Death
DEATH
The Most Solemn Pause of All: Death
Job 19:29; Philippians 1:21-25; 2 Timothy 4:6-8
[The most] awful solemn pause of all is death. Our work is stopped, our plans are broken off, our ties with others are snapped, the pitcher is broken at the well—just when it was going to draw water for someone. This is the most devastating pause of all. But is it? It may be the pause that will turn out to be only life’s sweetest, gladdest music in the making.
It was so with Alice Means, one of the rarest missionaries we have ever had in India. What an amazing life she was living: building, teaching, making leaders! And then cancer struck her. She thought she might get to America before she died, but was stopped in Bombay by the doctors, knowing she would never reach America. This is the letter she wrote me from the Bombay hospital, after knowing she would be denied even the privilege of going to her homeland to die:
How thankful I am for all these years of perfect, abounding health! What a happy life I have had! Let me tell you of the experience of these last two months. With a host of others I am working along in a great field, digging, sowing, weeding, watering, never noticing I had reached the edge, until I heard, “Alice, that’s enough, come over here and sit down a bit.” I looked up and there stood Jesus smiling at me. I went over and sat down on the grass by him, and he said—“You have been busy working and have not had time for all those intimacies that go with a great friendships, such as I want with you. Come along and let us walk together here.” He put his arm through mine and we walked along an avenue all covered with grass and flowers, and the birds were singing. Oh, it is beautiful! As I look down toward the river it is a little misty. But I know he will see me through that. Even now I am forever with my Lord. His peace within me is wonderful. Nothing can separate us now. It is heaven. That’s all. The doctors and the nurses cannot understand how I can calmly discuss my condition and outlook.
Who can say that this pause of death to her was not music in the making? And vaster.
Victorious Living
(Week 35, Tuesday)
Making All Things Work Together for Good
Romans 8:28-39; Philippians 1:12-14
Christianity gives a set of the soul, so that when trouble and frustration and disaster strike one, the Christian goes up, with soul wings set in that direction. The same disaster strikes another, and, with soul attitudes tilted earthward, the person writhes in anguish in the dust. Death strikes a home, and in it leaves bitterness and frustration; in another, calm and quiet victory and greater usefulness.
Abundant Living
(Week 41, Wednesday)
The Way Makes a Difference in Death
Philippians 3:20-21; 2 Thessalonians 1:4-6
A friend of mine, a layperson, was asked to conduct a funeral, so he went to the New Testament to see how Jesus conducted funerals. He discovered “that Jesus didn’t conduct funerals—he conducted resurrections.” Jesus never conducts funerals of anything. He conducts resurrections of everything! For everything in his hands lives!
The Way
(Week 35, Wednesday)
“I Can Take It—Can You?”
Psalm 42:1-7
The Brazilians have a saying: “God can write straight even on a crooked line.” The lines of your life may be crooked, not make sense, but God can write straight, can bring good out of crooked events. The outer events of Jesus’ life were crooked, but God wrote redemption on them.
The Way
(Week 35, Friday)
A Ladder to Serenity
Philippians 20:29; Acts 2:17
A woman said in one of our Ashrams, “I am about to jell into the kind of a person I don’t want to be.” Many of us are about to “jell,” to become fixed as the kind of person we would not like to be. How can we remain flexible and growing, even through old age? Here is how to reach an old age with power and poise:
Surrender into the hands of God your fear of old age and death. This is basic. For if you hold to an inner fear of old age and death, then all attempts at victory are whistling in the dark to keep up courage. It will be putting make-up on faded cheeks.
Go aside and on bended knee say to God, “You have promised to deliver all those who, through fear of death, were subject to lifelong bondage; now I will be in fear of old age and in bondage unless you take out this fear. That you may take it out I surrender it, surrender it once and for all. It is gone, gone forever. I thank you.” And believe that God takes it away.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 39, Wednesday)
Philippians 4:11-13
We pursue the thought of being thankful that we can be thankful for the worst that can happen. An outstanding philosopher, giving his philosophy of life, ended his volume by saying: “Goodbye, dear reader, I’m going out in the garden and play with my children.” That was the center of his life, the simple joys of human relations. My inner comment was: But suppose your children should be taken away by death? Then? You have built your nest too low; the floods may reach it and sweep it away. Your philosophy of life is vulnerable. In order not to be vulnerable you must be able to be thankful for the loss of that relationship, because you have a relationship that cannot be touched by any human happening.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 44, Monday)
Nothing Is Solved That Is Evaded
Matthew 8:26; 2 Corinthians 7:5
Perhaps the underlying fear is the fear of death. Many go through life with the undertone of a fear of death. Life is spoiled by forebodings about the tomorrow that may hold death within it. Or many just put it out of mind, refusing to think about it. . . . But death is not evaded by evasions. As someone has said, “The refusal to confront death might almost be called the ‘twentieth-century evasion,’ for it is the distinctive mark of the modern mind.” Nothing is solved that is evaded. It simply comes back as hidden complexes within, an undertone of fear that puts a discord at the center of life. Fears we try to evade come back to pervade.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 23, Saturday)
Look Fear Straight in the Face
Isaiah 43:1-2
Death is one of the least of the calamities that can happen to the Christian. By surrender of the self, the Christian has already died. What can death now do to? The Christian has already died!
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 24, Tuesday)
On Transforming Death
Revelation 21:3-4
We must now look a little longer at the central cause of our gloom: death. For unless we conquer the fear of death—the central fear—we are subject to an unrelieved gloom. The concern regarding death throws a shadow across all our hopes and achievements—across us—unless we see light there.
But suppose there no light there? If the worst came to the worst and there is no future life, is all lost? No, if I come to the end of this life and look out and see nothing but a vast blank, a vast oblivion, I shall look the universe in the face and say: “Well, I thought better of you. I thought this thing that I have in Christ had the feel of the eternal upon it, but now I see it didn’t. Well, I don’t repent that I was a Christian. It was a better way to live. I’ve had a brief experience of heaven, though denied an eternal one. I shout my victory in the face of oblivion.” That’s not rhetoric. I mean that.
Arthur John Gossip, in a vivid passage, depicts Jesus leaving the world, and after being gone some time, he returns weeping bitterly: “Oh,” he says, “it’s all a mistake. I misled you. I told you there was a heavenly Father back of things, but I’ve explored the entire universe and there is no heavenly Father. It’s all blank. I’m sorry, I’m sorry I misled you” [no published source found]. What would we say if we heard that announcement fall upon our incredulous ears? Well, after the first shock was over, I’d turn to Jesus and say, “With You, I’m sorry too. But I’ve still got you. Your way of life has worked. I’m glad I followed it. It’s been wonderful to live in company with you. I do not repent or regret; I am full of gratitude. If there is nothing after death, it does fill me with awe and gratitude that I had such a wonderful companion on my way to oblivion.”
Will such a thing happen? If so, then everything we know about the universe would be reversed. The conservation of values would be obliterated. The highest value is character, and if that value is obliterated by death, the universe adds up to nonsense.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 44, Tuesday)
The Death Fear
Proverbs 1:24-27
Many go through life with the single aim to avert death. And yet how completely futile the attempt is! It is bound to fail. “As certain as death and taxes” is pretty certain.
There are three reasons for this attempt to avert death. (1) We are afraid of the unknown. (2) We have not lived our lives the way they should have been lived, so we hesitate to go where “We shall know as we are known” (see 1 Cor 13:12). (3) We are afraid that death is equivalent to extinction. The urge to live is strong within us. Some of these are contradictory, but then life is often a contradiction. . . .
Many go through life spoiling it because of a fear of death. It overshadows all they do. This verse expresses it: “And release from thraldom [bondage] those who lay under a life-long fear of death” (Heb 2:15 Moffatt). Look at the terror in those words: “thraldom . . . lay under . . . life-long fear of death.”
Is this necessary? Are we bound to be tossed from one horn of the dilemma to the other, namely, between the life fear and the death fear? Can there be a release from both fears?
It is to the glorious possibility of freedom from both fears that we now turn. The word “release” in the above sentence points the way to an open door.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 5, Saturday)
2 Corinthians 5:12-15
Jesus reacted constructively to what happened to him. He took the worst thing that could happen to him, namely, his death, and turned it into the best thing that could happen to the world, namely, its redemption. We must learn the secret of reacting constructively.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 12, Friday)
Plus Ultra
1 Corinthians 15:51-58
But set death in the center of the Christian conception of life with an eternity of growth stretching beyond, and death really has no sting.
There was a sign at Gibralter with the words “Ne Plus Ultra” (“Nothing Beyond”) on it. That was before the new world was discovered. Then when it was discovered, they had to change it by rubbing out “Ne” to “Plus Ultra” (Everything Beyond). Before Jesus rose from the tomb, over the portals of death was written, “Nothing Beyond”; after he arose, it had to be written “Everything Beyond.” For in Jesus death is not even an interruption; it is a larger beginning.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 52, Wednesday)
Any Prods to Perfection There?
Revelation 21:22-26
We are now being compelled to look for an eternal growth. Everything sensible points in that direction.
I believe that we begin in heaven where we leave off here. This means that rewards in heaven are not arbitrarily given for faithful service to God. The reward is in the quality of being we take with us. We will start in heaven with the capacity for the enjoyment of God than we have developed here. The greater the capacity we take with us, the greater the enjoyment of God, hence the greater the reward. Each will be enjoying God with the capacity we bring with us. Hence there can be no jealousy of another’s greater reward. We won’t even know others have a greater reward; only God and they will know that. Hence there can be no asking for bonuses or jostling for rewards.
There will be no first seats or peanut galleries; everyone will take from the Infinite what God’s capacity for taking will allow. Everyone’s cup will be full, but some cups will be larger. They made them so through the years.
Will heaven provide incentives to growth? In a perfect environment where is the stimulus? . . . Are there any prods to perfection [in heaven]? I do not know. Perhaps the prods are within us. We are made for perfection, and that inward prod will be eternally with us.
But the greatest prod will be the sight of God. When we see God with the veils off ourselves and off God, we will be so overwhelmed with longing to be like God that we will need no prods; this pull will be sufficient. Love will love us into its likeness.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 52, Friday)
We Shall Be Like Him
Colossians 1:9-12
Will there be tasks in heaven? If not, how could we grow? In almost all the Japanese schoolyards there is a statue of a boy with a load of wood on his back, walking along, reading an open book. Is that boy the eternal pilgrim? We will never cease to be like that boy. In our hands there will eternally be the Book of Life, and on our backs will be the eternal burdens to bear. Will there be no kindergartens in heaven where we will be able to teach the beginners in the Way? And no postgraduate courses for us to take? And are there no other worlds to be evangelized? Give me twenty-four hours of rest in heaven, and I’ll ask for an assignment to one of those worlds! The call of the beyond is upon me now. And then?
Will we ever grow and grow until we become God? I think not, and I hope not. In Psalm 8:5, we read: “Yet thou hast made him little less than divine” (Moffatt). That “little less” is important. We are finite and God is the Infinite. The finite will infinitely approach the Infinite, but we will never become the Infinite. In that growth of the finite in the image of the Infinite will be our eternal happiness.
But I don’t want to be God. I just want to love God. And I couldn’t love God if I were God. To love God is enough for time and eternity. I want nothing else. I don’t want to be lost in the Ocean of Being. I want to be myself, a redeemed self, which will produce humility; and yet I want to look at my Savior, which will produce the incentive for growth. For when I see him, I see what I am and what I can be in him.
I saw a number of ropes going out from big trees in the forests of Japan to the little trees around. It meant that the big trees were pulling the little trees around them, which were inclined to crookedness, into straightness.
Jesus is the Big Tree, planted in eternity. I am bound to him by cords of love, and he is pulling me into straightness and will do so both now and forever. I’m out for eternal growth.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 52, Saturday)
“Jesus Began” Almost Everything
Luke 4:16-21
The test of a person’s life is this: Is the person dead when dead? Or does that person live on with greater power after death? Judged by that test, Jesus has really lived; for he was more powerful after his death than before. During his lifetime, through incessant teaching and preaching, he gathered at the highest estimate “five hundred brothers and sisters” (1 Cor 15:6 CEB); but after his death he drew, through people filled with himself, five thousand disciples in a single day.
Mastery
(Week 1, Tuesday)
Acts 2:46-47
If we fail to win others to Christ and to the church, there will be no church in the future. When we of the church today die, the church dies with us, unless the church of tomorrow has been won in the meantime. If you, as a member of the church, fail to win someone else, you have a part in the death of the church. If others fail with you there will be no Christian church one hundred years from now. Every year your church loses many from its membership through unconcern, change of address, or death. If you do not win at least that many new Christians, your church is dying.
Christian Maturity
(Week 45, Monday)
Death Becomes Life
Spiritual death, which separates us from God, the source of our life, and which separate us from our highest selves and our greatest possibilities, is a calamity. But physical death to those who are in Christ is not a calamity but an opportunity. It is a part of redemption, the redemption of our bodies. It is a sowing, a sowing of a mortal body and reaping an immortal body; it is a sowing of a diseased, broken-down body and the reaping of disease-free, death-free, decay-free body. So death cannot separate; it can only integrate.
In Christ
(Week 8, Friday)
Peace . . . in Christ Jesus
There is the peace of Christ. It is a peace of adequacy, a peace of assurance that you are adequate for anything, for you can not only bear everything, but can use everything that comes your way—good, bad, or indifferent. This is the peace without illusions. It says pain, sorrow, sickness, and death are real. There is a reality within that faces this reality without and transforms it into character and achievement, hence peace!
In Christ
(Week 46, Wednesday)
Sadness: A Christian Virtue
The person who is in Christ is in a heavenly place come sickness, come health, come life, come death.
In Christ
(Week 32, Monday)
I Take a Bite, You Take a Bite
Luke 4:1-4
Jesus “taste[d] death for everyone” (Heb 2:9), but he also tasted life with everyone. He asks us to do nothing but what he himself does.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 3, Tuesday)
Illustrations That Illustrate
John 14:5-7
Jesus did not merely tell us that death need have no terrors for us; he rose from the dead, and lo, now the tomb glows with light.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 51, Friday)