The reward of our creed
When a believer in Jesus Christ dies, it is the hour of the triumph of our faith. We see it each time in a godly loved one’s homecoming. One wife/mother’s hallmark statement in life was: "The Lord always takes care of me and always has and always will!"
Blaise Pascal wrote in his famous "Pensees" essay, "Life requires us to wager on eternal survival or eternal extinction.” He also said, "If you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing." Those who have chosen it view it as far more than mere survival; they view it with anticipation and joy.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke these last words to his Nazi executioners: "For you it is an end. For me, a beginning."
Blake told his wife that "dying was no more than moving from one room to another."
When D. L. Moody (the premiere revivalist/evangelist of the 1800's in both England and America) was dying he said: "Today is my coronation day!"
It was said of the Apostle Paul that upon his death "he did not change his career of worshipping God, only the location."
Malcolm Muggeridge (the renowned British correspondent born in 1903) said about the prospect of death in his waning years:
"So, like a prisoner awaiting his release, like a schoolboy when the end of term is near, like a migrant bird ready to fly south, like a patient in hospital anxiously scanning the doctor's face to see whether a discharge may be expected, I long to go home. Extricating myself from the flesh I have too long inhabited, hearing the key turn in the lock of TIME so that the great doors of Eternity swing open, disengaging my tired mind from its interminable conundrums, and my tired ego from its wearisome insistencies. Such is the prospect of death in Christ.
The Scriptures declare: "Death where is thy victory, and death where is thy sting" (1 Corinthians 15:55) and of Christ, "Death could not hold him" (Acts 2:24).
Our own experience reminds us that we go to bed each night as a dress rehearsal of our final last rest – and we do wake up the next morning!
Praise be to Christ who eventually transports each of us across the Jordan to everlasting day. The understatement of all of Scripture is "We shall not be ashamed in whom we have believed!" (Romans 10:11).
