How to Witness to Someone Who Has Lost a Loved One

“Grief” is a very special word we reserve to describe human emotions when we tragically lose a loved one. If we are dismissed from a job, we might use the word “devastated” to describe our state of mind, but it would be overkill to say that we were brought to grief. Grief is never good. This is despite the “Good grief!” oxymoronic euphemism made famous by the Charlie Brown cartoon strip.

Then again, if you’re anything like me, you will be almost grief-stricken at the thought of sharing the gospel with someone who has just lost a loved one. Your fears will whisper something like this:

This dear woman just lost her beloved husband after he suffered a long illness. It was well known that he was a womanizer (and an atheist) who was so bitter against God that he was blaspheming on his deathbed. Yet she still loved him. And now she is coming to see me. My secretary said she wants to talk about how a person gets to Heaven. How am I going to talk about sin, Judgment Day, and the reality of Hell when the elephant in the room is that her precious husband almost certainly ended up there?

If you can identify with that scenario, I have two comforting thoughts. The first is the memory of an experience I had recently with a middle-aged woman on the Huntington Beach pier. She agreed to come on camera to do an interview about the afterlife, and just before I turned the camera on, she said that the subject was appropriate because her husband had just died. That sparked the dreaded whispering of my fears. But I soon discovered that there was something overriding her grief. It was her own personal fear of death. Losing her husband had put it on steroids, and she was so relieved to find God has destroyed death through the gospel. The good news gave her an oil of joy in place of her mourning. And it was a relief for me because the last thing I wanted to do was to add to her grief.

“if we care about the lost, we have to warn them about Judgment Day so they will put on the Lord Jesus Christ.”

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The second comforting thought is this. You’re sitting in a small plane that you know is about to crash. You have put on a parachute, and you have great consolation that you’re not going to go down with the plane. The man next to you hasn’t been told the plane is about to crash. He thinks all is well. He does, however, have a broken leg (in a cast), which is still causing him a great deal of pain. As you think of his fate—the fact that he’ll be jumping out of a plane 10,000 feet up without a parachute, you think to yourself, “This man is already in pain. I don’t want to cause him to have anxiety on top of this by telling him about the jump. I will therefore just let him die a horrible death.”

What a ludicrous thought! You, of course, care about this man, and so you have to warn him about the jump and the offer of the parachute. And if we care about the lost, we have to warn them about Judgment Day so they will put on the Lord Jesus Christ. Your hope is that any pains they already have won’t distract them from your sobering message.

And that’s the dilemma we have. Either we choose love, or we choose fear.

How, then, can you share the gospel without compromise with this dear woman? Invite a friend and take her to lunch. After the small talk, ask her, “Do you think there’s life after death?” This is how I begin almost every witnessing encounter. If you’re not sure where to take it from there, check out our Living Waters YouTube channel.