As I approached the pulpit, I thought, “I am about to reassure this family and all these friends that their loved one is in heaven….and I’m not even sure that I believe in heaven anymore.”
I must have preached 7-8 funerals in the 3 months after my wife’s death. Each one was as painful as going down a slide of razor blades and landing in a pool of alcohol. I would be doing a little bit better and then I would be thrown back into confronting the issues of life and death. My pain was compounded because now I knew EXACLTY how this family felt in their loss. And after 11 years of pastoring the same church (now 13), I didn’t bury church members, I was burying my friends. When I would get a call that someone had died, I cried all the way to the hospital or their home. When I arrived, I did the best to follow my grandmothers advice after she switched me, “you better straighten up that face or I’ll give you something to cry about!” I knew what lay before these families and my heart grieved for all they would have to endure in the next few days.
They would have to contact family members. Songs and Scriptures would have to be picked out. Pictures would have to be perused to capture the essence of their loved one for the slide show at the funeral home or church. Pallbearers would have to be named, flowers ordered, clothes selected, and a grave dug (which costs $1750.00. Especially ridiculous if u have a church where half the members own backhoes!….but u have to use the cemetery’s gravedigger….which makes sense I suppose). And finally, they would get with me and share some thoughts about their loved one and give me a general idea for the direction of the service…and that direction almost always included their desire to have some comments about heaven.
I love to study. Even if I have preached a particular passage of Scripture before, I always go back and study the verses again as if its the first time that I have ever read them. And that's what I did for all those funerals that I preached. I studied John 14. I studied 2 Cor 5 and 12. I studied Revelation 20 and 21. I studied Luke 16 and Philippians 1.
And with each funeral, I was growing more and more convinced that heaven was for real! Not because of anything Todd Burpo said, but because of what the Holy Spirit was doing in my heart each time I deconstructed those verses! If you can visualize how the heart of the Grinch grew exponentially as he raced down the mountain towards Whoville, you can understand my elation when I felt like my heart of faith had been recovered, expanded, and restored!
Henry Blackaby would say that I had a “crisis of faith.” I saw it as a crossroads for my future. I knew that if I couldn’t trust the Bible on what it said about heaven, then how could I trust it on any other topic/theme? And I have too much integrity to preach anything out of the Bible that I don’t first believe in my heart. I’m not saying that I have to completely understand everything in the Bible, but I certainly need to believe it….or else I’m out of job and my life has lost its rudder.
I don’t preach “Hypocritical Funerals” any more. Now, when I say that the soul of a Christ-follower has transitioned up to heaven, I say it with the same conviction reflected in the words of Jesus when He declared to Nicodemus, “I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born again.” (John 3:3)
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