Pastor writes in to ask, "Have you personally conducted funerals for non-Christians? If not, would you? And if you did, what would be your thoughts in doing it, and how would that funeral be tailored differently from the funeral of a believer?" Pastor John? I have, but not many. I haven't done many funerals for unbelievers.

When I came, I made the decision just because of priorities here, and I wouldn't encourage every pastor to make this decision, I didn't encourage the funeral homes in the area to look to me as a burying pastor. Because a lot of people, they come to funeral homes, they don't know anything about the church, and they don't know how to have a funeral, and they look to some person.

Now others on our staff have done that explicitly. They're available, and so they go and they make it a ministry to unbelievers to do funerals. Now I've done some, and I would say that what I do is make sure the family knows I'm a Christian pastor. This funeral will be done.

If you want me to do it, I'm going to speak from the Scriptures, I'm going to talk about the good news of Jesus Christ, and I'm going to speak as a Christian. So don't ask me to be generic, because that's not my job. I'm not a generic, professional burying parson.

I'm a Christian herald of the good news, so if you want me to do that, I'll do it. And so my approach in the few that I've done has been, I don't talk about the person who's dead, I talk to the living. I talk about the gospel, I talk about God's sufficiency to help them in their crisis, because what they're experiencing right now is that they have just experienced a huge loss, and God has something to say to them about their need.

Now there have been some times where it is so, you know, the elephant in the room, you might say, is that these are believers who had an unbelieving brother, thinking of one in particular, where everybody in the room knew he was an unbeliever, and they're wondering, "What do I think?

What am I going to say?" And there were only a handful of people there, and I gathered them around the coffin at the end, because it was so bitter cold outside, we weren't going to go to the graveside, and I said to them, I just looked them right in the eye, about 12 people gathered around the coffin, and these were older folks mainly, and he was a brother who was just militantly anti-christian, and I said, "Now we're all aware that Henry was not a believer, and we know there's no hope for unbelievers beyond the grave." And I let that sink in, and then I said two other things that I think are always fitting to say.

We don't know, and I looked at his sister, I said, "We don't know how Henry dealt with the living God in the last minutes of his life, and therefore we don't pass final sentence at this moment on this man's soul. What we do know is the judge of all the earth will do right." Genesis 18, 25.

And that's probably the truth that I would end on in almost any unbelieving funeral, where people are aware that this person may well be in hell today. We close by saying God will always do what is right, and we will approve what He does. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast.

Pastors, please send your questions to us via email at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. Please include your first name and your hometown. Find thousands of other free resources online from John Piper at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. I'm your host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.