Benjamin Franklin once said, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes” – true. Death awaits us all. No matter how much we try not to think about it, it looms large. Since there is no escaping the reality of it, is there a way not to fear it? There is only one guy I know that has defeated it… I’d suggest we listen to what he has to say about it.
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Reasons we fear death:
- The people we leave behind
- The unfinished work we leave behind
- The pain in the process of dying
- The unknown of dying
John 11:17-27
2 Statements:
I am the resurrection
- whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live
- the resurrection at the last day, when Jesus returns is in view
I am the life
- everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die
- spiritual life that is available only through faith in Jesus is in view
Proper Response = faith in Jesus
[su_quote]“There is no question of death or life for any of us, only a question of this death or of that — of a machine gun bullet now or a cancer forty years later.
What does war do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent; 100 percent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased. It puts several deaths earlier, but I hardly suppose that that is what we fear. Certainly when the moment comes, it will make little difference how many years we have behind us.
Does it increase our chances of a painful death? I doubt it. As far as I can find out, what we call natural death is usually preceded by suffering, and a battlefield is one of the very few places where one has a reasonable prospect of dying with no pain at all.
Does it decrease our chances of dying at peace with God? I cannot believe it. If active service does not persuade a man to prepare for death, what conceivable concatenation of circumstances would?
Yet war does do something to death. It forces us to remember it.
The only reason why the cancer at sixty or the paralysis at seventy-five do not bother us is that we forget them. War makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right.
All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that centered in this world, were always doomed to a final frustration. In ordinary times only a wise man can realize it. Now the stupidest of us knows.
We see unmistakably the sort of universe in which we have all along been living, and must come to terms with it.”
– C.S. Lewis “Learning in War-Time”[/su_quote]
Big Idea: Faith in Jesus eradicates fear of death
Further Notes
Related Verses:
- 1 Corinthians 15:54-56 (cf. Isaiah 25:8; Revelation 21:4)
- 1 Corinthians 15:26
- 2 Timothy 1:10
- Hebrews 2:14-15
- Psalm 90:12
- Matthew 10:26-28