If we concentrate on the thought of redemption, we shall be able to sense more readily the impossibility of universalizing the atonement. What does redemption mean? It does not mean redeemability, that we are placed in a redeemable position. It means that Christ purchased and procured redemption. This is the triumphant note of the New Testament whenever it plays on the redemptive chord. Christ redeemed us to God by his blood (Rev. 5:9). He obtained eternal redemption (Heb. 9:12). “He gave himself for us in order that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify to himself a people for his own possession, zealous of good works” (Tit. 2:14). It is to beggar the concept of redemption as an effective securement of release by price and by power to construe it as anything less than the effectual accomplishment which secures the salvation of those who are its objects. Christ did not come to put men in a redeemable position but to redeem to himself a people. We have the same result when we properly analyse the meaning of expiation, propitiation, and reconciliation. Christ did not come to make sins expiable. He came to expiate sins – “when he made purification of sins, he sat down on the right hand of the majesty on high” (Heb. 1:3). Christ did not come to make God reconcilable. He reconciled us to God by his own blood.

The very nature of Christ’s mission and accomplishment is involved in this question. Did Christ come to make the salvation of all men possible, to remove obstacles that stood in the way of salvation, and merely to make provision for salvation? Or did he come to save his people? Did he come to put all men in a salvable state? Or did he come to secure the salvation of all those who are ordained to eternal life? Did he come to make men redeemable? Or did he come effectually and infallibly to redeem? The doctrine of atonement must be radically revised if, as atonement, it applies to those who finally perish as well as to those who are the heirs of eternal life. In that event we shall have to dilute the grand categories in terms of which the Scripture defines the atonement and deprive them of their most precious import and glory. This we cannot do….We do well to ponder the words of our Lord himself: “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that of everything which he hath given to me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up in the last day” (John 6:38, 39). Security inheres in Christ’s redemptive accomplishment. And this means that, in respect of the persons contemplated, design and accomplishment and final realization have all the same extent.

…The truth really is that it is only on the basis of such a doctrine that we can have a free and full offer of Christ to lost men. What is offered to men in the gospel? It is not the possibility of salvation, not simply the opportunity of salvation. What is offered is salvation.

Redemption Accomplished and Applied by John Murray, pg. 63- 65. This book resembles one of those expensive deserts at a fancy restaurant: small but rich and extremely satisfying.

The King’s Crown

There is its significance for a lost world. Christ came to be the Saviour of the world and that meant enduring the cross with all its shame and suffering. That crown of thorns was placed there by God as well as by man. The cross was God’s cross as well as man’s.

If we are to receive the crown of life, Christ must receive the crown of thorns. He cannot be our Saviour any other way….It is in his diadem of thorns that he stoops low in humiliation and shame and sorrow to seek and to save sinners. It is only by the sharp thorn of his suffering that the poisonous thorn of our sin is drawn. In other words, apart from the cross God cannot forgive sin.

There is also the significance of the crown of thorns for the church, for God’s redeemed people. It reminds us that C hrist is a king and that he is victorious even when he seems defeated. However abased Christ may appear to men he is still a king. He accomplishes a regal task at Calvary and gains for us a royal pardon. He ascends a throne as he goes to be crucified, a throne of grace. In this apparent weakness he is the mighty conqueror of Satan and sin and death, the overcomer of this world. The cross appears as foolishness to the world, but to God’s redeemed people that cross is victory, salvation, the power of God.

The Cross He Bore: Meditations on the Sufferings of the Redeemer by Frederick S. Leahy. This is a small book with short chapters and lots of stuff to meditate on. A good book for every Christian.

As D. A. Carson has said it: “The God on whom we rely knows what suffering is all about, not merely in the way that God knows everything, but by experience. In the darkest night of the soul Christians have something to hold onto that Job never knew. We know Christ crucified. Christians have learned that when there seems to be no other evidence of God’s love, they cannot escape the cross. “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all – how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?”(Rom. 8:32) … When we suffer, there will sometimes be mystery. Will there also be faith? Yes, if our attention is focused more on the cross, and on the God of the cross, than on the suffering itself.”

The Unobstructed Jesus

I have recently begun a Bible study through the Gospel of John. I have entitled this series The Unobstructed Jesus because at the heart of all that John seeks to show us is who Jesus is. Indeed, John is workmanlike in his removal of the obstructions that so easily cloud our sight of the true Christ. John labors to peel back the thin veneer of cheap ideas that would prevent us from knowing who Jesus really is and falling on our knees  with Thomas to cry out “My Lord and my God!”

While this might seem obvious, I have come across many sermons, talks, and articles on John’s gospel that have fallen far short of this. So much so that while many see Christ as the main character, he exists merely to illuminate us  or at least about some steps to a better version of us. Our preoccupation with ourselves is stifling indeed.

But listen to how D. A. Carson speaks about the heart of this blessed Gospel in his commentary The Gospel According to John.

John’s presentation of who Jesus is lies at the heart of all that is distinctive in this Gospel. It is not just a question of some titles being ascribed to Jesus that are not found outside the Johannine corpus (e.g. ‘Lamb of God’, ‘Word’, ‘I am’). Rather, fundamental to all else that is said of him, Jesus is peculiarly the Son of God, or simply the Son. Although ‘Son of God’ can serve as a rough synonym for ‘Messiah’, it is enriched by the unique manner in which Jesus as God’s Son relates to his Father. He is functionally subordinate to him, and does only those things that the Father gives him to say and do, but he does everything that the Father does, since the Father shows him everything that he himself does. The perfection of Jesus’ obedience and the unqualified nature of his dependence thereby become the loci in which Jesus discloses nothing less than the words and deeds of God. Although ‘Son of God’ could be used in extraordinarily diverse ways in the ancient world, this distinctive emphasis in John casts back its glow on many of the other Christological titles. ‘Son of God’, as we have seen, can be parallel to ‘Messiah’; but so powerfully is it constrained by this relation between the Father and the Son that ‘Messiah’ itself becomes not merely a prophetic category bound up with the line of David and the expectation of the prophets, but also a title that connotes the profoundly revelatory work of God’s promised servant.
Similarly, although ‘Son of Man’ can bear something of the shadings it enjoys in the Synoptics, where it characteristically falls into one of three categories (the Son of Man ministering on earth, suffering in humiliation and death, and coming in apocalyptic glory to inaugurate the consummated kingdom), the configuration of sayings in John is quite independent. Typically, the Son of Man is ‘lifted up’ in death, glorified through death, so that those who believe in him will have eternal life. But this title, too, has overtones of revelation: only the Son of Man has been to heaven, and therefore can speak what no other human being knows; only he is the link between heaven and earth (1:51; 3:11–13).
Small wonder, then, that John’s summarizing title for Jesus is the ‘Word’. It is a brilliant choice. In the beginning was the Word; in the beginning God expressed himself, if you will. And that Self-Expression, God’s own Word, identified with God yet distinguishable from him, has now become flesh, the culmination of the prophetic hope. (p. 95-96)

Carson’s Commentary on The Gospel According to John in The Pillar New Testament Commentary series is by far my favorite of the commentaries that I am using. Here are some others that I have enjoyed using so far in my study:

• The Gospel According to John by Leon Morris in The New International Commentary on the New Testament series.
• John by Andreas J. Kostenberger in the Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament series.
• The Message of John by Bruce Milne in the Bible Speaks Today series. While not really a “great commentary,” Milne helpfully synthesizes much of the text. This would probably be a great resource for churches to provide lay leaders with for a study through John’s Gospel. One severe limitation of this commentary is the size of the chapters (chapter 2 covers 2:1-12:19 – more than a hundred pages of material!).

There are other commentaries and resources that I have and am utilizing but these are the ones I thought most helpful.

What are some resources on this Gospel that have proven helpful to you?