Turn with me in your copy of the Scriptures to John, chapter 11, John chapter 11. I have in your bulletin reference also to Psalm 56. I will be quoting that, but because it forms such a unique part of our message this morning, I wanted to give you the reference also in your bulletin so that you would have it before you. This morning we returned to the narrative where we are told that Jesus wept. We're captivated by this and we might say it would be easier to preach a message in one message on the whole Bible. It could be summed up simply as saying the history of God's redemptive actions toward man. And we might go further to say, in Christ Jesus unfolded through the covenants throughout the ages of man's history. We're culminating in the final judgment if we wanted to go into that greater detail. And that would be a summary statement, in fact a message that could be preached covering all the Scripture and perhaps the minister would want to bring a few illustrations from the Scripture surveying them and could wrap it all up and preach one message on all the Bible in one Sunday. But to preach these two words, Jesus wept. To look in such detail as much like a scientist might examine a tissue or a sample of blood. To look at it from back we would note its color and perhaps its texture, its density, its shape, its volume, but once placed under a microscope, an entirely new world opens up. There under the microscope we see detail and we see images and we see things that we would never have even imagined had we not looked closely at it. And such it is with this very simple, widely held and known passage of Scripture, Jesus wept. We'll only be taking last Sunday and this Sunday on it. But I want to let you know that we could have very easily taken many more Sundays unfolding the character of God, the unity of God and man and Christ Jesus, the cross itself, his relation with others, all that this simple passage teaches. Let's look together at John the 11th chapter going to begin at verse 37, John 11, verse 37, 27. Thank you. I'm 37, 237 wouldn't actually take us very far, would it? 27. She said to him, yes Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God who is coming into the world. And when she had said this, she went and called her sister Mary saying in private, the teacher is here and is calling for you and when she heard it she rose quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come into the village but was still in the place where Martha had met him. When the Jews, who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary rise quickly and go out, they followed her, supposing that she was going to the tomb to weep there. Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. When Jesus saw her weeping, the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. And he said, where have you laid him? They said to him, Lord come and see Jesus wept. So the Jews said see how he loved him but some of them said, could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying? May the Lord bless the reading of his word and the hearing of his people. Just in very quick summation, we explored last week the simple emotion expressed here by Christ that he was moved in spirit and that he was troubled and we saw here two emotions that would be difficult for us and our humanity to sustain simultaneously. Here we saw Christ moved with sympathy and hurting with and for those who were around him wailing because they were crushed under the curse of sin which brought death and misery and suffering. And then also because there was in amongst them those who had not yet believed an element of unbelief and because of that there was also some consternation with Jesus. And so we find there that he was greatly troubled as well and there was an element of anger there against unbelief and holding these two together he then asked where have you laid him. Now we know that Christ knew not only where they had laid him but he also knew that he would be raised again so Jesus was not moved out of a sorrow over loss in Lazarus. For he had already told his disciples that Lazarus was not dead but would be raised Jesus as moved with sympathy for his people. And this tells us something of the nature and the mission and character of Christ and he brews five or seven in the days of his flesh. Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to him who was able to save him from death and he was heard because of his reverence. Here our great mediator is weeping on behalf of his people. And in those tears there is prayer before the Father who knows all. Jesus is our high priest. He intercedes for us with loud cries and tears. We have a sympathetic high priest who loves us and intercedes with all of his person for us. In Luke 22, 31. And Jesus said, Simon, Simon, behold Satan demanded to have you that he might sift you as weathe but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. We have one who intercedes on our behalf a sympathetic high priest and yet one who steps out against unbelief as well. Tears give us a view and an understanding of God through the incarnation of Christ. Remember always keeping in mind, Jesus Christ is the incarnation of God, the triumphant God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He is the manifestation of all of God s glory. Today more often than not, people s concept of God is what Michael Horton has called a greasy familiarity. He says this in his book in the face of God, it bears repeating that there are two opposite poles toward which we swing in pendulum like fashion when we are not anchored to God s self-revelation in Scripture. The first is to over-emphasize the distance. We call this the transcendence of God. The second or the opposite extreme is to over-emphasize divine nearness. We call that eminence so that we regard everything as divine or part of the divine. That s the same thing as pantheism, surely there is nothing new under the sun. We find that there are two extremes that we are easily driven to. One is that God is distant and far away that emphasizing the transcendence of God is true, that God is transcendent. He is holy and he is totally other. There are those who are only able to relate to Him as God who is distant and not near. And then there is the opposite extreme of those who choose to emphasize nothing but the nearness of God. That there is such an intimacy with God that His holiness and His transcendence and His sinlessness as opposed to our sinfulness is blurred and not made to be distinct. The tears of Jesus and the emotion that Jesus felt give us a right and accurate view of both existing with God. Today, we struggle from what I might consider to be a hyper-eminence, whereas the Greeks in John s day, as he was writing, understood only transcendence. They only understood a distant God, but remember where they were coming from, they were coming from a polytheistic system where there were many gods. And not only were there many gods, but they tended to be arbitrary and vengeful against people. They were not trustworthy and very often there would be schemes to do things behind these God s backs because they were away and not with us. Early American Christians even picked up on some of this in a form of Christianity called deism, where transcendence, again, was emphasized to where God was viewed as a divine clockmaker as it were, where a watchmaker or a clockmaker will make a watch or a clock, will wind it and then set it aside and leave. And the clock runs on its own without the watchmaker being present. And the deists have that sort of a view of God as being far away. There's a comfort in that, isn't there? A God who was not there to watch. A God who will not hold you accountable for everything that you do. A God who is away waiting for you to work it out and to be sovereign over your own life as long as you end up in the right place. There is a comfort to having a God who is not with us for the self-reliant and self-righteous individual. For those who recognize their lack of righteousness, though, we feel very alone and vulnerable if we have a concept of God that does not include him being with us. Jesus is the incarnate God, the exact representation of His nature and whom the fullness of deity dwells so in some sense, when Jesus weeps, is it not true that God weeps? Can we not say that with some assurance that because the fullness of God dwells and the person of Christ, that if Jesus weeps, not being schizophrenic and not suffering from split personality, but being simultaneously all God and all man, that there is some sense in which Jesus weeping also signifies God's weeping, while those around Him wept and mourned and cried out Jesus also wept, and in those tears God is revealed to us. What is it that we learn? The first thing we learn is that we are valuable to God in these days of going green and these days of saving the earth. The uniqueness of man is unfortunately and by default diminished. We are made equal to or sometimes even subservient to nature, aren't we? If you listen to the talk and watch the commercials, it is nature that is to be cared for as supreme and all things, lacking relationship with the one true God, we have made ourselves servants and worshipers of Mother Earth, but Jesus wept over those He loved. We wept over them in their humanity. God doesn't view all things as being equal and worth. We struggle with this in a materialistic age where people are sometimes shot for their tennis shoes. We struggle with understanding the uniqueness of a person. There's a humorous story told of a man who on a slippery road lost control and a turn in his Mercedes which he was driving went off the cliff. He was thrown from the car and the Mercedes rolled to the bottom and was destroyed and burst into flames. The man is on the curb, the car behind him immediately stopped to render assistance and he goes over to the man all he can hear the man saying is my Mercedes, my Mercedes, and the man tells him, sir, you need to be thankful because you could have been in the car. You could have died in that car. That's only a car. Look, you're alive. The man tells him yes, but there was $20,000 worth of options on that Mercedes. The man continues to try to comfort him. He says, look, we'll have to talk about this later. We need to take care of your arm and as the man looks down, sure enough he has lost his arm in the wreck and he's bleeding profusely, could bleed to death. As the man reaches over to helping with his arm and the fellow looks down, he hears him and changes from my Mercedes, my Mercedes to my Rolex, my Rolex, while possessions have value to use, they are not precious and we are not weep over them. We, on the other hand, are precious because we are made in God's image. That's what separates us from plants. That's what separates us from animals. That's what separates us from everything else in creation. Genesis 1, 26 and 27. Then God said, let us make man in our own image after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, He created him, male and female, He created him. We find this same creation order picked up in the commandments. In the second commandment, going along with this creation ordinance of man, we find you shall not make for yourself a carved image of any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that it is on the earth beneath or that it is in the water under the earth. We are not to worship the creation. We are to worship God alone and we are made in the image of God. In Romans 1, we find the result of the violation of this claiming to be wise and became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Because mankind has confused God with creation, we have no way of understanding our being in his image except to think that we are one with creation again, a reincarnation of pantheism. They say history repeats itself. I suppose it's because we didn't learn it to the first time. Pantheism has been around, man has confused himself with creation through the ages since the beginning and God knew that we would. So he set a commandment in place to forbid it. God has created us in his image. He has created us as what is called a triconamus being. That means three parts, a body, soul and a spirit. We have a body as Jesus had a body and it is taught that we are to see and honor our bodies as the temple of the Holy Spirit. Therefore even our physical bodies are of great worth to God and should be honored in our treatment of them because they are considered to be the temple of the Holy Spirit. We also have a soul, a soul that is centered in our mind and our emotion. This is our personality. Here a great battle takes place between the flesh and the spirit. Here we are to learn and to grow in our Christ likeness. Here we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind. Our uniqueness, our personalities, ourselves are important to God. And we also have a spirit. This is the place where communion with God takes place. This is the place where in Genesis we read that God breathed life and it was the spirit that came to life. Here it is when the condemnation of death came upon man. It was the spirit that died and it is the spirit that is raised back to life in the new birth. God is spirit we are told in the Bible. And we are to worship in spirit and truth into our spirit God breathed life and it is in our spirit that we participate in the very essence of God Himself, John 17, 2021. I do not ask Jesus said for these only but also for those who will believe in me through their Word that they may all be one just as you the Father are in me and I in you that they may also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. It is in the spirit that we have a communion with God, it is the spirit which animals lack. It is the spirit which has not had life breathed into it from God Himself. So we are valuable to God because we are made in His image. He loves us in a way that He will not love plants and He will not love animals or other inanimate matter. Dr. James Montgomery boy says moreover, he fills for him identifies with him, grieves over him and intervenes to make him into all he himself has determined that a given man or a given woman should be. Because of this great value which we have to God, he notices even our tears. Job 34, 28, he hears the cries of the needy and in Psalm 6, 8, the Lord has heard my weeping. Charles Spurgeon said, no prayer will ever prevail with God more surely than a liquid petition which being distilled from the heart trickles from the eye and waters the cheek. And then is God one when he hears the voice of your weeping. I'd like to take you through a very short progression in the Psalms because you can see if you listen carefully in the narrative the Psalms presents the culmination of agony and groaning and weeping with God's resolution. First from Psalm 6, various verses, be gracious to me, O Lord, for my bones are troubled. My soul also is greatly troubled but you, O Lord, how long? I am weary with my moaning. Every night I flood my bed with tears. I drench my couch with weeping, my eye wastes away because of grief, it grows weak because of all my foes. The Lord has heard my plea, the Lord accepts my prayer. Here the psalmist is saying, at night I cannot sleep, my eyes are tired from the weeping, I have weaped, wept and I have cried, my bed is flooded, my couch is saturated, I weep and in those tears are prayers to Almighty God and the psalmist is assured that the Lord accepts his prayer in Psalm 39, 12. Here my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry, hold not your peace at my tears in Psalm 42, 3. My tears have been my food day and night and then Psalm 56, verse 8 and 9. We have kept count of my tossings, put my tears in your bottle, are they not in your book? This I know that God is for me, at the end of the day with all of the grief and with all of the suffering and with all of the mourning which we are bound to go through for this world is dying and perishing, our bodies are wasting away. From the day of our birth with every day of our life, even as we are growing, we are growing towards our own demise and with each day of mourning that passes in every tear that is wept, we can know as God's children with assurance not one tear, not one is, goes by unnoticed as parents and our imperfect parenting where often we struggle with our own self-centeredness. Even as imperfect as we are, when you have seen your child in true grief, when you have seen your child genuinely weeping from a broken heart, have you been able to forget? Have you forgot a day when a child was broken apart? Does our Father in heaven forget a tear that falls from our cheek in his perfect fathering? He keeps them all in a bottle, not one slips into the past. They all remain with him, our heavenly Father keeps our tear in his bottle. He has kept a count of the tossings and they are even in his book. So treasured are we as his children, that our grief and our suffering and our mourning is not something we are left to just get over because we are supposed to be mature Christians. But Himself records each day of our grief because our grief is a result of the constant assault of sin and death. The constant assault upon our bodies and our minds and yes our spirit. And as we are broken under that and we feel a sense of loss, whether rightly or wrongly but as our heart breaks and as our mind is bent and contorted and twisted, not one in our immature days or in our maturity, not one is lost upon God. He doesn't brush one aside and say, that's just being silly, that's ridiculous, they should just get over that. He hears our cry in our tears, whatever we struggle with, whatever we're fighting through for those who are His children, He remembers each one and not one escapes Him. He not only notices them but He will remove them, Psalm 16, for you have delivered my soul from death and my eyes from tears and my feet from stumbling, Psalm 126, those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy. He who goes out weeping, bearing the seed for sewing, shall come home with shouts of joy bearing His sheaves with Him. Where did tears come from? They come from fear, they come from disappointment, they come from confusion and pain, all signs of a fallen world. And yet we know from the Scriptures in Revelation 7, and He said to Him, sir, you know, and He said to me, these are the ones coming out of the great tribulation, that great tribulation, a time of weeping and time of crying, and they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb, therefore they are before the throne of God and serve Him day and night in His temple, and He who sits on the throne will shelter them with His presence, and they shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more, the sun shall not strike them nor any scorching heat, for the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and He will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. And in 21 verses 2 and 4, and I saw the Holy City, New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband, and heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, behold, the dwelling place of God is with man, He will dwell with them, and they will be His people, and God Himself will be with them as their God, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall they be morning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away, to the unbeliever, tears mark tragedy. A hope was in, their tears fall into a bottomless well, never healed, never seen again, before the believer, for the believer tears mark a temporary estate, not in a state we are made to live alone, but one in which God is our very present help in times of trouble. Our tears of sorrow were mingled with faith and with hope, so that we do not sorrow as those who have no hope. Jesus said in our passage today, as they were weeping, He then comes to their aid, and he says, where have you laid him? We are not left simply to weep and to mourn, but we are left with the promise that our God will come to us and shelter us with His presence, and wipe away every tear from our eyes. I see the application of this as being twofold and very simple. The first is clearly a personal comfort, a personal comfort for each of us, if we have never mourned, we certainly will. Each of us, if we have not dealt with our own mortality, then our own foolishness and not doing so will cause us to do it soon. Each of us can apply this personally because each of us either has or will shed a tear and God keeps account of each one. Secondly, as a comfort to others, being temples of the Holy Spirit, we are the lights where the Spirit of God dwells, and we are to comfort one another by constant reminders of God's love. The next we celebrate a home going of one of our own, walk up to those whom you love, and put your arm around them, share in their tears, and remind them that the day is shortly coming when every tear will surely be wiped away, and where there will be rejoicing, where once we win out weeping, comfort one another with these words, and be comforted by the word of God in your own person, for our Lord weeps, for and with us. For this is the glory of God in Christ Jesus.