We Die With A Different Hope-Preparing for 2018

Hebrews 11:14-16a “People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one.”

Dying well is something of a lost art today. We don’t talk about it or preach about it or think about it, and we certainly don’t train our people in how to do it. We have “grief recovery” classes that help those who have lost loved ones. But when was the last time you attended a class on how to die well? 

The Puritans saw things differently. They preached a great deal to their people about how to die well, full of faith and hope and joy in the Lord. By this they did not mean how to plan your own death, nor did they intend to suggest that you could somehow avoid the sudden death that comes to so many people. They simply meant to train their people so that they would live with conscious, abiding faith in Jesus Christ to the very end of life, and that they would give a joyful testimony to the watching world they left behind.

The writer to the Hebrews is making the same point in his own way. In earlier generations people believed in two worlds, and they knew that the next world was the “real” world, the one that would last forever. And so they lived in this world (the solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short one) with one eye looking forward to the next one. They understood that this world could not, cannot, and does not bring you ultimate happiness.And so we believe there is another world. Hebrews 11 calls it a “a country of their own” and “a better  country—a heavenly one.” We are destined to live and die feeling slightly (and maybe more than slightly) out of place. 

-That’s why we won’t go back in 2018.
-That’s why we won’t turn around in 2018.
-That’s why we keep our eyes always on heaven and for the rapture in 2018.

We live by a different standard and we die with a different hope. Death for the believer is not what it is for the unbeliever. For those who know Jesus, death is going home, to our real home, our eternal home, to the place where when we get there, we will say, “This is where I belong.”