Pastor Bo WagnerEvery belief system has the same temporal ending to deal with: death.
As a pastor and evangelist, I am in death’s presence often, sitting and praying with people as they near the end and then preaching their funerals. After 20 years of doing so more times than I can count, I cannot help but notice and remember how very different they usually are based on what a person and the family have held to through the years.
Last year I said goodbye to one of the godliest old deacons who ever lived, brother Joe. For weeks, he knew death was coming. And yet he met it confidently, and his family smiled while they wept.
Years ago, a dear gentleman in my church was dying of cancer, and as he took his last few moments worth of terrestrial breaths, he smiled and held his hands up to heaven, as his family sang “What a Day That Will Be.”
I think of those and many more instances like them, and I smile. But then I shudder as I think of other times far different.
There is no anguish like that of a person dying with no hope or the family helplessly watching it happen. If people believe that this life is all there is, then death often becomes the most frightening specter imaginable. Whether they understand the reality of hell or whether they believe they are simply going to cease to exist, they are facing a hopeless situation.
Death is, in some degree, frightening for everyone, simply because we have never done it. But for the born-again Christian, there is a fact that turns tragedy into triumph.
First Thessalonians 4:13-18 was written by a man who once hated and disbelieved in Jesus. It says, “But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent (go before) them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words.
When Jesus rose from the dead, he gave a guarantee that his redeemed would as well. We sorrow at death, ours or that of a loved one, but not “as others which have no hope.” We will not simply cease to exist. We will certainly never feel so much as one second of hell’s flame. We will enter straight into his presence. Second Corinthians 5:8 says, “We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.”
Unless God intervenes, and we know that he can, a dear friend of mine is right now staring down imminent death. Neither she nor her family desires it; they mourn a coming, albeit temporary, separation. But they are meeting it with confidence, knowing that the risen Christ is a guarantee of a risen mother, wife, grandmother.
A young lady, a friend of my wife’s family, was involved in a horrible wreck some years ago. She was thrown from the vehicle and was dying on the side of the road. A man came to her aid and realized immediately she was not going to make it.
She looked up at him and said, “Are you a Christian?”
He said, “Yes, I certainly am.”
She said, “Would you hold my hand while I go to meet Jesus?”
Would you hold my hand while I go to meet Jesus That is the power of the Resurrection.
Bo Wagner is pastor of the Cornerstone Baptist Church of Mooresboro, N.C., a widely traveled evangelist and the author of several books. He can be contacted by email at 2knowhim@cbc-web.org.