Sermon quotes on death
Augustine of Hippo
The Jews looked upon a serpent to be freed from serpents; and we look upon the death of Christ to be delivered from death.
Harriet Beecher-Stowe
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.
Winston Churchill
I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Norm Crosby
My school was so rough the school newspaper had an obituary section.
Emily Dickinson
Unable are the Loved to die / For Love is Immortality…
Epicurus
Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?”
Stanley Hauerwas
Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead. But Lazarus is still to die. We are still to die. Jesus, by contrast, has been raised never again to die. His death makes possible a communion that overwhelms the loneliness our sin creates. Our God has made his home among the mortals by assuming our deadly flesh so that we might be made friends of Jesus and even one another. Such friendship means we rightly mourn the loss of friends, yet we can rejoice in the knowledge that the living and the dead share the common reality of this new city, a city of the martyrs, the New Jerusalem.
Stanley Hauerwas
We live in a death-denying world that seems determined to develop technologies that will enable us to get out of life alive. Yet the more we strive to be free of death the more we are shaped by the death-determined means we create to try to free ourselves of death. Even more paradoxical, the means we use to free ourselves from death only serve to increase our isolation from one another. We fear the loneliness we think death entails, but it turns out that the loneliness we fear death entails is the expression of the loneliness made unavoidable by our attempts to avoid death.
Ernest Hemingway
Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.
Steve Jobs
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
Peter Kreeft
He’s what we really need. If your friend is sick and dying, the most important thing he wants is not an explanation but for you to sit with him. He’s terrified of being alone more than anything else. So God has not left us alone.
Taken from Lee Strobel, The Case for Faith, Zondervan.
C.S. Lewis
“When a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.”
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Jim Morrison
No one here gets out alive.
William Shakespeare
Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
Charles Spurgeon
Never fear dying, beloved. Dying is the last, but the least matter that a Christian has to be anxious about. Fear living – that is a hard battle to fight, a stern discipline to endure, a rough voyage to undergo.
J.R.R. Tolkien
“Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
J.R.R. Tolkien
“End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.”
Isaac Watts
Time, like an ever rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten as a dream
Dies at the break of day.
The busy tribes of flesh and blood
With all their cares and fears,
Are carried downward like a flood
And lost in following years.
Douglas Adams
Invited to write his own epitaph:
He finally met his deadline
BBC Radio 4 Quote Unquote
Epitaph in Bushey Churchyard, before 1860
Here lies a poor woman who always was tired,
For she lived in a place where help wasn’t hired.
Her last words on earth were, Dear friends I am going
Where washing ain’t done nor sweeping nor sewing,
And everything there is exact to my wishes,
For there they don’t eat and there’s no washing of dishes
Don’t mourn for me now, don’t mourn for me never,
For I’m going to do nothing for ever and ever.
Quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, Oxford University Press.
Katherine Mansfield
If you wish to live, you must first attend your own funeral.
Reverend W. Awdry
I should like my epitaph to say, ‘He helped people see God in the ordinary things of life, and he made children laugh.
Independent March 22, 1997
Frederick Buechner
Intellectually we all know that we will die, but we do not really know it in the sense that the knowledge becomes a part of us. We do not really know it in the sense of living as though it were true. On the contrary, we tend to live as though our lives would go on forever.
R.C. Sproul
Death is a divine appointment.
Surprised by Suffering: The Role of Pain and Death in The Christian Life
Athanasius
He, the Life of all, our Lord and Saviour, did not arrange the manner of his own death lest He should seem to be afraid of some other kind. No. He accepted and bore upon the cross a death inflicted by others, and those other His special enemies, a death which to them was supremely terrible and by no means to be faced; and He did this in order that, by destroying even this death, He might Himself be believed to be the Life, and the power of death be recognised as finally annulled. A marvellous and mighty paradox has thus occurred, for the death which they thought to inflict on Him as dishonour and disgrace has become the glorious monument to death’s defeat.
Philip Yancey
The leading causes of death are self-inflicted — side effects of tobacco, obesity, alcohol, sexually transmitted disease, drugs, and violence. We need a transformation. We need the kind of personal and societal renewal in which Jesus-followers who bear the good news of God’s love and forgiveness could play a crucial role.
Vanishing Grace Study Guide, Zondervan.
George Eliot
O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude…”
O May I Join the Choir Invisible! And Other Favourite Poems
Matthew McCullough
Once we’ve learned to see the shadow [of death], we’ll be able to apply the light of Christ.
Matthew McCullough
Death is not ok. By avoiding the subject of death, we act like that’s not true. And we shrink down the scale of Jesus’s victory to fit the world we live in now.
Matthew McCullough
Through death we may as well be nameless. We’re essentially waiting to be forgotten in time. But in Christ we are known, eternally, by the Father with the same intimacy and affection he has for his Son. . . . We wait, still, but not to be forgotten.
Matthew McCullough
Death spreads its poison through everything we enjoy because nothing we enjoy is ours to keep. Time passes, things change, and eventually everyone loses everything they love
William Stringfellow
Hope is reliance upon grace in the face of death: the issue is that of receiving life as a gift, not as a reward and not as a punishment; hope is living constantly, patiently, expectantly, resiliently, joyously in the efficacy of the word of God.
An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, Word Books.
William Stringfellow
Hope is reliance upon grace in the face of death: the issue is that of receiving life as a gift, not as a reward and not as a punishment; hope is living constantly, patiently, expectantly, resiliently, joyously in the efficacy of the word of God.
An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, Word Books.
John Koessler
God will not forget us either in the hour of our death. I confess that I hope the same is true of pups.
Taken from The Radical Pursuit of Rest by John Koessler. ©2015 by John Koessler. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove IL 60515-1426. www.ivpress.com
George Herbert
Death used to be an executioner, but the gospel has made him just a gardener.
Fred Smith
It’s important, as we go along in life, to create thirsts that death will satisfy.
Leadership, Vol. 3, no. 1
Albert Camus
“Since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn’t it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes toward the heaven where He sits in silence?”
Tarrou nodded. “Yes. But your victories will never be lasting; that’s all.” Rieux’s face darkened. “Yes, I know that. But it’s no reason for giving up the struggle.”
“No reason, I agree. Only, I now can picture what this plague must mean for you.”
“Yes. A never ending defeat.”
Jerry Seinfeld
I saw a study that said speaking in front of a crowd is considered the number one fear of the average person. Number two was death. This means to the average person, if you have to be at a funeral, you would rather be in the casket than doing the eulogy.
Charles Henry Brent
The first and best illustration of the effect upon personality of death is found in Jesus Christ. After his reappearance from the grave, he is unaltered in character, tone of thought, and fundamental tal relationships. What strikes one forcibly is the absence of anything thing like a break in the continuity of his personality.
Sermon: “The Last Great Adventure.”
Martin Luther
Christ lay in death’s bonds
given over for our sins,
He has risen again
and brought us life . . .
It was a strange battle,
that death and life waged,
life claimed the victory,
it devoured death.
The scripture had prophesied this,
how one death gobbled up the other,
a mockery has been made out of death.
Hallelujah!,
Christ Lag In Todesbanden
Gerard Manley Hopkins
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing —
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief.”‘
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
John Newton
I am still in the land of the dying; I shall be in the land of the living soon.
John Donne
One short sleep past, we wake eternally;
and Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
John Piper
At funerals we sometimes lay quite a bit of emphasis on the fact that Christians never say their last good-bye. Death means we will be reunited with loved ones who have died in the Lord before us.
Taken from John Piper in Coming Home edited by D.A. Carson, © 2017, p. 59. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.
Steven Wright
I intend to live forever. So far, so good.
French Proverb
Fear and restlessness kill more than do illnesses.
Roger Rosenblatt
The problem with death is absence.
Emily Dickinson
This is the Hour of Lead—
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons recollect the Snow—
First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go.
George Eliot
It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a man’s death hallows him anew to us; as if life were not sacred, too.
Phillips Brooks
There is not one life which the Life-giver ever loses out of His sight; not one which sins so that He casts it away; not one which is not so near to Him that whatever touches it touches Him with sorrow or with joy.
Martin Luther
Even in the best of health we should have death always before our eyes [so that] we will not expect to remain on this earth forever, but will have one foot in the air, so to speak.
Source Unknown
“Relax, none of us are getting out of here alive.”
Kevin (Tate Donovan)
“What’s the worst thing that can happen? We’ll all die, right?’
Space Camp
Alexander Schmemann
“Biological” or physical death is not the whole death, not even its ultimate essence …in [the] Christian vision, death is above all a spiritual reality, of which one can partake while being alive, from which one can be free while lying in the grave. Death here is man’s separation from life, and this means from God Who is the Giver of life, Who Himself is Life.
Charles Wesley
God buries his workmen, but carries on his work
Maya Angelou
If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.
Billy Graham
All my life I was taught how to die as a Christian, but no one ever taught me how I ought to live in the years before I die.
Nearing Home: Life, Faith, and Finishing Well (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 2011, p.4).
Mark Twain
Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his others—his last breath.
Following the Equator (1897)
John Calviin
If Christ had died only a bodily death, it would have been ineffectual. No — it was expedient at the same time for him to undergo the severity of God’s vengeance, to appease his wrath and satisfy his just judgment. For this reason, he must also grapple hand to hand with the armies of hell and the dread of everlasting death.
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