Some of the purest, most healing worship rises when God is bringing you through what you never imagined you’d have to walk through. Worship in grief is uniquely powerful.
The morning Dan died, my home filled with neighbors, friends, and family. I remember walking into my kitchen where several women were taking care of the food and dishes people were bringing and hearing one of my best friends say, “We need worship music” as she popped a CD into the player.
Later that morning, two other friends called me out of my bedroom to the foot of the stairs. “You need to hear this,” they said. My teens and tweens were upstairs with some of their friends who’d come to be with them in grief. They’d picked up the guitars and were singing worship songs hours after their dad had suddenly gone to heaven.
In the following weeks and months, worship was key in my grief. Certain songs took on new meaning or echoed the cries of my heart. And worship undid me on Sundays. The song set seemed hand-selected for me, every phrase unleashing the deepest worries and prayers of my shattered heart. There, wrapped in the presence of God, my messy mix of emotions triggered hot tears for all that was lost and the hope for what God had for me.
Our grieving hearts need worship. Let’s look at 5 ways worship in grief brings comfort.
5 Ways Worship in Grief Comforts
1. Worship is lament.
Lament is voicing our hardest emotions and questions to God and choosing to trust God’s comfort and faithfulness. It shows up as quiet tears, audible cries, and choking sobs. But Biblical lament isn’t tears alone. Nearly half of the psalms, which were written to be sung, are psalms of lament. The classic hymn “It is Well” was written after deep loss and the hymn “Abide with Me” is laced with lament. Many contemporary Christian songs express the anguish and pain of loss while also declaring trust in God.
2. Worship is war.
The enemy is palpable in our pain. He comes to steal, kill, and destroy and works overtime when we’re at our weakest. Worship helps us fight his lies with the truth of who God is and how he cares for us. Worship reminds us that Jesus defeated death and that we have the hope of eternal life because of the cross. Worship invokes the powerful name of Jesus so that we have no fear we walk through the valley of the shadow of death.
3. Worship is prayer.
Sometimes our pain is so deep we can’t even put words around it. We desperately need God who alone can lift our despair, comfort us, and restore our joy. Worship is prayer when we have no words. Songs often express what we’re feeling. It brings us to the throne of grace where we find mercy and grace in time of need. Worship takes our eyes off our circumstance and onto God. When we’re so lost in pain we don’t even know how to pray, the Spirit can intercede in groanings too deep for words.
4. Worship is repentance.
When my heart broke open in grief, I knew I was in a good place for God to go ahead and clean it out. Broken before God, I was acutely aware of the junk in my heart. Suffering shakes us. It shows us the idols we’ve set up like control, self-sufficiency, ease, or status. It reveals where we’ve distorted the gospel and made faith out to be a transaction where God owes us a life free from trouble. It clarifies that life is short and this world is not our home. Worship brings us to a posture of humility and surrender to repent and re-align our heart to God’s.
5. Worship is praise.
It’s one thing to declare God is good when life is good. But when life falls apart, will we still bless God? Praising God through pain is a testimony to a watching world that our faith isn’t conditional on circumstances, but anchored in God who’s sovereign over our circumstances. God is worthy and proved how wide and long and high and deep his love for us is on the cross. When we worship God in the storm we renew our hope. Lamentations 3:22-23 says, “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”
Some of the purest, most healing worship rises when God is bringing you through what you never imagined you’d have to walk through. Because worship in grief is uniquely powerful.
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