On Grieving When Your Loved One's Faith Was Ambiguous

What I've learned three years in...

A couple of months ago, I passed the three year anniversary of my brother Jake’s death. When his vehicle veered off the road into a ditch, he left behind a wife, three kids, two parents, and me. Jake was my little brother and only sibling. Every death has its own weight, but I think it’s fair to say there is something unique about the unexpected, tragic death of a loved one. There is no preparation for it. You don’t walk down a gradual slope, unsure of exactly when it will end but knowing it’s coming soon. It’s more like falling off a cliff. You simply get the phone call and all of the air gets sucked out of the room. You experience a kind of unraveling you didn’t know was possible.

Providentially, in January of 2023, a couple of months before Jake died, the Lord led me to get serious about reading. So in April, as my heart struggled to hang on amidst the 9.5 Richter scale earthquake that is those first months of loss, I decided to read a number of books on grieving. The one that served me the most was Tim Challies’ Seasons of Sorrow. In that book, Challies shares about the sudden, unexpected, and tragic death of his son, Nick. Tim’s wrestlings with the pain of grief and his learning to uphold God’s providence and goodness in the midst of something so hard was a balm to my soul. I am profoundly grateful for that book.

“Somehow it still wouldn’t shock me if my phone rang and I saw his name on the display and heard his voice. I’m hovering in this place between belief and disbelief, between certainty and doubt. I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to feel.”

Seasons of Sorrow - pg. 13

Yet as I read it, I experienced a dissonance between the grief Tim was processing and my own. In Seasons of Sorrow, Tim finds comfort in the reality that he will see his son again when they are both in the presence of Christ. He has no questions or doubts about this. That confidence is a gift I am glad the Lord gave to Tim and his family. If you have family members walking faithfully with the Lord and with the church - especially your immediate family of children, parents, or siblings - God has showered you with a grace I would beg you not to take for granted. When they die (and they will), you will grieve, but not as those who have no hope (1 Thess. 4:13).

In the days and weeks following Jake’s death, I wondered if I could rightly and responsibly hold onto that 1 Thessalonians 4:13 hope. Because my brother’s faith was tragically ambiguous.

The Valleys and Mountains, the Mountains and Valleys

In high school, my brother overdosed and I visited him in the ER for the first time. It would be the first of numerous times his addiction nearly claimed his life. The subsequent decade and a half were an emotional roller coaster for my family and those who loved him. If you’ve known a substance addict, you understand what this is like. You want to help your loved one slay that wicked, evil, demonic dragon of addiction, but you do not know how. Jake spent much of his adult life in and out of recovery programs, hospitals, and the church.

I describe our life with Jake as an emotional roller coaster because it was not merely a long march through the valley of the shadow of death. We ascended mountains with him, too. Shortly after high school, Jake became highly involved in a local church that loved him, served him, and did not see him as defined by his addiction. They supported him in ways that I, an hour away on a college campus, could not. Jake embraced the gospel and gave his life to Christ. When his church had a baptism, he asked me to baptize him along with one of his pastors. That was one of the most beautiful moments in my life. I have many other fond memories of this season: Jake directing a Christmas play with the children’s ministry of his church; getting his first good job; singing All Glory Be to Christ at his wedding; the announcement of him and his wife’s first baby on the way. The corner felt turned. We knew Jake still faced temptation, but it felt like something new was happening. The light at the end of the tunnel ceased to be a pinprick. Fullness of life in Jake’s story felt possible for the first time in a long time.

The mountaintop, however, descended back into the valley. For whatever reason, Jake re-opened the door to his addiction and let it back in. Over the course of several years it wreaked untold havoc on his life, his marriage, his children, and his relationship with the living God. He pulled away from the church and from Christ. The Bible he once claimed to be God’s word he claimed for a season to be a lie. When he and I would get together, he felt in many ways like a different person. Jake was gone and replaced by an imposter. Who was this man? What happened to my brother who loved Jesus and walked by faith?

Yet in the year before Jake died, there were once again signs of a shift in him. A good shift. While he was in a rehab facility in Milwaukee, he decided to attend a gospel-preaching church with a couple other guys in his program. I was in the process of moving down to Kenosha just south of him, so on one of my drives he and I got coffee. When I asked him about where he was at spiritually, he gave me an answer I didn’t know what to do with. He claimed to, again, believe in Jesus, but he questioned the authority of the Bible on some significant points. I left that conversation deeply confused about whether I should be encouraged or concerned.

Jake continued to struggle with substances, but he also seemed to be moving increasingly towards the Lord. He got reconnected with some good people at his old church. He expressed a desire for the two of us to spend more time together. He seemed gentler and more genuine. Yet it was hard for me to trust that any of the change I saw was real. During a visit for one of my kids’ birthdays, Jake told me that he felt a burden to lead his family spiritually but was unsure of how to do that amidst all of the turmoil he’d caused. He wanted my advice. I don’t remember what I told him, but I don’t think it was helpful. At that point, I was emotionally exhausted from years of riding the emotional rollercoaster with Jake. I was stuck in a heart posture of frustration towards my brother. So I gave him a couple sentences of half-hearted wisdom. I’m sure he could tell I wasn’t taking him seriously. We changed the subject and moved on to more safe, surface level conversation.

That was the last time I saw him.

Ambiguous Faith

I recount all of that history to say that when my sister-in-law called and told me that my brother was dead, I did not, amidst the sorrow, immediately hold in my heart the comforting thought of I know he’s with the Lord. Nor was I assaulted with the certainty that my brother was eternally separated from the Lord. I honestly did not know the state of my brother’s soul. I knew where I hoped he was. I knew Jake was aware of the gospel. I knew he had tasted of God’s goodness. I knew he had many believers in his life who had loved him and pointed him to Christ. And I knew something had been happening in his heart shortly before he died that had drawn him back into some of the Christian community he’d walked away from for a couple of years. But I could not help but have doubts.

If you’ve lost a loved one whose faith was unclear, no two stories are the same. Every thread in the tapestry is unique. The things I can point to in my brother’s life as reasons to hope or question will be different than yours. But even so, I want to share three affirmations that have helped me over the past three years in processing Jake’s death and thinking about his ambiguous faith:

Affirm the word of God, affirm the justice of God, affirm the hope of God.

Affirm the Word of God

The Bible is not a book of opinions. It is not one way of many possible ways of interpreting the world around us. Every word of the Bible has been breathed out by the Holy Spirit, from “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” to “The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all. Amen.”^⁠¹ “Every word of God proves true,” says Proverbs 30:5, and this includes both the welcome truths (God’s love, grace, mercy, patience) and the hard truths (God’s wrath, judgment, the reality of sin). Perhaps the hardest truth for us to embrace is the doctrine of hell, and it becomes all the harder when it comes to the soul of someone you built LEGOs with.

Yet the Lord is clear:

“31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left….“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels… 46 And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Do I call my Lord a liar because I hate the idea of a loved one rejecting Jesus and facing eternity in hell? Do I place the King who shed his blood for me underneath my own sense of justice and call him a moral monster? Or do I believe, as God’s word clearly articulates, that every person on this planet, including me, is dead in their sin and that the only way to be saved is by believing in the gospel and embracing Christ as both Savior and Lord? Will I uphold God’s word as true? Or will I call him a deceiver?

When you are wrestling with a loved one’s ambiguous faith, the answer is not to try to change God’s words. There is no life to be found there. Even in the tragedy of death, we must cling to the truth of the Holy Spirit inspired Scriptures. All of the Scriptures. The Bible is the foundation from which we think about everything, including the death of a loved one.

Affirm the Justice of God

If you affirm the word of God, it means that you will affirm the justice of God. It means accepting, as painful as it is, that if your loved one rejected Christ as their Savior, there are eternal consequences for that rejection. As we just said above, all who face God having rejected Jesus face him without the hope of Jesus. The wages of sin is death - “eternal punishment,” as Jesus himself describes it. That is God’s justice.

And yet…here also is God’s justice - “whoever believes in him will not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). Ambiguous faith is not the same thing as an all-out rejection of the gospel. Many of us will carry the burden of burying family members who clearly denied the Lord. That’s not the topic I’m addressing here. We are talking about ambiguous faith. Which means we are facing both reasons to doubt and reasons to hope.

Here’s what the justice of God accomplishes for all who put their faith in Jesus Christ: eternal security. This is the doctrine that tells us we cannot sin our way out of the grace of God once he has sealed us with his Spirit. It’s impossible.^⁠ Jesus himself makes this clear:

“My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.” (John 10:27–29, ESV)

If your loved one had faith in Christ, no matter how small or weak that faith was, Jesus himself gave them eternal life. That is an irrevocable gift. His promise is that they will never perish; that no one can snatch them out of his hands. Jesus holds them, the Father holds them, and the Spirit holds them by his seal (Eph. 1:13). For God to respond to your loved one’s sin by breaking his promise to hold them eternally in his hand would be unjust, and he is a God who commits no injustice. He is a God who does not lie (Heb. 6:18).

But in that passage, you may think to yourself, Jesus says that his sheep follow him. My loved one’s life was marked by so many faulty starts and lapses back into sin. I resonate with that objection. Again, we want to always affirm the words of God, not twist them. Here’s what I would ask you: what does Jesus mean by “follow him”? Well, you might say in response, it means to move in his direction. Exactly.

The Return of the Prodigal Son - Rembrandt

Let’s imagine, for a moment, the Lord’s parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15 and let’s add some non-inerrant texture to it. Having come to his senses after squandering his father’s inheritance, the Prodigal trudges his way towards home. As he rehearses in his mind what he will say when he sees his father’s face again, he thinks to himself, No, there’s no way he’ll take me back. He stops walking. He remembers some of his “friends” he met during his weeks of partying. Perhaps they’ll put him up for a night or two? He turns around, away from home. He walks a quarter of mile. A memory flashes across his mind of the time he accidentally broke an alabaster jar at home and lied about it. He remembers the truth coming out. He remembers his fears of his father’s wrath melting away before his father’s compassion; his father holding him as he cried. He remembers his father’s mercy.

What am I doing?! he asks. He shakes his head violently, like a drowsy man fighting off sleep, and turns around again, this time towards home. Towards the love, mercy, and grace of his father. Now, let’s say this happens several more times on the long journey as the Prodigal Son’s heart wages war within him. A quarter mile back. A half mile forward. On repeat. Where is he headed?

He’s headed home.

And if the Prodigal Son meets a deadly snake on one of his backward diversions?

He was still headed home. He is still his father’s son. No one can steal that identity from him, because it is an identity purchased by the blood of Jesus Christ.

I don’t know your loved one’s heart but I do know this: if they belonged to Christ, a season of rebellion did not unsave their soul any more than a season of faithfulness preserved their soul.

I closed my brother’s eulogy with these words, which I gladly stand by three years later:^⁠

If Jake, or me, or you, or anyone of us gets into heaven, it will not be because we held our lives together perfectly. It will not be because we were good spouses or good parents. It will not be because we attended a church faithfully. It will not be because we successfully overcame an addiction.

The only reason any person avoids the wrath of hell is the broken body and shed blood of Jesus Christ, who is the greatest Treasure and the most wonderful Person in the universe. He is the God my brother’s soul ached for and longed for, and I know that if he was here right now he would want me to tell you that Jesus is the only way forward for any of us.

Affirm the Hope of God

There is a well-worn phrase in 1 Corinthians 13 that has helped me over the past three years: “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” The third expression of love is the one that’s served me the most: love hopes all things.

What a beautiful phrase. 1 Corinthians 13 is one of the most textured portraits of love in the Bible. It captures how our hearts are supposed to relate to other people. It pictures what God intends to rise to the surface as we live side by side with other flawed humans (like us). And one of the virtues God desires to well up within our hearts is hope. A hope that hopes all things. What does that mean?

I think it means we become the kind of people who choose to see the potential in every human being we meet. Not “potential” in a kind of foolish, power-of-positive thinking way. Potential in the sense that we know what God is capable of doing in the human heart, because he’s done a miracle in us, and we fixate on that. We don’t ignore the thorns we see in others, but we have sharper eyes for the fruit.

When it comes to the ambiguous faith of a loved one who has died, this means we not only remember God’s justice, we remember that he is a God “who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4). We remember that God is love (1 John 4:8). When considering the myriad of reasons God might have had in taking his son, Tim Challies writes this:

“A little mind like mine cannot hope to put all the pieces together, to unweave the entire tapestry or make sense of the whole. But I can have complete confidence that it is all according to the good plan of a good God, a God whose heart is always love, whose purpose is always love, whose acts are always love, whose very nature is love” - Seasons of Sorrow, pg. 34

The God described in those sentences is the same God who ruled over the fate and faith of your loved one whose faith was unclear at times. His purposes, acts, and nature are love. That does not negate the very clear passages on the doctrine of hell. We must not fall into the heresy of universalism. But God’s character means that we should embrace hope where God has given us reasons to hope. If you find the needle quivering between the thorns you saw in your loved one’s life and the buds of good fruit and faith you saw growing, does the character of your Heavenly Father urge you towards hope of heaven or towards despair?

So, dear sister or brother, let me ask you: when you think back on your loved one’s days on this earth, do you see reasons to hope that they knew Christ?

One of the greatest comforts to me regarding my brother’s eternity is that he kept coming back to Jesus and the church, over and over. What I wrote above is a compressed summary of my story with Jake. I wanted to share only what is necessary to give you a picture of the heartache I experienced (and continue to experience). Jake had multiple seasons of walking away from the Lord and then coming back. But he kept coming back. Even when I was convinced he was done with Jesus, in the final months of his life he was seeking the Lord. He was turning towards the God he knew he needed. I believe my brother understood, at the depth of his soul, his need for Christ. And I believe the reason he kept coming back to Jesus is because Christ’s sheep know his voice and they follow him. They stumble. They stray. They even flee from the flock at times. But they keep coming back to the Shepherd.

And my brother did that.

Jake

What now?

Again, I do not know your loved one’s story. Only you know that. So what I would encourage you to do now is to take up the lifelong burden of grief and choose to live by faith. Bring your loved one’s fate to the Lord. Over and over again. Trust him with it. Surrender it to him. Ask him to help you place it in his all-wise, all-good, all-loving hands. Affirm the words of God, the justice of God, and the hope of God, and resolve to love and encourage and pursue those who are still with you on this side of eternity. Steward the relationships God has surrounded you with. Don’t retreat into yourself. Cling to your Good Shepherd and live for him. Remember that “God’s speciality is not bringing good from good, but good from bad” (Seasons of Sorrow, pg. 89). Even grief as great as this is still a thread in his tapestry.

As I close this article, know that my prayer for you is the prayer Tim prayed for his family as they walked through the valley of the shadow of death together:

“I pray that they would not forget their grief in the sense that they would refuse to be defined by it or be made useless to the Lord’s purposes because of it. I pray that they would remember their grief in the sense that it is now a part of their story and a part that has equipped them for more and better service to God. And I pray that they would press on through their grief, with hearts softened by loss, hands fitted by sorrow, feet running by faith, and arms always straining forward, always pressing on toward the goal for the prize for which God is calling them heavenward.” - Seasons of Sorrow, pg. 60

Onward and upward.

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1. In other words, every word from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21 - the entire scope of the Bible.