I want to enter death tired. I want to have spent what energy God has apportioned me. The cross-country races that were most satisfying to me when I was young were not the ones I won most easily but the ones that took everything I had to win. Weariness produced by hard, diligent labor is a reward, not a curse. An eternal rest awaits all who know Christ, so why are we preoccupied with rest now?
Death’s Comfort
Death can be a consoling thought for those who face particularly difficult losses or trials in this world. Fénelon reminded us, “St. Paul recommends to all Christians that they console themselves together in the thought of death.” 12
Christians, above all people, have reason to be consoled through death. Although we are last on earth, we will be first in heaven. Those who mock our faith and have a sadistic pleasure in polluting our collective soul with their perversion won’t have a voice in heaven. The lost loved ones we miss so much are waiting for us on the other side of time. Our disabilities or broken-down bodies won’t torment us in heaven. Instead, we’ll rejoice as we meet new and improved versions of ourselves without the aches and pains and without the propensity to sin.
And even more importantly, death ushers us face-to-face into the fulfillment of the cry of our hearts—fellowship with the one true God—and this is our greatest consolation of all. All sincere Christians experience at least a bit of loneliness because we long for a more intimate walk with our God—a walk that we will realize beyond our dreams once we pass the threshold of eternity.
To experience the pain of death is normal and healthy. Jesus, after all, wept at the death of Lazarus. But death can also bring hope, not for what it is, but for what God promises us on the other side. The Christian life doesn’t make complete sense without the consoling thought of eternal life. Paul himself said we should be pitied above all others if the Christian faith is only for this temporal world (1 Corinthians 15:19). John Calvin said we haven’t matured spiritually at all if we don’t actively look forward to the day of our death.
Keeping Death Alive
When I lived in Virginia, I occasionally attended a Wednesday Communion service at an Episcopal church that dates back to the eighteenth century. As is common with many older churches, the building is surrounded by a graveyard. Every week I walked past the grave markers on my way in and out.
That short walk did almost as much for me as the service itself. I was reminded as I faced the second half of the week that one day, my body, my bones, would be lying in the ground. My work on earth will be done. What will matter then? What should matter now in light of that?
I am fond of old graveyards—not in a morbid way, but in a way that inspires me like nothing else. I want to use death the way Thomas à Kempis used it.
Happy is he that always hath the hour of his death before his eyes, and daily prepareth himself to die…When it is morning, think thou mayest die before night; and when evening comes, dare not to promise thyself the next morning. Be thou therefore always in a readiness, and so lead thy life that death may never take thee unprepared. 13
William Law urged that we make the subject of death the focus of our prayers every evening.
The subject that is most proper for your [evening] prayers is death. Let your prayers therefore then be wholly upon it, reckoning up all the dangers, uncertainties, and terrors of death; let them contain everything that can affect and awaken your mind into just apprehensions of it. Let your petitions be all for right sentiments of the approach and importance of death, and beg of God that your mind may be possessed with such a sense of its nearness that you may have it always in your thoughts, do everything as in sight of it, and make every day a day for preparation for it.
Represent to your imagination that your bed is your grave…Such a solemn resignation of yourself into the hands of God every evening and parting with all the world as if you were never to see it anymore, and all this in the silence and darkness of the night, is a practice that will soon have excellent effects upon your spirit. 14
Scupoli urged the remembrance of death by using one of the most common aspects of living: “When walking, think how each step brings you one step nearer to death.” 15
Another way I keep death alive is by living in the communion of saints. I’ll post a picture here or a quote there of someone whose faith and life has encouraged me as a reminder that work has an end. If the world can get by without a Dietrich Bonhoeffer or a Blaise Pascal (both died in their thirties), it can get by without me—and one day it will. I have a limited time to use, and it may be much shorter than I realize.
When contemporary saints die, let’s benefit from their deaths as much as we benefitted from their lives. The passing of Dr. Klaus Bockmuehl, who mentored me in seminary, gave me great pause and still touches me today, two decades later. Wise shoppers clip coupons. Wise Christians clip obituaries.
But the supreme way for a Christian to keep the thought of death alive is, of course, to remember the crucifixion of our Lord. Jesus died proclaiming, “It is finished.” What a wonderful and triumphant way to die—knowing that you’ve completed the task you were sent here for. What is your “it”? Determine what you must accomplish so that at the hour of your death you can look up to heaven and echo the apostle Paul’s words: “The time has come for my departure. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me” (2 Timothy 4:6-8).
Just before my family moved from one state to another, Gordon Dunn, a dear missionary in his eighties, invited Lisa and me over for a good-bye dinner. As the night wore on, Gordon pulled me aside and opened up his well-worn Bible to Acts 26:19, where Paul tells Agrippa, “I was not disobedient to the vision from heaven.”
“Gary,” Gordon said as he looked me in the eye, “at the end of your life, will you be able to say, as Paul did, that you were not disobedient to the vision given you from heaven?”
I’ve never forgotten that conversation. I particularly try to remember it—as well as Christ’s words on the cross—every time I participate in the Lord’s Supper. Every time we take Communion, we should do so with the awareness that, just as Christ’s work on earth had a beginning and an end (as He ministered in a human body), so the mission He has given us has a beginning and an end.
One of my editors told me of a fellow writer, not well known in the United States, who died at a relatively young age. He had worked tirelessly to get Christians more actively involved in the arts. His life was a testimony to God’s grace and creativity. By all accounts, this man had been a faithful husband, a good father, and an earnest servant of the gospel.
Many tears were shed at the funeral for a man most thought should have had several more decades to live. Yet as his casket was picked up by the pall bearers and carried down the church aisle, something curious happened: Mourners turned into celebrators. The crowd erupted into a spontaneous standing ovation. This was a life well lived; a life in which death revealed a victory, not a defeat; a life marked by faithfulness and service. It deserved a raucous cheer.
May we all live in such a way that our passing evokes a standing ovation, not only by believers on earth but also by the saints and inhabitants of heaven.
Keeping death alive is one of the most fruitful spiritual disciplines we can ever practice. “Death is the destiny of every man; the living should take this to heart” (Ecclesiastes 7:2).
This article about remembrance of death originally appeared here.
