Last Sunday morning at around 1130 AM, an entire family entered heaven together. Jameson and Catherine Powell and their three small children were driving from Minneapolis to Colorado for final preparations as missionaries to Japan. They planned to leave in October. But in an interstate construction zone in western Nebraska, a semi-truck rear-ended the family vehicle.

Tragically, the entire family died at the scene, including Jameson and Catherine, both 29, and their three young children, three-year-old Ezra, 23-month-old Violet, and two-month-old Calvin. The 53-year-old trucker was arrested and charged with five counts of felony motor vehicle homicide. But today, the life and the faith and the obedience of Jameson and Catherine was celebrated at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis.

John Piper was asked to deliver the pastoral prayer, and here's what he said. Would you pray with me? O Lord, God of might and mercy and mystery. You have driven the arrows of your quiver into the breast of your people, your beloved. You have filled our throat with bitterness and gall.

You have made our teeth grind on gravel and laid us down with wounds in the ashes of dreams. You have taken away our sleep and replaced our gladness with groaning. You have covered us with shadows and the shadows of those we love, and we have reached out in vain to touch their bodies.

Happiness has fled through the window where the rain pours in. Peace has put her hand on the latch, and endurance wavers at the threshold of our soul. A voice is heard like Rachel's, lamentation and bitter weeping. Where is the comfort for her children because they are no more? You have spared us, us, who have lived out the fullness of our days through no merit of our own, who would happily have finished our course and taken their place, but you have not spared even the children or the valiant young lovers, your most loyal servants.

O Lord, our eyes are on you. We do not look to another for hope, to you alone, to you we cry. Remember our affliction, remember the bitter wormwood and the gall. You have not made us drink this cup in vain. Peace we call to mind, and therefore we have hope.

Your steadfast love, O Lord, never ceases. Your mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. You alone, O Lord, are our portion, and therefore we will hope in you. You are good to those who wait for you, to the soul who seeks you.

You are good today, and you were good last Sunday. So we are waiting. We are looking for the salvation of the Lord. We are not running from the yoke of this dark providence or throwing off the burden of your good sovereignty. We are waiting and looking for the yoke to be made easy and the burden light.

You do not hide yourself forever. Though you cause grief, you will have compassion according to the abundance of your steadfast love, for you do not afflict from your heart or grieve the children of men. We know your heart, O God, for there is nothing in the world more bright, more blazing, more terrible, more beautiful, more bloody, more hopeful than the revelation of your heart in the death and triumph of your Son, Jesus.

Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. Yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted, but he was pierced for our transgressions, he was wounded for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. For we, like sheep, have gone astray, we've turned every one to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

This is the great and glorious rock where we stand or lie, prostrate, and on which we give thanks for the lives of Jameson and Catherine and Ezra and Violet and Calvin, who did not count their lives to be more valuable than obedience. We praise you that they did not snatch a few vain years of life on this earth in exchange for allegiance to their King, but set their faces like flint toward Japan in finishing their course in the ministry they had received from the Lord Jesus.

And we praise you they did finish it, like your Apostle Paul, who wrote from Rome, "I have finished my course," though he never got to Spain. We stand on this mighty rock of Christ and his shed blood for our sins and the sins of the Powell's family, and on this victorious triumph over death, and standing on this rock we pray for these parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, who sit with pieces of thread in their hands from a fabric of life woven from the womb and then consumed.

Father, we ask that you would sustain in their hearts, as we have already seen, an unshakable confidence that the countless hours of investment in Jameson and Catherine and the children were not in vain. Because your promise in 1 Corinthians 15, 58, that their labors were not in vain, is built on a mighty "therefore," and on the mighty, glorious, greatest foundation of the best chapter in the Bible about the resurrection of Jesus and his people from the dead.

And we pray for these brothers and sisters, the brothers and sisters of Jameson and Catherine, that in spite of the sudden and horrific severing of priceless sibling ties, they will feel the unbreakable bond that binds them through the brotherhood of Jesus, who said, "Who are my brothers and sisters?

Here are my brothers and sisters. Never does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother." Lord, cause this family to know and feel this circle is not broken. And I pray for the cousins, these children, oh God. Make the risen, living, reigning Jesus real to them.

And as they taste what we could wish no child would ever have to taste, grant them to know and feel that the arms of Jesus are strong and that in his arms all are well. For he did not promise, "I will be with you to the end of your life," but to the end of the age in death and life.

And Father, I pray for the young people in this room and around the world who remain, that they would find the love of their lives, their Catherine, their Jameson, and embrace together the second proposal that Jameson made to his beloved, to lead the family in obedience whether it is life or death or discomfort or disappointment, to take up our cross just as he did to suffer and die.

Lord, in the name of Jesus and by the blood of these five, I ask, raise up, raise up a legion of replacements for the global glory of his imperial majesty, Jesus Christ. Forbid that any of your children when they hear this news would waste their lives on trifles. And again, Lord, we pray for Tony Wheatley, whose head is covered with shame, whose hands are stained with blood.

And we stand in awe that the heart of this family is not a vengeful heart. And we pray that Mr. Wheatley will find the one and only remedy for shame and guilt, Jesus. And we ask that in time, through Christ, he would make his way to heaven and know the indescribable miracle of reconciliation with those already there.

And finally, we pray for Japan, that the great idols of gold and silver and material success would fall before the blood of this family, that these five, even these three little ones who have now grown to the fullness of their glory and the perfection of beauty, not through the trials of three score and ten, but in the twinkling of an eye, that these all, these five might be found among the champions of the victory of the gospel in Japan.

In the name of Jesus and his great mercy and for his glory, we pray. Amen. That was John Piper's funeral prayer today at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis at the funeral of Jameson and Catherine Powles and their three young children, Ezra, Violet, and Calvin, all laid to rest today.

Please keep their families and extended families and their many friends in your prayers today. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.