Do You Conduct Funerals for Non-Christians?
00:00:00.000 | Pastor writes in to ask, "Have you personally conducted funerals for
00:00:10.720 | non-Christians? If not, would you? And if you did, what would be your thoughts in
00:00:15.360 | doing it, and how would that funeral be tailored differently from the funeral of
00:00:19.080 | a believer?" Pastor John? I have, but not many. I haven't done many funerals
00:00:26.040 | for unbelievers. When I came, I made the decision just because of priorities here,
00:00:32.680 | and I wouldn't encourage every pastor to make this decision, I didn't encourage
00:00:37.360 | the funeral homes in the area to look to me as a burying pastor. Because a lot of
00:00:43.920 | people, they come to funeral homes, they don't know anything about the church,
00:00:47.160 | and they don't know how to have a funeral, and they look to some person. Now
00:00:53.280 | others on our staff have done that explicitly. They're available, and so
00:00:59.400 | they go and they make it a ministry to unbelievers to do funerals. Now
00:01:04.800 | I've done some, and I would say that what I do is make sure the family
00:01:12.400 | knows I'm a Christian pastor. This funeral will be done. If you want me to
00:01:18.520 | do it, I'm going to speak from the Scriptures, I'm going to talk about the
00:01:23.000 | good news of Jesus Christ, and I'm going to speak as a Christian. So don't ask
00:01:28.840 | me to be generic, because that's not my job. I'm not a generic, professional
00:01:33.040 | burying parson. I'm a Christian herald of the good news, so if you want me to do
00:01:38.480 | that, I'll do it. And so my approach in the few that I've done has been, I don't
00:01:45.680 | talk about the person who's dead, I talk to the living. I talk about the gospel, I
00:01:51.560 | talk about God's sufficiency to help them in their crisis, because what
00:01:56.280 | they're experiencing right now is that they have just experienced a huge loss,
00:02:01.000 | and God has something to say to them about their need. Now there have been
00:02:07.960 | some times where it is so, you know, the elephant in the room, you might say, is
00:02:14.960 | that these are believers who had an unbelieving brother, thinking of one in
00:02:21.040 | particular, where everybody in the room knew he was an unbeliever, and they're
00:02:25.480 | wondering, "What do I think? What am I going to say?" And there were only a
00:02:29.440 | handful of people there, and I gathered them around the coffin at the end, because
00:02:33.160 | it was so bitter cold outside, we weren't going to go to the graveside, and I said
00:02:37.480 | to them, I just looked them right in the eye, about 12 people gathered around the
00:02:40.520 | coffin, and these were older folks mainly, and he was a brother who was just
00:02:45.680 | militantly anti-christian, and I said, "Now we're all aware that Henry
00:02:52.200 | was not a believer, and we know there's no hope for unbelievers beyond the
00:02:59.920 | grave." And I let that sink in, and then I said two other things that I think are
00:03:04.600 | always fitting to say. We don't know, and I looked at his sister, I said, "We don't
00:03:10.200 | know how Henry dealt with the living God in the last minutes of his life, and
00:03:17.640 | therefore we don't pass final sentence at this moment on this man's soul. What
00:03:23.640 | we do know is the judge of all the earth will do right." Genesis 18, 25. And that's
00:03:30.840 | probably the truth that I would end on in almost any unbelieving
00:03:38.520 | funeral, where people are aware that this person may well be in hell today. We
00:03:45.360 | close by saying God will always do what is right, and we will approve what He
00:03:52.920 | does. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast.
00:03:56.840 | Pastors, please send your questions to us via email at
00:04:00.120 | askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. Please include your first name and your hometown.
00:04:03.280 | Find thousands of other free resources online from John Piper at
00:04:07.040 | askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. I'm your host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.
00:04:11.440 | [BLANK_AUDIO]