The world is full of people who are trying to get all they can get out of life. The reality of the impending death is continually before us all in this broken world. And those who have no eternal hope, who have not been transformed by the Gospel, who do not know intimately the Person and Work of Jesus are in a rat race to soak up as much as possible at all costs before their life expiration date hits. How else are they to live? If this is our only shot and all we have to look forward to is non-existence… or as Paul puts it “If the dead are not raised” then all we have to do in this world is “eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” (1Cor 15:32)
Not so for the believer in Christ. Not even close for those who have been redeemed, made alive, and given an eternal hope through Jesus Christ. His death has ransomed those who have trusted in Him and His resurrection has secured for His people a reward. For the Christ-follower, to live is Christ and to die is gain. (Phil 1:21) This all-glorious truth radically shifts the way we live life and the way we approach our impending death.
This is clearly seen in the words below. Matt Chandler , Pastor at Village Church, has over the past week come face to face with his own mortality. His doctors discovered a small mass in the frontal lobe of his brain. Today, hours before he went into major brain surgery, he posted the words below on his blog. As I read his post, I was reminded that this is not our final stop and our life should reflect it. And I was reminded of Resolution #17 from Jonathan Edwards, “Resolved, that I will live so as I shall wish I had done when I come to die.”
The last seven days have been some of the most interesting of my life. I have felt anxiety, fear, sadness and a deep and unmovable joy simultaneously and in deeper ways than I have felt before. I am grateful for this heightened sense of things. Today at 10:45 a.m. CST I will have a good portion of my right frontal lobe removed. I head into that surgery with a heart that is filled with gratitude and hope.
Here are some of the things I am thankful for in no particular order:
- I am thankful for the thousands of you who have prayed and fasted for my health. It has brought far more tears to Lauren’s and my eyes to receive this kind of attention from the Church universal than this tumor has.
- I’m thankful for health insurance because I’m guessing they aren’t doing my five-hour surgery for free!
- I am thankful that I have deep, real friendships at The Village with Michael Bleecker, Josh Patterson, Brian Miller, Chris Chavez and Beau Hughes. They have been such a comfort to me and my family this past week. Pastors should have good friends on their staff. It’s risky but worth the risk.
- I am grateful for the men of God in my life, namely John Piper who taught me to hold my life cheap and to join with Paul in saying “I don’t count my life of any value or as precious to myself if only I might finish my course and complete the work that He gave me to do to testify to the Gospel of the grace of God. I’m nothing, I just have a job. God keep me faithful on the job and then let me drop and go to the reward.” Without this strong view of God’s sovereign will, I’m not sure how you don’t despair in circumstances like mine.
- I am thankful for my wife Lauren. “Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come. She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue. She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: ‘Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.’” “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised.”
- I am thankful for my children. Audrey the Beautiful, Reid the Valiant and Norah the Joyous. Being a daddy to these three is one of the greatest joys of my life.
- The privilege of seeing and appreciating all of life through the grid of a heightened sense of my own mortality.
- I am thankful for brilliant doctors and surgeons who have been given a real gift by our great God and King to repair things as complex as the brain.
- I am thankful for The Village Church. If there is a place that loves Jesus more, takes sanctification as seriously and wants to see the lost love the great King deeply I am unaware of it. These last seven years have been a spectacular joy!
- More than anything else I am grateful to my King Eternal, my Lord Immortal, for my God invisible. He alone is God. All Glory and Honor, Forever to You O God. I am overwhelmed in these moments by God Himself and the assurance of a future inheritance of a Kingdom that cannot be shaken and where all things are made new (Hebrews 12).
Christ is All,
Matt Chandler
Praying for Matt Chandler and his family today. Trusting that our Sovereign God is working out all things, including brain tumors, according to the counsel of His will. And learning more and more of what it looks like to live life well- In other words, learning to live life with my eyes fixed on Christ and continually aware of my own mortality!
Britten