thought exercise on Fear of Death

Do not fear death; the Savior’s death has brought freedom. He endured death and thus destroyed it. He descended into Hell and destroyed it. Even as Hell tasted his flesh he threw it into chaos. Al...

I saw a study that said, the number one fear of the average person is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two! How in the world is that? That means to most people, if you have to go ...

In an article entitled, What the New Atheists Don’t See , the British author Theodore Dalrymple shares his honest struggles with atheism. The subtitle of his article is fascinating, “To regret re...

As John Preston, the Puritan lay dying, friends asked him if he was afraid of death. “No,” whispered Preston; “I shall change my place, but I shall not change my company.” As if to say: I shall leave ...

An ancient story goes like this: A slave travels with his master to Baghdad. Early one morning, while milling through the marketplace, the slave sees Death in human form. Death gives him a threatening...

I remember growing up in the ’80s (yes, that dates me) when all kinds of fears and phobias seemed to be in the air—fear of the dark, snakes, scorpions, spiders. Someone in my own close circle was afra...

When I was told that I had six months, or perhaps nine, to live, first reaction was naturally of shock -though I also felt liberated, because, as in limited-over cricket, at least one knew the target ...

An atheist professor delighted in tearing down the Christian faith of zealous freshmen. By his own admission, he was arrogant, selfish, and intolerant of anything that didn’t measure up to his standar...

When Napoleon was bombing Vienna in 1805, his shells rained down across the city, striking buildings at random. One cannonball crashed into a schoolroom, shattering walls and windows. Inside, an eight...

Ted Williams—often called the greatest hitter in Major League Baseball history—has spent the years since 2002 not in a hall of fame or resting beneath a headstone, but inside an unassuming warehouse n...

There’s a well-shared (though probably apocryphal) story that took place about the morning, the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther was having a theological discussion with a few of his friends. One...

An American pastor once asked an Indonesian missionary who works among Indonesians but with a different people group from his own, “Are you afraid you’ll get caught?” Christian mission work in Indones...

In The Hiding Place Corrie ten Boom tells of the time she and her father needed to find a safer place for a Jewish mother and child they had been concealing from the Nazis. A local clergyman cam...

In his book The Grand Essentials , Ben Patterson recounts the story of an S-4 submarine that sank off the coast of Massachusetts, leaving its entire crew trapped inside. Despite numerous rescue a...

Though Jim was just a little older than Phillip and often assumed the role of leader, they did everything together. They even went to high school and college together. After college they decided to jo...

King George V of Britain, who was king during the tumultuous years of World War I, shared a New Year’s card with his friends that featured a drawing of an open gate. Below the image, he included thi...

Becoming a Navy Seal is considered the most challenging training of any military unit in the U.S. military. And as difficult as most of their training is, nothing can compare to BUDS, which stands for...

In his excellent study of the famous Biblical passage on shepherds, ( The Good Shepherd: A Thousand Year Journey from Psalm 23 to the New Testament ) , scholar Ken Bailey provides context to the 23...

Fear is a “mighty wind” indeed. The wreckage left by the toxic wind of fear is evident everywhere. We are afraid of the unknown, afraid of one another, afraid of poor health, afraid of death, and afra...

In his book, Running Scared, Pychologist Edward Welch illustrates how the fear of an event is often worse than the event itself. To demonstrate this, he provides two examples of people whose lives are...

Facing imminent death, Thomas Cranmer—the Archbishop of Canterbury who crafted the foundational Book of Common Prayer for Anglican worship—succumbed to terror and signed a document renouncing hi...

Its [Romans] message is not that ‘man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains’, as Rousseau put it at the beginning of The Social Contract (1762); it is rather that human beings are born in sin ...

The following prayer from the Trappist Monk, Thomas Merton, is vivid in its honesty and captures the challenge of seeking God’s will through a life of prayer: My Lord God, I have no idea where I a...

In his excellent study of the famous Biblical passage on shepherds, ( The Good Shepherd: A Thousand Year Journey from Psalm 23 to the New Testament) , scholar Ken Bailey describes the nature of David’...

In ordinary times we get along surprisingly well, on the whole, without ever discovering what our faith really is. If, now and again, this remote and academic problem is so unmannerly as to thrust its...

An old legend tells of a merchant in Bagdad who one day sent his servant to the market. Before very long the servant came back. White and trembling, and in great agitation said to his master: “Down i...

Dave Nessia was starving himself to death while hoarding food. It was on the hit reality show Alone. After 73 days alone in the wilderness, he had lost 40 lbs. and his blood pressure had fallen to 80/...

When I was six years old, my dad let me stay up late with the rest of the family and watch the movie The Wolf Man. Boy, did he regret that decision. The film left me convinced that the wolf man spent ...

In his devotional guide on preparing for the rite of confession in the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard says that true repentance from the persp...

Our culture is afraid of grief, but not just because it is afraid of death. That is natural and normal, a proper reaction to the Last Enemy. Our culture is afraid because it seems to be afraid of the ...