Sermon on Lament

Series Title: LamentationsSeries Summary: This Lent, we will journey together through the book of Lamentations, learning how Scripture gives voice to grief, suffering, and faithful protest before God. Beginning with the devastation of Jerusalem (2 Kings 23-25), we will explore how God’s people wrestle with shame, loss, divine sovereignty, worship, humility, and the call to corporate lament in the face of deep pain. Along the way, we will be invited to examine how our responses to suffering—both our own and that of others—reveal what we believe about God and ourselves. This series will encourage us to resist quick answers and instead learn how to sit honestly before God with our sorrow and questions.On Palm Sunday, we will see how praise and lament collide as Jesus weeps over Jerusalem, revealing himself as the prophet who not only laments but acts to bring redemption. Finally, on Easter Sunday, we will celebrate how the risen Christ meets us in our sorrow and promises a future where lament is healed, and God wipes away every tear.⁠LAMENT GUIDE⁠ResourcesHere are some resources you can use to help you study Lamentations on your own⁠Bible Project video and guide ⁠on Lamentations⁠A Bible study ⁠on Lamentations⁠Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy: Discovering the Grace of Lament by Mark Vroegop⁠ - a book that studies the theme of lament in Scripture, it focuses on both the psalms of lament as well as lamentations.⁠Prophetic Lament by Soong-Chan Rah ⁠- this book is an extended meditation on Lamentations, drawing applications to the church in the United States. This book pushes the reader in ways that are uncomfortable. You may not agree with him on everything, but you will be challenged to think about Lamentations, and it’s meaning for us today.Passages: 2 Kings 24:18 - 25:12Speaker: David BillingsleyThe message of Lamentations, at least in part, is that an till you're confronted with sin, confronted with death, confronted with the reality of the brokenness in the world and in our hearts and in our lives, until that happens, then God's love, God's grace, His steadfastness, His mercies that are new every morning, they only remain just kind of skin deep and don't penetrate to the heart. The comfort of God will just stay on the surface if we try to leapfrog the pain and the suffering. So we need to see that we have to go through Lamentations one and two and three to get to the comfort and the compassion of God.Lamentations 3 highlight something that's true of our culture and true for a lot of us, maybe even true of church. And it's that we don't want to lament. We don't want to cry, or at least we don't want to be seen crying because maybe we think we have to be tough.