DYING LIKE WE LIVE

I spent several hours this week visiting my 89 year old uncle in the hospital, where he is dying of pneumonia, with antibiotic-resistent infections in both lungs. We can all learn from watching death's relentless conquest in overcoming the physical body. We will all be there sooner than we think.

Both my uncle and the man in the adjacent room were desperately using some of their final breaths to cry out for help - but only miracles can help them now. It is too late for medicine.

My uncle has been in denial about the approach of death for several years. He could not comprehend that he would some day lose control over his mind and body. By the time that day came for him, or comes for any of us, it is too late to try to get right with God, it is too late to develop the relationship with Jesus Christ to which God has been calling you for your whole life. The chasm of self-consumed living and thinking is just too hard to overcome at the last moments with a dying mind and body.

All of us have just the briefest wisp of time in this body to use our gifts, talents and opportunities for either ourselves or for the glory of God. Time in the Word of God, time in prayerful communion with our Heavenly Father, and time praising and worshipping God the Son - Jesus Christ - develops relationship with the Almighty that gives peace and confidence and joy as the end of the physical body approaches. That lost time cannot be made up at the last second. It is too hard, too far, too wide, too foreign, too hopeless.

Thankfully, God sometimes intervenes to overcome even that hopelessness, as He did with the thief on the cross. That, however, appears to be the exception, not the rule, and it doesn't make up for a life of wasted time and wasted opportunity to know and love and live for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

For the saint who knows and loves God with all of his or her heart, the outcome is so much different. As Dwight L. Moody so famously said and lived:

Some day you will read in the papers that D.L. Moody of East Northfield, is dead. Don't you believe a word of it! At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now; I shall have gone up higher, that is all, out of this old clay tenement into a house that is immortal- a body that death cannot touch, that sin cannot taint; a body fashioned like unto His glorious body.

I was born of the flesh in 1837. I was born of the Spirit in 1856. That which is born of the flesh may die. That which is born of the Spirit will live forever.

Dwight L. Moody also said:

Preparation for old age should begin not later than one's teens. A life which is empty of purpose until 65 will not suddenly become filled on retirement.

The same can be said of living in such a way that we are prepared for death. Now is the time to chose our purpose, to really know our God and Savior, to live for and love Him with all of our heart, so that there is no real fear in death, because we know Whom we have believed and that He is faithful to complete what He began in our lives. How grateful I am for the absolute assurance of our eternal glory with God in His kingdom - a life without regrets.