In Your Death

We’ve been talking all week about ways in which God expects us to glorify Him. There is a final way in this life – it’s in our death.

John 21 is the passage in which Jesus appeared, after His resurrection, to the disciples on the shore. It’s the one where Jesus kept asking Peter “Do you love me?” Finally Jesus says to Peter, “I tell you the truth, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go." And then the clincher verse, John 21:19.   

“Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God.”

God already knows the day of your death. He already knows how you will die. He has already planned your final opportunity to glorify Him on this earth.

Death is that final opportunity to glorify God in this life. I observed this vividly in the death of my mother-in-law – a godly woman who at age 85 was told of the cancer that filled her body. I was there. I saw her reaction. Through her tears she gently cried, “Why God? Why me? I’ve served you all my life.” Then, as though realizing that her death was one final means of glorifying God, she stopped crying and said to all of us present including a skeptical doctor, “God knows why and that makes it OK.” 

Matthew Henry wrote in his commentary, “The death of the martyrs was in a special manner for the glorifying of God. Precious therefore in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints, as that which honors him; and those who thereby at such an expense honor him he will honor.”

Although my mother-in-law was not a martyr she used her death as a final opportunity to bring glory to God and I will never forget that lesson – - to my dying day.

Paul wrote in Philippians 1:20, “I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death.” Death is our final opportunity on this earth to let the character and nature of God be “seen”. How will you act? How will I act and what will see say?

By glorifying God now in all the ways we’ve talked about you’ll be ready for the final opportunity.