WHEN GOD SAYS 'NO'

This message was delivered at the Celebration of Life for Sarah Lyke of The Foundery Free Methodist Church in Wellsburg, West Virginia, on September 7, 2024, after a two-year struggle with cancer!  Perhaps - as you read this [about 15 minute read] - you'd like to lift a prayer for her husband, Gene, and their twelve-year-old-son, Gage.  This blog is posted with Gene's permission.

We’re all here today for two key reasons. 

Of course we’re here to remember and honor Sarah and the way she lived her life.  We’ve seen that played out here in the last hour!  She was loved; and for good reason: she was wonderfully sweet and dedicated and loving.  We experienced it and we’ve cleared this afternoon to be here.

However, we’re also here for another reason.

We’re here to honor the God that Sarah served and loved! 

But, for some of us, that creates some tension.  We are left to wonder why God didn’t intervene.  Why didn’t God heal Sarah? 

In over forty years of ministry, I’m stretched to remember a time when God’s people prayed more fervently and persistently than this family and this church prayed for Sarah!  We held her up before God daily!  We anointed her with oil repeatedly!  We laid hands on her as we prayed!  We rallied scriptures like these as we prayed:

^{Matthew 18:19-20} “Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”

^{Matthew 18:18}  [Jesus speaking]  “Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

 

^{James 4:7}  Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

 We can stand together and cry out: 

But God, we did these things!  We gathered in Your Name!  We agreed together in our prayers!  We submitted ourselves to You and we resisted the devil!  But Sarah was not healed in the way that we desired! 

Brothers and sisters in Christ - we must get our theology right! 

God has not promised to keep bad things from happening to us.  Actually, He told us in John 16:33, “In this world you will have trouble, but take courage; I have overcome the world.’  God has not promised to heal every illness.  He has not promised to reverse the consequences of sin. 

We don’t have time for a deep theology lesson here, but let me just remind you of a few things:

In Exodus 4, when Moses is arguing with God about going back to Egypt to deliver the Israelites from slavery, God makes a penetrating observation to Moses’ argument about being slow in his speech. 

In verse 11, “The LORD said to [Moses], ‘Who has made man’s mouth? Or who makes him mute or deaf, or seeing or blind? Is it not I, the LORD?’”

We need to read this!  Did you see it? 

God confesses here that He makes some mute, some deaf, many seeing, and some blind!  In other words, they are made this way by the purpose and intention of a Sovereign God! 

 Now – hold that thought while we look at one more scripture. 

In John’s gospel [chapter 9:1-3], “Jesus passes by a man who was blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’

[Jesus answered]  ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned,…but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.’

We need to understand and accept that there are occasions when God intervenes and there are other times when He does not.  Why?  Because He is the Sovereign Lord and He, at times, has purposes that are beyond our knowledge and understanding 

Bad things happen.  Cancer takes lives.  Divorce occurs.  Good people die.  Plans don’t always work out the way we wish they would.  But this is no reflection on the goodness or the presence of our Sovereign God and Heavenly Father. 

Just look at the Apostles.  They were certainly men of great faith.  Yet their lives were not free of difficulty; all of them but one, died as martyrs!  God didn’t intervene to save them.  But an answer of “no” did not undermine their faith.  They didn’t have to get everything they wanted to keep their faith intact.  Their faith was grounded in Jesus and His resurrection – not on how their lives went or what happened to them.

I can almost hear you thinking.  But what are we to do when tough times come?  How are we to handle the unexplainable tragedies that occur in our lives?  What should our response be when it feels like God has let us down or abandoned us? 

Good questions!

The answer to these questions is found in two key verses from the book of Hebrews. 

^4:15-16  For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin.  Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

Here’s the best news you’re going to hear today.  Because you have Jesus as your High Priest, you can draw near to God with confidence!  Some might say, “Confidence in what?  I already know that He may not give me what I want.  He might say no to my prayers.  How can I ask for anything with confidence?” 

But you can have confidence because God will always give you two things that are critical in your times of need. 

The first thing He will give you is mercy.  Our Savior, Jesus, knows far more about what you are experiencing than you may think.  Jesus is able to enter into your pain and understand how you feel because he also knew:

Ö        Temptation.  He experienced temptation at the hand of Satan himself.

Ö        Rejection.  He was rejected by both friends and family members.

Ö        Failure.  He saw everything He had lived for and worked for crumble around Him.

Ö        Fear.  In the Garden of Gethsemane, He spent an entire night dreading the events of the next day.

Ö        Abandonment.  His friends ran away when He needed them most. 

[Take note of Matthew 26:56  -  When Jesus was arrested in the Garden on the night of His trial, Matthew tells us “Then all the disciples left Him and fled!”]

Ö        Loneliness.  He even faced death alone.  

LISTEN:

Jesus understands your pain and/or sorrow.  You can come boldly to Him with total transparency and openness, confident that He will never mock or ridicule you.  He is a mercy-giving God because He knows from experience what it is like to need mercy.  Mercy is the assurance that God will never allow the pressures or heartbreaks of life to overwhelm you.  He will ALWAYS be there to help or carry you!

The second thing He will give you is grace. 

Grace in this context means the strength to endure or the ability to carry on.  Remember, He has not promised to deliver you from your circumstances; but He has promised to deliver you through them.  You can ask Him to change your circumstances, but we’ve already stated that God rarely intervenes to do so.  However, He has promised to give you the grace to endure in the meantime. 

Even the great Apostle Paul experienced this painful reality.  In II Corinthians 12 he tells about what seems to be a physical problem that had plagued him for many years.  Now this is a man who had the spiritual gift of healing, but he struggled with a personal malady.  He tells us that he asked God three times to deliver him from this problem.  Each time God said no.  Paul accepted his consequences and came to realize that there was a reason for God’s unwillingness to heal him.  It was to keep him humble. 

He was a man who had experienced phenomenal spiritual privileges – including a supernatural glimpse into heaven where “He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell.”  (12:4).  Anyone experiencing this kind of privilege would certainly be vulnerable to spiritual pride.  Consequently, God left this godly man – who had the gift of healing others – with a physical malady to keep him appropriately humble and to remind him of his dependence on God.  God’s actual answer to Paul on his third request was: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”  (12:9).

___________________________

I’m close to the end.  I’ve been talking with you as a pastor who wants to help you understand why we’re here today. 

But I want to close in a very different way. 

I want to close this message and this service by talking with you as a father.  But not just any father – I want to use the voice and words of a specific father who had to come home earlier this week and explain to his twelve-year-old-son that his mom would not be coming home again.

As he explained this to his son, the son asked, “But dad, why did God take mom?” 

This wise father responded immediately – with no theological training and without referring to any scriptures. 

He simply said: “Son, God didn’t take your mom from us – cancer did!  God was good enough to help your mom for these past two years so that she could stay with us just a little longer!”

Let that settle in!  All the biblical and theological thoughts I’ve shared with you today don’t weigh as much as these tender, sincere words! 

I want to share one more image with you and then we’ll sing and worship our Lord.

Gene has probably told some of you about this because it was a deeply moving experience for him.  In the last moments of his sleep on Monday morning – the day after Sarah died – he had a dream.  Now, I have to tell you that I believe God used this dream to open a portal to Heaven.  In this dream, he saw Sarah.  She was glowing!  Her hair was long again and flowing!  She was smiling!  Then she looked at Gene and said:  It’s ok!  I’m home!”

What a gracious and loving God we serve!  To give Gene this assurance was an act of absolute kindness!