This week I am performing two funerals for people we have known through our work in the church and I have been thinking about the significance of comments that are made at funerals.
One of the temptations that ministers all over the world have is to say things that lean on the side of comfort. So the temptation is to declare that someone is now in Heaven “with the Lord” and all their pain and suffering is finished. With that everyone feels better, the minister has apparently done his job and he puts his cheque in his pocket and feels good about himself.
There’s one terrible problem… let me tell you a real story of someone I used to work with.
Craig was a contract carpenter who worked for us building homes. I can’t remember but I think he may have had some Catholicism in his family somewhere, but anyway, one day we were talking about Heaven and Hell. I was telling him what the Bible clearly says, that there will be a judgment and God will send people to Hell if they have not repented of their sins and turned their lives over to live for Christ.
He was genuinly surprised and said “That’s not what the minister said at the last funeral I went to.” He then told me about his friend who was a swearing, cursing, drinking man who apparently “was in Heaven.”
You see, if we tell people that their friends or family have gone to Heaven, we are more or less saying they will go to Heaven too. In fact we may as well just say everyone will go to Heaven. When people hear false words of comfort, what it actually does is innoculate them from the truth. They are then convinced that they only have to do the same as their friend or family member and they will be OK to God too.
Words like that condemn a person to Hell. Kind of sobering isn’t it.
So I’m always careful what words I say at funerals. I do want to comfort people in their time of loss and grief, but I also am mindful that the Lord loves these people and that a funeral can be a time when the gospel, properly explained can help open eyes to Jesus. May the Lord give wisdom and fill his kingdom.
In Summary: Unless the deceased was a holy and committed person devoted entirely to Christ in a way that was widely recognised – be slow to declare that they are with the Lord. This may result in false comfort for sinners.
