The Promise of a Lifetime
Notes
Transcript
1000 Illustrations for Preaching & Teaching Facing It
Facing It
Death is the shadow that hangs over human life. It is the judgment. It is God’s evaluation of your life and mine. Though impossible to do so, we are constantly attempting to escape the fact of death. The late William Randolph Hearst forbade anyone to use the word death in his presence. What a contrast to Philip II, King of Macedon and father of Alexander the Great, who commissioned a servant to come into his presence daily and solemnly announce, “Remember, Philip, thou must die.”
Lord God, bless Your Word wherever it is proclaimed. Make it a Word of power and peace to convert those not yet Your own and to confirm those who have come to saving faith. May Your Word pass from the ear to the heart, from the heart to the lip, and from the lip to the life that, as You have promised, Your Word may achieve the purpose for which You send it, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen
A voice cries: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” A voice says, “Cry!” And I said, “What shall I cry?” All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the Lord blows on it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.
Ordinary life is made of mountains and valleys. There is seldom a straight line from point A to point B. When Marvin Gaye and Tammy Terrell sang the song, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” they were acknowledging that life does not go smoothly for many people. If we try to live as if that is not the norm, we will be constantly disappointed. When Jack Nolan Campbell moved his wife, Corrine and their children from Marked Tree, AR to Gary, IN, his children were very young or not yet born. He did what many southern blacks did, got a job in the mills and also had a side job hauling trash. All of his sons, Clarence, Harlee, Nolan, Herbert, and James either did well as employees or were successful entrepreneurs.
As such, that means that none of them rode the lazy river cruise to success, nor were they aware of its existence. I must also note that none of them passed on to their children a strong interest in Scripture or the issues of sin and salvation. When I talked to any of them, we talked about work, careers, vocation, my future under the sun, but never about my soul. To the extent that we discussed moral issues, it was in the context of what I as a Lutheran pastor would call the First, or Civil use of the Law. “Do the right thing, because it is the right thing to do,” or, if you are going to bend the rules, do it because it gives you an economic advantage that will enable you to better provide for your family, not because it doesn’t matter how you treat your neighbor. The bottom line, life is hard, so you must work hard if you are going to get ahead, even as a hustler.
What gain has the worker from his toil? I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man.
Uncle Nolan was the last of that generation. The things that I remember about him, my dad, my uncle James, and to a lesser extent, my uncles Clarence and Harlee, were the things that I just mentioned, along with a great ability to host family gatherings and, in the cases of Uncle Harlee and my father, musical ability. I don’t know how good of a job that we have done in carrying on those traditions forward or of placing them in our children.
That is not why I’m here today though. Instead, I’m here today to bring closure to Uncle Nolan’s life and to address God’s perspective on his death. Whatever spiritual impact Uncle Nolan may have had on anyone’s spiritual life, today is a chance for me to get you to look at his death and see the reality of death, and that you too will have a day when we will once again be brought face-to-face with our enemy.
Nolan Campbell was baptized as a child at St. John’s Baptist church, a couple of blocks from the family home at 2337 Massachusetts St. While I don’t know whether every baptized person dies as a Christian, I do know that God has made a promise that connects to baptism, but He has made no promise that he has attached to refusing to be baptized when it comes to eternal life.
Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.
I know that death is the general course for living things, and that we seem to intuitively understand that there is more to life than this life. I know that Jesus understood His mission to be our salvation, and that the Christian church has consistently told people for over 2000 years that Christ rose from the dead, and that He offers eternal life to those who trust in him. No one has ever called Jesus Christ a liar or fool, but the Bible calls those who say that there is no God a fool.
The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is none who does good.
Today, as you look at this casket, you can think, “so what; I’’m still breathing.” The day will come, and we don’t know when, that we will be looking at your casket. I cannot tell you where your soul will be on that day, but I can tell you what the Lord Jesus Christ has promised:
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”
You might not believe those words today; you might not want to because you have been tricked into believing that Jesus Christ doesn’t really want to save you, or maybe that He can’t, or worse, that there is nothing from which He needs to save you. And yet, you are here. If there is nothing after our last breath, there is no reason for this. No reason for this ritual, no reason for our efforts to prevent death, no reason for us to be concerned with how we live our lives in relation to others.
It is God’s promise to lift up the valleys, bring down the mountains, and level out the uneven places that gives us hope. It is the reality of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ that draws us to to acknowledge our hunger and thirst for righteousness that He alone promises to satisfy, not momentarily, but eternally.
“Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me, to repay each one for what he has done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life and that they may enter the city by the gates.
How can this be? How can you get access to this tree of life and enter that city? Jesus Christ did the work for us:
For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water. Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him.
This same Jesus, who tasted death for us all, and then rose again, is the Son whom the Father sent into the world to redeem the world from sin, and now offers eternal life to those who trust in Him.
But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord.
So let the peace of God that passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.