Thinking about your Dying Day

PSALM 39:4  LORD, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am.

Click here for previous study I prepared in my youth on Preparing for a Safe and Happy Death: 

For Drivers-Ed my daughter was required to write a letter to her parents expressing her sorrow for recklessly driving the car and involving herself in accident which brought about her demise.   The instructor hoped it would add a necessary soberness to the young soon-to-be-drivers-ed graduate.   My daughter thought it would be a good opportunity to rejoice in the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Below is the letter she submitted to the instructor.   There is a necessary degree of license as she fulfills the requirements of the assignment. She writes as if she could speak from the casket, which of course is not possible - nor are there any tears on the other side.  Note: I removed the names and replaced the name of the eating establishment to protect the innocent and her privacy.

Dear Mom and Dad,

It is evident that I am now experiencing the Apostle Paul’s words, “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.”  1Cor. 5:3

I am so sorry. The tears as I write this are heavy on my cheeks because of my actions. All the pain, hurt, and grief I have caused you and others. I didn’t just hurt myself on the corner of 39th St. but everyone else I love.

Why, oh why must it be this way? Why can’t I just rewind time and erase all the hurt I have caused? Why couldn’t I have just, turned my head, looked, and slowed down?! That’s all it would have taken to save all the pain and sadness.

I can imagine R___ and K____, crying together with you, praying that you, S____, A____, J___, K___, and themselves can go through the day, with rejoicing, confident that all things, work together for good to those who love God, so that God will be praised even through this.

J___ and K___, giving themselves so selflessly to help with anything you might need while they, themselves, cry out to God for mercy on their grieving hearts.

 

S____ and A____, each night, crying themselves to sleep. Trying to remember all the times I made them laugh. Forgetting all the times I’ve bossed them around like an annoying selfish big sister. Thinking, “Oh why did L___ have to be so careless? Why couldn’t I have been there to warn her?” and asking, “God, oh God, help me, Lord, calm me, use this as an opportunity to be closer to you, to know you more.” and “Please keep me alert and attentive when it’s my turn to drive.”

Each sister, taking turns waking up in the morning to make Dad breakfast, throwing pillows on each other's head to get the other one out of bed for breakfast, eventually the one still in bed yelling, in a groggy, angry, tired voice, “I’m coming, I’m coming, leave my room and shut my door!” I can see it just like it was yesterday. Then at breakfast opening the Bible and reviewing Jude, the first book we girls studied with you, Dad, at the start of our weekly Bible studies at the local grocery-store-with-dining-facilites.

Oh! Please forgive me for all that pain! It’s like a disease spreading to all my friends, family, brothers and sisters in Christ.

Mom and Dad, I know that you loved me and that your sorrows are exceeding.

But, do not trouble yourselves, take comfort. God is in control of all things. Like saving you both on the same day. I praise God that He saved both of you. He gave me the greatest parents I could have ever asked for. Parents who love each other so much, but only because you love God more.

Mom, I was really noticing how wise God has made you. I remember thinking most of my life that you were smart, but I was so sure I was much smarter in most areas. Looking back at my life and all the things you’ve shown me through your actions, and words, I see how much God has used you to change the way I say, think and do things in a way that’s more like Christ. Like how I should be a hard worker and not complain, as you, yourself, do every day. You’re definitely not complaint-free, but if I was doing all that you do for us, I’m sure I would complain lots more than you ever would. I complain about just the little things I do.  I have no reason to complain, God’s given me Christian parents, wonderful brothers and sisters, work which is part of living and to be done joyfully for God’s glory, and God gave me a changed heart, so I might know the joy of serving my creator.

  

I love the way you discern how to do things and why. I see that your wisdom comes from God. When you don’t know if something is right or not, you go to the Bible, and not to your own wisdom, knowing our hearts are desperately wicked and deceitful above all things. Jer. 17:9

I love how you randomly start telling us something you’ve been thinking about or reading about. Often times when I was thinking about something serious, I thought back on those talks and God used them to help me understand himself more.

 

What a great God to make you such a mother!

Dad, that which was the start of the biggest part of my life, began the day you took me to "the local-grocery-store-with-dining-facilities" for breakfast, which became our, “Weekly breakfast and Bible study”. It was the start of our weekly “Breakfast and Bible study at the-local-grocery-with-dining-facilites”, at first, attended only by you and I. God used those studies in the scripture to show me so many unfathomable things about Himself. He used them to open my eyes enabling me to understand: why you and mom love each other so much, why Christians love God and actually want to know more about Him, why everything works together for good to those who love God, why Christians go to other countries to spread God’s name.

Dad, God opened my eyes through our Bible studies to what happened when 9 years ago, I was up late at night crying. It was God’s grace showing me how sinful I was, that I did not love Him, and so I came to you the next morning to pray that God would change my heart and come into it.

And through our Bible studies, God showed me that we are all sinners, and we can’t save ourselves because of this fact. Only someone without sin can pay for our sins. But no one is without sin because we are all counted sinful through Adam and have fallen in him. But Jesus, God’s only begotten son, came to earth to die for us. And He was the only one who could do it. Because He is one hundred percent God and one hundred percent Man. He had to be fully man to pay for our sins because man brought sin into the world, and he had to be fully God because all men are counted sinful. Only a sinless man can pay for sin. But He not only paid for sin, he also lived a perfectly righteous life on earth, in our place, so that this righteousness was counted to us as ours, God treating us as if we had done what He did. He bore the cup of God’s wrath. Because we are at war with God, Jesus bore the wrath God would have had upon us sinners. So now our sin is paid for, Jesus paid for it. We don’t have to bear God’s wrath, because Jesus did it in our place. And then He rose again on the third day! He is alive! And reigning, right now!

“What!?” Oh Dad, I thought, “How can this be, why would God do this for me?” He didn’t do it because I had something special in me. The only reason why I wasn’t as bad as I could be was because of his grace. I didn’t even want to know God before I became a Christian. In my heart I was disappointed every time you would talk about God or the Bible. I only wanted to be a Christian because I wanted a perfect, care free, pain free life in heaven or on earth. 

 

I didn’t want to be with Jesus, I didn’t love him. I loved myself and I was good with it. But God changed my heart!! A heart of hate and evil. Jesus made me his. It was a gift! I can boast in nothing but the cross.

 

When we were going through that in our Bible studies God opened my eyes to see Him fuller. To really want to rejoice and praise Him in a new way, more than before. I got a taste of heaven, being with Jesus our Savior every day, and totally undeserving of it. I wanted to go out to the nations to share this good news. So others might come to Christ and know the joy of being His. Knowing who He is. 

Thank you so much Dad for teaching us who Jesus is, and training us to be more like Jesus. I thank God that he made you my Dad. I remember as soon as we three younger girls could speak you had us start memorizing Bible verses. You were so patient with me. I remember that first day you took me on that special breakfast, you were teaching me what being “Born again means”. And you asked, “Does that mean we go back into our mothers stomach and then be born again?” Hehehe! I was so confused. Being born again is God changing our hearts and now we have a new life. Different from our life of sin and hate, but a life that is new in Christ. One of my favorite studies was in Jude when you were teaching us about “Justification” and “Sanctification”. When God gives us a new life he’s justifying us, (counting us righteous) then he sanctifies us, (is at work in our hearts to make us more and more like himself everyday). Thank you Dad for teaching me right out of the Bible so that I could hear the Gospel just the way Jesus tells us.

I love you so much Mom and Dad. God used you greatly in my life.  And what happened on 39th St. was my fault. I wish it never had to happen that way. But God’s in control of everything, even the bad things that happen. And God will use it for good. Rejoice! Rejoice that we have a God who cares for the helpless. Like me. 

Please, when my family, friends, niece’s, nephew’s, strangers ask about me or what I was like; tell them how ugly and corrupt my heart was. How God changed it. And how I couldn’t be perfect until I got to heaven and God gives me a new body. That Jesus counted me perfect when He changed my heart, so that I can be with Him in heaven. Show them the sin that was still in me, that I could still mess up, like on 39th St., but that God was at work in my heart and making me more like Him every day. Show them how messed up my heart was so that they can see what a great God we serve to save such a wretch like me.

Set your eyes on things above and not on things below.

See you soon.

In Christ,

L________

Beauty For Ashes - Repost

Two years ago I referred to this link from Laurie at Beauty for Ashes wherein she speaks frankly about abortion.   It's one of the posts that stick with you and perhaps change how you think.  I wanted to repost a link to her original article once again.  
 ------------------------------
Please click here and read Beauty for Ashes - wherein she speaks frankly about Abortion.

From my own reading I will never regret what this article taught me both about abortion, pro-life and the centrality of the Gospel as touching both these subjects.

Earth despicable, Heaven desirable..

Reading out loud to my family now thrice,

Try aloud yourself, my advice

Thus many visions gloriously seen

Jesus my all, Saviour and King.

--- with much apologies for the above I now present you from Erkine a Gospel Sonnet

 

Click for online version

Earth despicable, Heaven desirable.

There's nothing round the spacious earth
To suit my vast desires;
To more refin'd and solid mirth
My boundless thought aspires.

Fain would I leave this mournful place,
This music dull, where none
But heavy notes have any grace,
And mirth accents the moan.

Where trouble tread upon reliefs,
New woes with older blend ;
Where rolling storms and circling griefs
Run round without an end:

Where waters wrestling with the stones,
Do fight themselves to foam,
And hollow clouds with thund'ring groans
Discharge their pregnant womb:

Where eagles mounting meet with rubs
That dash them from the sky:
And cedars, shrinking into shrubs,
In ruin prostrate lie:

Where, sin the author of turmoils,
The cause of death and hell,
The one thing foul that all things soils,
Does most befriended dwell.

The purchaser of night and woe,
The forfeiture of day,
The debt that ev'ry man did owe,
But only God could pay.

Bewitching ill, indors'd with hope,
Subscribed with despair:
Ugly in death when eyes are ope,
Though life may paint it fair.

Small wonder that I droop alone
In such a doleful place:
When lo, my dearest friend is gone,
My father hides his face.

And though in words I seem to show
The fawning poet's stile,
Yet is my plaint no feigned woe;
I languish in exile.

I long to share the happiness
Of that triumphant throng,
That swim in seas of boundless bliss
Eternity along.

When but in drops here by the way
Free love distils itself,
I pour contempt on hills of prey,
And heaps of wordly pelf.

To be amidst my little joys,
Thrones,sceptres, crowns, and kings,
Are nothing else but little toys,
And despicable things.

Down witH disdain earth's pomp I thrust,
Bid tempting wealth away:
Heav'n is not made of yellow dust,
Nor bliss of glitt'ring clay.

Sweet was the hour I freedom felt
To call my Jesus mine ;
To see his smiling face, and melt
In pleasures all divine.

Let fools after heav'n of shades pursue
But I for substance am:
The heart I seek is likeness to,
And vision of the Lamb:

The wothy lamb with glory crown'd
In his august abode;
Inthron'd sublime, and deck'd around
With all the pomp of God.

I long to join the saints above,
Who, crown'd with glorious bays,
Through radiant files of angels move,
And rival them in praise:

In praise to JAH, the God of love,
The fair incarnate Son,
The holy co-eternal Dove,
The good, the great Three-one

In hope to sing without a sob,
The anthem ever new,
I gladly bid the dusty globe,
And vain delights, Adieu.

Ephesians Chapter Five Verse Twelve

"Would it make any difference to you—any difference at all to the way you talk, to what you watch, to the way you ‘engage culture’—if Eph. 5:12 had never been written?”  -- Carl Trueman

Ok,  I totally ripped this off from Carl Trueman.  Actually from Justin Taylor.  Or was it Tim Challies?   Challies linked to Trueman.  I read Trueman.  Trueman's question probed me.  But then I jumped over to Justin Taylor and he also picked up on Trueman and so once again- the question.  

Would it really make any difference in how I talk, how I express myself, and what I do had Ephesians 5:12 never been written?    Hmmmmm  - I really really hope not, but O' God that I would take this verse more to heart.  My Grandfather epitomized Eph 5:12.  When my mind goes to his example his purity of speech is one of the very first things I remember.  And I do not attain to his example much less than to Christ to whose image I am hoping to be conformed.


EPH 5:12 "For it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret."

ht: Challies,  Taylor, Trueman

Blog Commendation: Surprised by Optimism

Times are bad.  People are evil.  The government is corrupt.  Hopelessness abounds.  The world is falling apart.  People will always fail you.    But on the other hand, won't they somehow do what's right?   Isn't there a spark of goodness in every man?  Can't we hope that good men will prevail eventually over evil?  Should we place our hope in man?

My brother in Christ and friend, John, is writing to counter some of this very thinking.  I've come to respect John's words, and appreciate the insight God is granting him for the good of the body of Christ.   And because of this, I'm very excited to become a new follower of his blog, "Surprised by Optimism."  John openly and honestly writes:

"My reason for starting this blog is that I know the crippling power of cynicism, and I want to help others avoid it. Now, it’s not that I always walk around with a scowl on my face, as the song “He’s a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” plays ominously in the background. Instead, as Paul Miller explains in his book A Praying Life, my cynicism begins with my false assurance that “anything is possible”. However, optimism rooted in the goodness of people collapses when it confronts the darker side of life, such as disappointed expectations or downright evil in people (including myself). From the signs I see in our culture, I think that this type of cynicism is becoming a widespread problem."   

After reading John's words, I was made to reflect on my own cynicism.   Am I secretly and unwares cynical?   Admittedly this sin can blindside me unawares.  Is there hope for us to overcome this kind of cyncism?   John, again, writes in words meant to bring hope:


"However, there is a way out of this quiet cynicism. Rather than withdrawing into this negative spirit, we need an optimism that is founded on something more dependable than the goodness of people. We all know deep down that people, including ourselves, aren’t good. Nevertheless, the famous words of Psalm 23 hold the key: God is willing to be our Good Shepherd who won’t disappoint. Jesus proved this willingness when he came to earth to pay the penalty of our corrupted goodness by dying on the cross. Now we have the opportunity to have hope, and even the kind of fun that lasts! There is so much hope and joy to be found in God, and I’d love if you would join me in this journey of learning to be optimistic through Him!"

ht:  Unto-Him-We-Live 
ps:  Please be sure to read the comments on John's new blog seeing especially that from Father to Son and learn from grace.

Guest Post: A Few Thoughts on Free Will

Good friend and brother, Richard, sent me "A Few Thoughts on Free Will."   What a great way to begin the new year by thinking deeply concerning the things of God.  So with permission and to honor my own friends meditations below are "A Few Thoughts on Free Will" by Richard.

First what is the will? (link to the dictionary.com definition of will.)

I am going to define it as our ability to make a decision, and then carry it out to fruition. 

So we when make a decision about anything how do we do this? Lets look at something that seems trivial like what socks to wear. It seems that a decision about sock choice would be made freely. Or is it? When we make decisions we always do so based on some intellectual or emotional factor (or both). In picking socks most people consider style, matching outfits and so on. Someone that would flippantly say, "I don't care about what the socks look like, I just wear whatever have," at the very  least have some thought concerning comfort. They would not wear socks that would hurt their feet. The point is that even the most trivial decisions we make are influenced by something. So then how "free" are these choices? I would say no choice we make is free in this sense.

Does it seem likely that the most important decision we make, that of our eternal destiny would not be influenced by some factor. We most likely agree that the Holy Spirit plays some role in our salvation. Most of us have prayed for the soul of a lost loved one. Are we not asking God to influence their will? Does it not seem true that He would influence our decision to follow Christ. If the Holy Spirit does influence the heart in this decision how can it be called "free."

The truth is, the part of our salvation that is "free" is the Grace that is given to us and the Faith to accept this free Grace. Grace must be given to us freely for our salvation. If we could be saved based solely on our decision or in other words something we do. Would not the glory of our salvation be ours and not Gods? The "freedom" of our will is not really what is at issue here. The ability of our will is what needs to be considered. Do we have the ability to come to Christ on our own terms? NO! This ability is given to us by the Holy Spirit. We have the freedom to choose salvation only after we have been given the ability. The Holy Spirit makes our will willing.

So after reading Richard, have you any thoughts of your own concerning the freedom of the will?

For more information I suggest you check out the following article:  (please click on title for link)
Human Nature in it's four-fold state. 
LBCF commentary on Fair will 
Free Will vs. Free Will   I found this article especially helpful. 
Freedom of the Will by Jonathon Edwards
Bondage of the Will by Martin Luther

Gospel Sonnets of Ralph Erskine

Can you picture the father of good ol' John Paton, missionary to New Hebrides, sitting under the tree reading Erkine's Gospel Sonnets, his future wife secretly observing  him,  he reading until he can bear no more and must get low and pray?  

As I read them I think and think and think some more
Methinks I see the senior Paton, Christ to adore.
But really with faith's keen eye it's not that fatherly man I see
For these Poems, gospel rich, have awakened prayer in me.
(with apologies)

I was captivated by these two lines from Gospel Sonnets:

The law can crave no more, yet craves no less,
Than active, passive, perfect righteousness.

So searching through Erskine's book I found the whole in context as follows:
     The believer, being married to Christ, is both justified and sanctified

Proud nature may reject this gospel-theme,
And curse it as an Antinomian scheme.
Let slander bark, let envy grin and fight,
The curse that is so causeless shall not light.
If they that fain would make by holy force
‘Twixt sinners and the law a clean divorce,
And court the Lamb a virgin chaste to wife,
Be charg’d as foes to holiness of life,
Well may they suffer gladly on this score,
Apostles great were so malign’d before.

When as a cov’nant stern the law commands,
Faith puts her Lamb’s obedience in its hands:
And when its threats gush out a fiery flood,
Faith stops the current with her victim’s blood.
The law can crave no more, yet craves no less,
Than active, passive, perfect righteousness.
Yet here is all, yea, more than its demand,
All render’d to it by a divine hand.
Mankind is bound law-service still to pay,
Yea, angel-kind is also bound t’ obey.
It may by human and angelic blaze
Have honour, but in finite partial ways.

Thus doth the Husband by his Father’s will
Both for and in his bride the law fulfill:
For her, as ’tis a covenant; and then
In her, as ’tis a rule of life to men.
First all law-debt he most completely pays;
Then of law-duties all the charge defrays.
Does first assume her guilt, and loose her chains;
And then with living water wash her stains:
Her fund restore, and then her form repair,
And make his filthy bride a beauty fair;
His perfect righteousness most freely grant,
And then his holy image deep implant;
Into her heart his precious seed indrop,
Which, in his time, will yield a glorious crop.
But by alternate turns his plant he brings
Through robbing winters and repairing springs.
Hence, pining oft, they suffer sad decays,
By dint of shady nights and stormy days.
But blest with sap, and influence from above
They live and grow anew in faith and love;
Until transplanted to the higher soil,
Where furies tread no more, nor foxes spoil.

This book available for purchase here.

To read online click here. 

White Horse Inn blog discusses here.