When Lazarus left his charnel-cave, And home to Mary’s house return’d, Was this demanded—if he yearn’d To hear her weeping by his grave? ‘Where wert thou, brother, those four days?’ There lives no ...
And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders are not going to...
Every day opportunity shortens, our scope for learning our Redeemer's love is narrowed by twenty-four hours, and we come nearer to the end of our journey, when we shall fall into the hands of the ...
Romans 8:18, Revelation 19:16, Matthew 2:2, John 18:36-37, Revelation 17:14, Zechariah 9:9, Isaiah 9:6, Psalm 24:7-10, Colossians 1:15-20, Matthew 21:1-11, Mark 11:1-11, Luke 19:28-40, John 12:12-16
In Romans 8:18, Paul describes the future of those who persevere in the faith: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us....
The day of one's birth is a good day for the believer, but the day of death is the greatest day that a Christian can ever experience in this world because that is the day he goes home, the day he ...
Psalm 23:4, John 16:33, Romans 8:18, 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, Psalm 27:1, Isaiah 41:10, 1 Peter 5:10
“So to end this time together, I won’t say everything will be okay. How could I know that? I’ll just look you in the eye, give you a nod of solidarity, and smile. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack ...
I hate to admit it, but there is actually a minister in a city in America who has a phone line connected from his wife’s grave to his office because before she died, they had agreed that if she was pr...
When the New Testament speaks about “the dead,” it has a specific background, one that affirms “the [place of the] dead” as a location containing the disembodied souls of both the righteous and unrigh...
Job 3:1-26, Psalm 94:19, 1 Peter 5:7, Matthew 14:22-33
In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery? “The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to pre...
On the final page of the final book of The Chronicles of Narnia, some of the children who have been to Narnia lament that they once again must return to their homeland—the Shadow-Lands. But Aslan (the...
Colossians 3:23-24, 1 Corinthians 3:6-9, Matthew 6:19-21, 1 Corinthians 15:58, Galatians 6:9, 1 John 3:2, Romans 8:18, 2 Corinthians 4:17-18
Life is short, and we can accomplish only so much. Much of what we do will remain unfinished. For now. In one of my favorite short stories of all time, “Leaf by Niggle,” author J. R. R. Tolkien provid...
The manner in which Christians have thought about life after death, or about the world to come, has varied considerably from century to century and from place to place. It is easy enough to understand...
It seems to me… that if it is possible … for human beings to choose to live more and more out of tune with the divine intention, to reflect the image of God less and less, there is nothing to stop the...
No sorrowful tears, no beating of the breast For a safe repose has taken me. I dance Ring dances with the blessed saints In the beautiful fields of the righteous.
When we reflect on the life to come, the comparative is really inadequate and the superlative is appropriate. This is why, whenever we are reflecting on the future that awaits us, we can always say, “...
A businessman, while away on vacation, was reading his hometown newspaper. He was stunned to come across his own obituary. Shocked and angered, he immediately called the editor on the telephone. I’m c...
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...
The life which we are living now is more aware than we know of the life which is to come. Death, which separates the two, is not, as it has been so often pictured, like a great thick wall. It is rathe...
A father was at the beach with his children when his four-year-old son ran up to him, grabbed his hand, and led him to the shore, where a seagull lay dead in the sand. “Daddy, what happened to him?” ...
A Minneapolis couple decided to go to Florida to thaw out during a particularly icy winter. They planned to stay at the same hotel where they spent their honeymoon 20 years earlier. Because of their ...