Greater than as soon as, I’ve had such shut calls with demise that I felt the thinness of the wall between this world and the subsequent. These moments on the sting of my mortality — whether or not underwater or in a battle zone — have been at first breathtaking with suddenness after which sobering with what-ifs. However I used to be too busy residing to assume a lot about dying, and shortly these shut calls have been within the rearview mirror.
Nevertheless, my newest demise menace isn’t any near-miss. Nor can I outrun it. Successive most cancers diagnoses in 2019, 2020, and 2021 have struck laborious. My state of affairs, although, isn’t any totally different from what all of us will face as a result of most cancers is simply one other option to die. And one kindness from God I’ve seen (and I can depend a lot of his kindnesses to me on this stretch of my journey) is that most cancers has given me a clearer deal with the end line.
I need to make each stride depend — every single day significant. I need to end sturdy. As Eric Liddell, the Olympic gold-medal sprinter turned missionary, famously stated, “I run the primary 2 hundred meters as laborious as I can. Then for the second 2 hundred meters, with God’s assist, I run tougher.” That’s how I need to run the race I’m in proper now.
Nonetheless, as I pen these traces, I do know I haven’t but completed my course, and I strongly really feel Spurgeon’s warning:
The trumpet nonetheless performs the notes of battle. You can not sit down and put the victory wreath in your head. You shouldn’t have a crown. You continue to should put on the helmet and carry the sword. You have to watch, pray, and struggle. Count on your final battle to be essentially the most tough, for the enemy’s fiercest cost is reserved for the tip of the day. (Beside Nonetheless Waters, 2)
I’m studying a lot by way of this expertise, and God is actually growing my religion; however I admit it’s an uneven work as a result of I’m typically a poor pupil. Fortunately, I’ve a affected person Instructor. So, as I proceed to press forward in my race, there are three issues I can inform you.
1. Quantity Your Days
The prayer of Moses in Psalm 90 is stuffed with breathtaking awe and surprise over the God who’s “from eternal to eternal” (verse 2). The Rock of Ages doesn’t age. He was God earlier than time, he’s God who enters time, and he will probably be God when all our clocks and calendars, histories and monuments aren’t any extra.
However then, in cosmic distinction, there’s one other type of breathtaking awe over simply how transient our time is. Moses says our lives are “like grass” (verse 5) — right here immediately and gone tomorrow. Even when we’re granted a full life with sufficient birthday candles to set off the smoke alarm, but the fireplace is extinguished with a breath, and we quickly “fly away” (verse 10). So caught between brevity and eternity, we ask God to “train us to quantity our days that we might get a coronary heart of knowledge” (verse 12). After all, none of us can add up upfront the variety of days we will probably be given. However what we’re to recollect is that there is a quantity, and we will’t add a single hour to it (Luke 12:25).
We might think about ending properly to appear like a life filled with years, maybe like Jacob’s. “When Jacob completed commanding his sons, he drew up his ft into the mattress and breathed his final and was gathered to his folks” (Genesis 49:33). That’s a pleasant hope however an unlikely state of affairs, since demise not often operates on our timetable, and we don’t know whether or not we will probably be given ninety years or nineteen. Our end traces typically come abruptly, with little or no warning. There could also be no residence stretch — solely Dwelling, as fast as a wink. And so, given the here-today-gone-tomorrow actuality of our vapor-like lives, one of the best ways to complete life properly is to complete every day properly. We have to run with the center and tempo of a marathoner and with a sprinter’s eye for the swift end.
2. Observe Intently
If life is transient — generally shockingly so — then wouldn’t it make sense to watch out and defend it? Actually it’s best to train, eat wholesome, and look each methods earlier than crossing the road, however the truth is that you simply can’t save your life. You may’t hold it. You may solely spend it. So, spend it properly.
Jesus informed us how. “If anybody would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and comply with me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, however whoever loses his life for my sake will discover it” (Matthew 16:24–25). So, we should totally embrace, totally determine with, totally comply with our Cross-bearer — no matter it is going to value us and wherever it is going to take us. And clearly the trail to completely following Christ shouldn’t be present in a fear-driven, risk-averse, comfort-zone life. Threat will at all times be a primary and dear requirement of following and ending properly.
“One of the best ways to complete life properly is to complete every day properly.”
This sort of danger isn’t only for missionaries who pursue Christ’s calling to the opposite facet of the world. It’s additionally for talking the gospel — with all its damning dangerous information and saving excellent news — personally, head to head with a coworker or neighbor in a society the place “reality is trying stranger than the lies,” as Josh Garrels places it in his music “Watchman.” In actual fact, being risk-averse is the alternative of cross-bearing. The One who carried the cross, died, and rose once more says the way in which to life is to comply with him within the fellowship of his sufferings and the facility of his rising (Philippians 3:10) — and the fellowship of his sufferings essentially includes struggling. Or as Elisabeth Elliot places it,
To be a follower of the Crucified means, eventually, a private encounter with the cross. And the cross at all times entails loss. The nice image of Christianity means sacrifice and nobody who calls himself a Christian can evade this stark truth. (These Unusual Ashes, 145)
We need to make sense of struggling, however it not often is sensible. We wish the puzzle to come back collectively and appear like one thing significant, however too typically there are lacking items. Our goals and plans by no means embrace chemo or automobile wrecks or the confusion that comes from deep disappointments and sudden detours. My pastor typically says, “God is looking us to comply with him, and he not often makes use of his flip alerts.” So, we should comply with intently and belief the lead and the love of the Shepherd with scars on his fingers, who has already gone forward of us into the darkness to crush Loss of life to demise.
3. Keep in mind We Have a Nice Savior
Our final and solely hope is in our nice Savior. Ending our days properly — and our lives — shouldn’t be about our grit or goodness, the size of our résumé, or the power of our our bodies and talents. Paul’s letter to the Philippians was written from jail in Rome, and maybe as his beloved Philippians learn the letter, they remembered when Paul first got here to their metropolis and his preaching landed him in jail there. What occurred in that Philippian cell was one of the vital dramatic scenes in all of Paul’s missionary journeys:
About midnight Paul and Silas have been praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners have been listening to them, and abruptly there was an ideal earthquake, in order that the foundations of the jail have been shaken. And instantly all of the doorways have been opened, and everybody’s bonds have been unfastened. (Acts 16:25–26)
However as Paul writes this letter, months — maybe years — have handed behind bars. There aren’t any dramatic conversions, no midnight hymn sings, no earth-shaking, shackle-breaking deliverances. Removed from his normal life in movement, Paul is chained and can’t stroll out of his door. When darkness fell over that jail cell night time after night time, what hope may he presumably have that his life nonetheless made a distinction? Paul tells us he labored on in hope “as a result of Christ Jesus has made me his personal.” So, from his 4 partitions, he was nonetheless working laborious towards Christ — straining, reaching, desirous to know him and make him identified increasingly more, urgent “towards the aim for the prize of the upward name of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:12, 14).
John Newton understood this, imprisoned behind his personal bars of failing well being. Although he had preached 1000’s of sermons and wrote lots of of hymns, as his sight, listening to, and power have been fading, he summed up his state of affairs in a sentence:
My reminiscence is almost gone; however I bear in mind two issues: that I’m an ideal sinner, and that Christ is a good Saviour. (Clever Counsel, 401)
Newton’s physique was failing, however his hope wasn’t. It was nonetheless as sturdy as when he penned this hymn within the early years of his ministry.
Rejoice, believer, within the Lord,
Who makes your trigger His personal;
The hope that’s constructed upon His Phrase
Can ne’er be overthrown.Although many foes beset your highway,
And feeble is your arm,
Your life is hid with Christ in God,
Past the attain of hurt.Weak as you’re, you shall not faint,
Or fainting, shall not die;
Jesus, the power of each saint,
Will help you from on excessive.
Christ is the one by way of whom and for whom we end properly. He’s the one who offers the endurance we want, the enjoyment now we have, the cross we bear, and the hope we embrace till religion turns into sight.
