One of the last things that I did before leaving Mount Vernon was to visit one of the sweetest women that I have ever met with my good friend Caryl. We pulled up to her apartment, walked in and enjoyed talking to her about her many decades ministering at EBC, where her favorite plants were from, and what it was like to be diagnosed with caner. It was a very special afternoon.
As I drove back to the church I noticed a group of college girls running on the side of the road conditioning for some kind of sport and then it hit me. It wasn’t that long ago that this dear woman who I’d just visited was able to run and play with her own friends. It wasn’t that long ago that the entire world seemed to be full of possibilities for her and adventure waited around every corner. It wasn’t that long ago that cancer was the furthest thing from her mind and yet today, just a few short decades later it’s probably one of the only things on her mind.
I guess what I’m saying is that this experience was a powerful reminder that “life is short!” It won’t be long before I begin to slow down myself, and it probably won’t be very long after that when God will call me home. And in a few short years there will be very few people who even remember my name. The Psalmist talks about this in Psalm 90:12, “Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” The point is that we only get so many days and before we know it life has passed us by, so the question is how am I going to spend these few days that the Lord has given me? The best place to start is probably in asking yourself, “How am I going to spend today in light of how short my life really is?”
Jack Kevorkian has been out of the news for quite some time, but an upcoming film from HBO promises to make him a topic of conversation once again.
In 2005 Wesley Smith wrote an article upon rumors that the movie was in the works:
He is ubiquitously portrayed in the media as the doctor who helped terminally ill people end their own lives. No doubt, that is how he will be portrayed in the movie — as the iconoclastic visionary whose compassion induced him to test the boundaries of the law to help the actively dying achieve a gentle end.
But this view of Dr. Death — who received the moniker when, as a medical student, he haunted hospital wards to watch people die — is a blatant, media-driven myth. In reality, Kevorkian’s notorious assisted-suicide campaign, which dominated the headlines throughout most of the 1990s, was driven by a ghoulish desire to conduct human vivisection [here’s the wikipedia explanation of vivisection], or “obitiatry,” as he liked to call it. Yes, you read right. Kevorkian’s primary motive in all that he did was to create the social conditions that would permit him to experiment on the people he was putting to death. . . .
. . . Kevorkian’s first targets in his quest to slice and dice people were not the ill, but the condemned. He spent years visiting prisons and corresponding with death-row inmates, seeking permission to conduct “obitiatric research” on those being executed.
Only after Kevorkian was thrown out of every prison he visited did he hit upon another angle. If condemned people were not going to be made available for “unfettered experimentation on human death,” perhaps he could gain access to experiment on sick and disabled people. His front would be assisted suicide. But his goal would remain human vivisection.
Kevorkian appears to have pursued a three-step plan toward achieving his dream: First, popularize assisted suicide and make it seem acceptable; second, give society a utilitarian stake in assisted suicide by using the victims for organ procurement; and finally, gain permission to conduct his death experiments on the sick and disabled people he would be allowed to kill.
The rest of the article is well worth the read and is eye opening to say the least.
”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.”
Psalm 90:12 – So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.
Several years ago my Pastor (then at Riverlakes Community Church) preached a series on “What Breaks God’s Heart”. The title has always stuck out to me and I have often times meditated on what does break God’s heart. The Bible is full of explicit references to the heart of God being deeply moved, even moved to tears over the heartache in this fallen world. This is the second in a series of posts on What Breaks God’s Heart
In the fall of 2005 I was finishing up my last semester at The Master’s Seminary when I had one of the most intimate experiences with death that I can remember. Each year I got to take a discipleship lab with one of the professors or one of the pastors at Grace Church. This particular semester I got to spend some time with Jim Pile who is the pastor in charge of Pastoral Care at Grace. Jim gets to spend a lot of time dealing with death and dying, so over the course of the semester we go to talk about death and dying quite a bit. Toward the end of the class, I was given the rare privilege of visiting the Los Angeles County Crematorium for an extended tour of the facility. I got to see the furnaces, a small chapel, and a large room full of brown plastic boxes. Each of the boxes held a clear plastic bag of ashes. Standing in this room I listened to the care taker of the facility explain how the facility worked, as I held one of the plastic bags with what remained of a human life in it. As I thought about what was in my hand, the care taker’s words began to fade into the distance as I reflected on the fact that this person used to be someone’s child. He was probably bounced on his father’s knee, he was probably rocked to sleep by his mother and he probably went to school with other kids just like him. Maybe he was even someone’s husband, maybe they were still looking for him or maybe they could care less…and something inside of me just ached.
Death has a way of doing that to us, it always hurts and it seems so completely arbitrary and unfair. In one box you may have found a drug dealer, and in another box you may have found a lawyer who fell on hard times. But, when it was all said and done they ended up sitting side by side and soon they would end up in the same place. Death truly is the great equalizer of all men and yet despite all of the thousands of years that mankind has had to come to peace with our own mortality, death still stings.
When I think of the question, “What breaks God’s heart?” I have to think that death ranks pretty high up there. Death was the ultimate punishment handed down from God to man for his sin and since that time Adam’s tragic epitaph has been written over every man’s grave “and he died” (Genesis 5:5).
Perhaps no single event makes this more clear than the death of Jesus’ friend Lazarus. After hearing of His friend’s sickness, Jesus went to find that he had already died. As Jesus looked over the crowd of mourners that day the Bible gives one of its simplest and most profound statements, “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). I’ve often wondered why Jesus wept over Lazarus death, especially when He knew that in just a few moments He would raise Lazarus from the grave. It almost seems like one of those moments when He would say, “Why are you weeping? Behold the power of God!” But instead we find the Savior, God in the flesh, bursting into tears (BDAG) and weeping over the death of a friend. The only explanation seems to be that death is really that bad. Death always hurts, it is always heart wrenching and it is one of those pains that is so great that it broke the Saviors heart.
As Christians, we live in a wonderful place where death no longer has victory over us (1 Cor. 15:55). We have been given a new life and promised a new body (1 Cor. 15:42), but in some way death will still touch each of our lives and that breaks God’s heart.
Psalm 90:12 – So teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
Amy and I just watched this last night and we simply can not say enough good about it. If you have a wife, please take an hour tonight and watch this together. If you have a husband, please set aside time and watch this together.
Rachel’s story is not unlike what thousands of women around the world have experienced. A diagnosis that changes a woman’s life and inevitably takes from her what we consider to be most precious.
After four and a half years of vigilantly fighting breast cancer, the 37 year old wife and mother of two was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
But for Rachel the essence of life is found in her relationship with God through Jesus. And that’s why Rachel is convinced that death is not dying.
Several weeks ago Terry Stauffer’s 14 year old daughter was murdered (Terry is a pastor in Alberta, Canada). The following is taken from his address at her funeral:
You can find the rest of the article here, it is well worth the read.
When Emily’s death was confirmed on Saturday night, I was shocked and bewildered. All I could pray was, “O Lord, Help! Help! Help!” As I was on my knees, a thought came to me: “If all my talk about the Gospel and God’s goodness is not true now, then it was never true.”That was a great comfort, for I know this great good news is true. I stand with my wife and family in a long line of Christians who have suffered loss yet look ahead to a “city not made with hands” and the fulfillment of God’s promise of eternal life to those who trust Christ.We will see Emily again. I said to my daughter Petra last night that this clumsy, self-conscious dad is looking forward to dancing with Emily in Heaven as we celebrate God’s glory together.
The title of this post may be a little bit of a surprise to some of you, because the T in TULIP is not traditionally known as “Total Inability” but rather as “Total Depravity”. In recent years there have been a number of reformed theologians who have opted for this “inability” instead of “depravity” because it seems to be a much clearer explanation of what the Bible teaches about the condition of man’s heart and his inability to respond to God.
The doctrine of “Total Inability” teaches that man is completely and totally unable to respond to God, due to the fact that man is spiritually dead. It is not as if all men are as evil as they could possibly be, but all men are equally dead. It may be best to think of this concept as a battlefield. After a major battle scores of dead bodies are to be found upon the field. Some of these bodies were simply struck by a stray bullet that hit the right place, resulting in death but no major dismemberment; others were struck by large caliber weapons resulting in major disfiguration. In the same way, not all men have been as damaged by the effects of sin, but all are equally dead.
Man’s spiritual death is to be found throughout the pages of Scripture, the following is merely a smattering of passages that teach the fact that man is spiritually dead. Romans 5:12 Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned- Colossians 2:13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh… Psalm 58:3 The wicked are estranged from the womb; they go astray from birth, speaking lies. Jeremiah 13:23 Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Then also you can do good who are accustomed to do evil. Romans 3:10-12 as it is written: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.” Genesis 6:5 The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
To be dead is to be unable to respond to anything. I’ve been in crematoriums, where the remains of human beings are being burned and stored. One thing is for sure in a house of the dead, they are completely unable to respond to anything. In the same way, man is totally unable to respond to God b/c man is spiritually dead.
Total Inability is the foundational doctrine upon which all of the Doctrines of Grace rest. It is because of man’s total inability to respond to God that God must be the one initiating salvation through election.
John MacArthur uses the following illustration to show the relationship between Total Inability and Unconditional Election. To deny the doctrine of election, after understanding the doctrine of Total Inability, would be like looking at a man caught in a series of rapids and totally unable to free himself and then calling out “Listen, I’ve got good news for you.” “If you can get out of there, we can help dry you off.” What the man needs is a power far greater than himself to reach in, lift him out of his desperate situation and save him.
The following quote is taken from Thomas Watson’s “A Christian on Earth, Still in Heaven.” I’m posting it here because it was a tremendous blessing to me this afternoon, I trust that it will be the same for you.
“Let all the golden streams of worldly delights run into the heart of a man–yet the heart is not full. Strain out the quintessence of the creature–it turns to froth, “Vanity of vanities!” But in God is sweet satisfaction and contentment. He is a hive of sweetness, a mirror of beauty, a storehouse of riches! He is the river of pleasure, where the soul bathes with infinite delight!”
“The bird, the higher it takes its flight, the sweeter it sings. Just so, the higher the soul is raised above the world–the sweeter joy it has. How is the heart inflamed in prayer! How is it ravished in holy meditation! These joys are those honey-streams which flow out of the rock, Christ! He has those tastes of God’s love–which are the beginnings of heaven. So sweet is this kind of life, that it can drop sweetness into our troubles and afflictions–that we shall be scarcely sensible of them. It can turn the prison into a paradise; the furnace into a festival; it can sweeten death. A soul elevated by grace, can rejoice to think of dying. Death will but cut the string, and the soul, that bird of paradise, shall fly away and be at rest. Happiness is but the cream of holiness!”
One of the last things that I did before leaving Mount Vernon was to visit one of the sweetest women that I have ever met with my good friend Caryl. We pulled up to her apartment, walked in and enjoyed talking to her about her many decades ministering at EBC, where her favorite plants were from, and what it was like to be diagnosed with caner. It was a very special afternoon.