Greater than as soon as, I’ve had such shut calls with loss of life 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 warfare zone — had 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 had been within the rearview mirror.
Nevertheless, my newest loss of life menace is not any near-miss. Nor can I outrun it. Successive most cancers diagnoses in 2019, 2020, and 2021 have struck arduous. My state of affairs, although, is not any completely 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 rely a lot of his kindnesses to me on this stretch of my journey) is that most cancers has given me a clearer concentrate on the end line.
I need to make each stride rely — daily significant. I need to end robust. As Eric Liddell, the Olympic gold-medal sprinter turned missionary, famously mentioned, “I run the primary 200 meters as arduous as I can. Then for the second 200 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 strains, 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 warfare. You can’t sit down and put the victory wreath in your head. You would not have a crown. You continue to should put on the helmet and carry the sword. You will need to watch, pray, and battle. Count on your final battle to be essentially the most tough, for the enemy’s fiercest cost is reserved for the top of the day. (Beside Nonetheless Waters, 2)
I’m studying a lot by this expertise, and God is actually rising 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 Trainer. So, as I proceed to press forward in my race, there are three issues I can let you know.
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 likely be God when all our clocks and calendars, histories and monuments aren’t any extra.
However then, in cosmic distinction, there’s one other sort of breathtaking awe over simply how transient our time is. Moses says our lives are “like grass” (verse 5) — right here as we speak and gone tomorrow. Even when we’re granted a full life with sufficient birthday candles to set off the smoke alarm, but the hearth is extinguished with a breath, and we quickly “fly away” (verse 10). So caught between brevity and eternity, we ask God to “educate us to quantity our days that we might get a coronary heart of knowledge” (verse 12). In fact, none of us can add up prematurely the variety of days we will likely be given. However what we’re to recollect is that there is a quantity, and we are able to’t add a single hour to it (Luke 12:25).
We might think about ending nicely to appear like a life stuffed with years, maybe like Jacob’s. “When Jacob completed commanding his sons, he drew up his toes 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 loss of life hardly ever operates on our timetable, and we don’t know whether or not we will likely be given ninety years or nineteen. Our end strains typically come abruptly, with little or no warning. There could also be no residence stretch — solely House, as fast as a wink. And so, given the here-today-gone-tomorrow actuality of our vapor-like lives, the easiest way to complete life nicely is to complete every day nicely. We have to run with the center and tempo of a marathoner and with a sprinter’s eye for the swift end.
2. Comply with Carefully
If life is transient — typically shockingly so — then wouldn’t it make sense to watch out and shield it? Definitely you must train, eat wholesome, and look each methods earlier than crossing the road, however the truth is that you just can not save your life. You’ll be able to’t maintain it. You’ll be able to solely spend it. So, spend it nicely.
Jesus instructed 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 absolutely embrace, absolutely establish with, absolutely comply with our Cross-bearer — no matter it’s going to value us and wherever it’s going to take us. And clearly the trail to totally following Christ shouldn’t be present in a fear-driven, risk-averse, comfort-zone life. Threat will all the time be a primary and dear requirement of following and ending nicely.
“One of the best ways to complete life nicely is to complete every day nicely.”
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, nose to nose with a coworker or neighbor in a society the place “fact is wanting stranger than the lies,” as Josh Garrels places it in his music “Watchman.” Actually, being risk-averse is the other of cross-bearing. The One who carried the cross, died, and rose once more says the best way to life is to comply with him within the fellowship of his sufferings and the ability of his rising (Philippians 3:10) — and the fellowship of his sufferings essentially entails struggling. Or as Elisabeth Elliot places it,
To be a follower of the Crucified means, ultimately, a private encounter with the cross. And the cross all the time 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 hardly ever is smart. 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 hardly ever makes use of his flip alerts.” So, we should comply with carefully 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 loss of life.
3. Bear in mind We Have a Nice Savior
Our final and solely hope is in our nice Savior. Ending our days nicely — 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 some of the dramatic scenes in all of Paul’s missionary journeys:
About midnight Paul and Silas had been praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners had been listening to them, and abruptly there was a terrific earthquake, in order that the foundations of the jail had been shaken. And instantly all of the doorways had been opened, and everybody’s bonds had 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 arduous towards Christ — straining, reaching, desirous to know him and make him identified increasingly more, urgent “towards the purpose 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 hundreds of sermons and wrote a whole lot of hymns, as his sight, listening to, and power had 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 a terrific sinner, and that Christ is a good Saviour. (Smart Counsel, 401)
Newton’s physique was failing, however his hope wasn’t. It was nonetheless as robust 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 whom and for whom we end nicely. He’s the one who provides the endurance we’d like, the enjoyment we now have, the cross we bear, and the hope we embrace till religion turns into sight.
