God is my No.7 God be at my end

And one aspect in the creed, which so often we say at the tab, underlines the fact that we do believe, not only in God as our Creator, but God who calls us eventually from this life to stand before Him. We also believe in the return of Jesus Christ, that one day we will submit to His judgment as to the things that we have done in our lives. And it's this whole concept of death and what lies beyond, judgment, the benefits of salvation, which we're homing in on as our subject matter this evening.

So, if you know the creed, just bow your heads. If you don't, then it's coming up on the overhead projectors. It's also in the supplement.

And let's recite it together. I believe in God the Father, Creator of heaven and earth, and I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Virgin and was born of the Virgin Mary. It is I who am the Pontiff's Father, for through this Father have I been ordained.

It is said unto you today, on the third day of your birth, conceived by the right hand of the Father, you will come again into church believing on that day. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Please sit down.

I'd like you to listen to some scriptures being read to us by our drummer, who not only plays the drums well, but also reads the scriptures well. Come and sit around here, will you? These scriptures speak about our belief in life beyond the grave, and they're taken from throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament, and they're very important because there is a sense of absolute confidence, certainty, no ifs, no maybes, no perhapses, but this is what one can expect on passing from this world into the next. This is taken from the Book of Psalms, Psalm 23.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. I will say, Amen. Then it goes on in Psalm 17.

This is with boldness, and it says, As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness. I shall be satisfied when I awake with a likeness. Though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.

Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of his saints. Then I jump on to John, and this is what he said. Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life.

He who believes in me will live even though he dies, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe in this? Then it goes on to 1 Corinthians with braveness, and it goes on and says, Well, death is your victory. Well, death is your sting.

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, he gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Today you will be with me in paradise.

Then it goes on to Hebrews, which is a very, very great chapter to read. It goes on and says, To the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven, you have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirit of righteous, and it goes on to the spirit of righteous men. Then the great book of Revelation, chapter 8. The smoke of the incense with the prayers of the saints went before God.

And I pray that as we listen to the words of God tonight, that the Lord will continue to reveal himself to us in spirit and in deed. Amen. So, in the Old Testament, Job, who lived well before the Lord Jesus, probably, I think, before Abraham, was absolutely convinced that after his death, he would one day stand in a resurrection body and see God.

Though worms destroy my body, yet in my flesh will I see God. Right in the Old Testament you get that. And then in the New Testament, the concept from Revelation, that those who've actually died, who are Christians, go into the presence of God and their prayers are accepted by God, even though they're no longer with us, but they are in his presence.

Affirmation after affirmation. The Bible making it very clear that life is not blown out like a candle flame is blown out, but rather our spirit is indestructible and we go back to God who granted us life. Now, if everyone had that assurance, then I think the world would be a better place.

But not everyone has. Some struggle towards faith and some just deny the concept of God and responsibility and so on. There's a man in history whose story has always appealed to me because while he was of a poetic nature, he lived out in Chichester and he died of tuberculosis when he was just in his mid-thirties, probably in the precincts of Chichester Cathedral, realising that he would very quickly die and that he'd never have the satisfaction of knowing marriage with the woman that he loved.

He spots a nightingale and he sees the nightingale fly off into the sky and for a moment that nightingale seems to suggest to him all that he wants. The nightingale in his imagination, remember he is a poet, just flies on and on and on and represents eternity. It represents a world where there's no problem, no sickness and, well, he muses, as poets often do.

If only he was the nightingale, if only he had an assurance that when tuberculosis had killed him, he might go on. Listen to Keats, it's part of his ode to a nightingale. Fade far away, dissolve and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known The weariness, the fever and the fret Here where men sit and hear each other groan Where pulses shakes a few, sad last grey hairs Where youth grows pale and scepter thin and dies Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leading-eyed despairs Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes Or new love pine at them beyond tomorrow Thou was not born for death, immortal bird No hungry generations tread thee down The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth When, sick for home, she stood in tears amid the alien corn The same that of times hath Charmed magic casements Opening on the foam of perilous seas In fairy lands forlorn So, Keats even has an appeal to the Bible and thinks about Ruth.

The way her story turned out eventually, well, she was a refugee, she came to Bethlehem, things looked quite bleak, but she married a man called Boaz and she set up house in one sense. Take this with a little bit of qualification. She lived ever more happily after she got married.

She lived happily ever after. That's the phrase I was chasing for. Well, nice to have that sort of faith, nice to have that sort of outlook, but the Bible does give you the right, if you embrace Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, not to think of death in terms of a problem as the final stumbling block, but death rather as a door through which you go into an experience which is so more wonderful compared with this life, that the Apostle Paul says it can't really be described.

I have not seen nor heard the things that God hath in store for those that love him. And that's all part and parcel of the Christian faith. Push that away and there's really nothing left at all.

There is no faith. But this is what Christians believe. So from the scriptures you've had quite a number of very, very conclusive statements.

And from the poet, well, you've got his fantasy, but he got nothing to anchor himself on. Thanks for helping me. I can remember it as though it was yesterday, one of the most challenging pastoral experiences I've had.

A little child was born with Down syndrome's disease and wasn't expected to live. Actually, the little lass lived about a month and a half and then went away and the remains were put in a tiny little coffin and I had to go up to the funeral chapel and try to speak to the parents and then convey that little bundle of human remains to the cemetery, where in the tiniest grave you ever did see, the coffin was lowered and eventually put to rest. I got up early that morning and read through quite a chunk of the book of Psalms, asking the Lord for some help in speaking to this occasion.

I came across a verse halfway through the book that says this and the actual imagery is taken from the temple in Jerusalem, which had a very high ceiling and it was open as far as part of the roof was concerned and birds could fly in and out amongst the rafters. Sometimes Old Testament worship was enhanced by the chirping of the birds and the psalmist says, the sparrow has found a nest even in the house of my God and I thought, thank the Lord for that particular eye-opening verse which had obvious application for this scene and I could tell those people, mum, dad, relatives, hand over my heart that this is what the Bible was promising with regard to their child. David is one of the celebrated characters of the Old Testament, greatest king that Israel ever knew, called friend of God and yet in some ways represented tragedy and on one occasion, a beloved child that he was expecting to enjoy and bring up, the child that was conceived illegally because the woman was not his wife, I refer to Bathsheba, was stillborn and David lamented the death of this child and actually fasted that the birth might have been successful and the child might have lived but when it was obvious that there was no breath left in the youngster whatsoever, David says this, he will not come to me, but I will go to him.

David indicating that the life even of a child within the womb, a child that does not know much in terms of the life that you and I have known, nonetheless is a sovereign individual and goes back into the presence of God. Martin Lloyd-Jones was a great doctor in London and was the consultant of, at least his chief was the consultant of the late King George VI and Lloyd-Jones left the medical profession although he was a very brilliant surgeon himself, particularly specializing in heart conditions and one of the reasons he told me why he left the medical profession was because he believed that doctors could only help to extend life for a limited time and at the human level whereas it was even more important to be concerned for someone's spiritual well-being because when the doctor has done all he or she can do, the patient still has other demands. It reminds me that the founding doctor, at least the doctor who founded St. Barnabas's Cancer Home here in Worthing, did so with this sole objective to give a place for people who were suffering with terminal cancer to go and to be ministered to not only at a medical level but also at a spiritual level.

Gustafson was the only man as far as I know who got an article in the Lancet, that's the in-house magazine of the doctors, the medical profession, which argued for doctors preparing not just their patients for life but also for death. And Dr. Lloyd-Jones, just to go back to him, on one occasion having switched from the medical profession to being a preacher, makes this comment in the 1940s. He says, The Lord Jesus Christ does manifest himself in moments of extreme agony and crisis to help us.

Many have testified to this immediately before their death, the greatest crisis of all. Suddenly he has appeared to them, and the people standing by the bedside have seen a smile upon their faces. I remember being at the bedside of an old saint, aged 78, who had once been a terrible sinner.

I shall never forget it. Suddenly he must have seen the Lord, for he held out his hands and said, I am coming, Lord. What a contrast that approach to death is over against the epitaph on a tombstone, which reads like this, Here lies an atheist all dressed up, but with nowhere to go.

Bertrand Russell writes, There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment, and then nothing. One of the greatest British philosophers, Russell, towards the end of his life says, there really is just triviality.

There is nothing really in life that has been worth living for. All the paucity, the bankruptcy of a philosophy like that, of that sort of statement, it's only when you come to the Christian gospel and to the teaching of the Lord Jesus and the anticipations of the Old Testament that you really get any framework in which you can understand the phenomena of life and be prepared for the tremendous last step of death itself. There was an evangelist who was in his day equivalent to Billy Graham.

I'm talking about the end of last century. His name was D.L. Moody and he's well known for a quip that he made on one occasion in his preaching. He said that when the news broke out that D.L. Moody was dead, dismiss the notion because Moody would be twice as much alive as ever.

Well, it's easy to say that when you're in mid-flow as a preacher, as a famous evangelist, but here is something that's not so well known regarding D.L. Moody. He's now on his deathbed in New York and he speaks about an experience that he has of the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ and he goes on to talk about a presence which I could not see but which I knew was entering into the cloud from the southern side of the room. The presence did not seem to my mind as a form because it filled the cloud like some vast intelligence and as though the cloud rested upon either side of my head, thoughts not my own entered into my brain.

And he goes on to tell how he believed that the Lord Jesus Christ came to him. Moody said, I went to the gate of heaven. It was so wonderful.

I saw the children. When asked who he saw, he said, I saw Irene and Dwight. Then he realized he was near the end and Moody said, I will stay as long as I can but if my time is come, I am ready.

If God wishes, he could work a miracle. I will get up. Doctor, I can die in a chair just as well in bed, can't I? Moody contemplated death and spoke of the experience that he had just before he slipped away to be with the Lord.

One of the men who impressed me most in terms of his preparation for that tremendous hour was my own general practitioner who I knew well. He qualified in the University of Sheffield and came down to practice here in Worthing and was a member of the tab. He didn't very often speak of his own spiritual experiences.

He wasn't that sort of person though he had a commitment to the Lord which had lasted the whole of his professional life. Unfortunately, he developed cancer. Cancer of the lung.

I remember going out to see him after one of the lungs had been taken away. And as I sat down, he said something to me like this. I want to talk to you, Tony.

So I said, go ahead. He said, when I was unconscious, I had such an experience of the presence of God and floating into somewhere where God became so very real that I did not want to return. Indeed, he said, had it not been the thought of my wife and my children and my grandchildren, I would have had no urge whatsoever to come back to this life.

And the thing that impressed me was that I had never heard him in the many, many occasions we'd had conversation, I never heard him speak in this sort of spiritually intimate fashion. And it became, to me, a very wonderful confirmation at a pastoral level of those things that I have believed for a long time. And that is that at the moment of death, the moment when your heart no longer causes blood to pulse around, to pulsate around your body, you then go into the presence of the God who, if you remember, at the beginning of this series, I spoke to you of from Scripture, who is your creator.

God who gave you life has the right and exercises that right to take life back to himself. One out of one people die. The statistic is so absolute that men and women and young people who do not consider the last step from life into death and from death beyond really are fools.

And it's the Old Testament and the New Testament, far more than any other religious book, and I measure my words, that speaks to this subject in a way that you can find no information equal to that anywhere else. The Old Testament, the psalm that was read to you, the 23rd psalm, surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever. The psalmist says, I shall be satisfied when I awake in your likeness.

Here is the Lord Jesus, and he has the same experience as I've had innumerable times. He finds himself by a grave. Lazarus is dead, and Jesus missed the funeral rites.

And when Jesus speaks to Mary and Martha, he uses words which either confirm that he was the son of God, or he is an utter lunatic. For Jesus, with consummate skill, or crass indelicacy, depending on how you judge the person of Jesus, says, I am the resurrection and the life. He that believes on me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.

And whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die. And when you move through the whole of the Old Testament and on into the New Testament where you get additional revelation, you find death looked at with incredible optimism, and almost a sense of welcome. Absent from the body, present with the Lord, says Paul.

A man who lived life to the full. I have a problem. I don't know really whether I should be asking God to stay on here and pastor these churches, or whether I should ask him for the fullness of my reward to slip through the corridor of death and on into eternity.

Let me be specific. And we'll go to the overhead just for a little while. When the summary of the biblical teaching on death is made, what you have confronting you is that the Bible speaks about three types of death.

There is spiritual death. When the apostle Paul writes to the Ephesians, he talks about them in their pre-Christian days. And he says, you were dead in trespasses and in sins.

Spiritually, you were dead. Now, it does look at the moment, because I haven't been preaching too long, that everybody here is alive and alert. But theologically, that is not true.

Theologically, this congregation is split into two compartments. Probably one far larger than the other. One compartment is composed of people who are spiritually alive.

They have committed their lives to Jesus Christ. They have confessed that He is their Lord and their Savior. It's not just a question of on death entering into eternal life.

They already have it. Their spirit will never be extinguished. They will slip from this world at the end of their physical life into the next world.

But there are those who are spiritually dead. And death in that sense is defined as rejecting Jesus Christ. There are two groups of people in our world, says the Bible.

The spiritually alive and the spiritually dead. So, one teaching of the Bible in regard to death is death is spiritual. The Bible also recognizes that death is physical.

I've made reference to that. Jesus, at the tomb of Lazarus, He's had a telegram. He's been told that Lazarus is sick.

He arrives too late. The man is already in the tomb. And Jesus is given the blunt information, Lazarus, who you love, is dead.

D-E-A-D. Jesus speaks not only of physical death and spiritual death. But He also speaks about eternal death.

On one occasion, you find in John's Gospel in chapter 8, He's speaking to some who are antagonistic towards Him. And these were actually religious leaders. And He says in the 21st through to the 24th verse, You will die in your sins.

And that is the most grotesque expression that you find in the whole of the Bible. Grotesque because it describes a condition which is irreversible. If you die in your sins, you are dead eternally.

There is nothing that can bring you back from that condition. You can be spiritually dead now, but respond to the Gospel. Which means that you've moved from one compartment to the other.

But physical death is the terminus, is the full stop of your opportunity to respond to the salvation work of Jesus Christ. This is, therefore, the summary teaching of the Bible in regard to death. Spiritual death, physical death, eternal death.

When Martin Luther King died, when he was assassinated, they put on his tombstone, Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last. What did they mean? Well, he died physically, but he confessed Jesus Christ as his Savior.

So when he slipped from this world into the next world, he went to enjoy the benefits of an eternity with God. So I ask you the question, have you yourself responded to the free offer of salvation? Made by Jesus Christ. Found an anticipation in the Old Testament, made clear in the New.

Let me close down in five minutes time, and spend these last few minutes answering some questions that I'm often asked in regard to death. You'll not remember all the answers, you'll not remember all the references. That's why there are some notes on the welcome desk for those who are particularly interested.

One question that's sometimes put is, does a Christian, when he dies, go immediately into the presence of God? Does a Christian go immediately into the presence of God? The answer in the Bible is yes, he does. Absent from the body, present with the Lord. The Apostle Paul, in the reference that I quoted, says that he has this problem.

It would be good for him to stay with the Philippians, it would also be good for him if he could slip away into a more wonderful experience of God's grace by being in his immediate presence. Does a Christian go immediately into the presence of God on death? And the answer is yes. What happens when a child dies? Oh, let me sharpen this even more.

What happens when a fetus is aborted? Well, I quoted you the example of David who, when his child born by Bathsheba did not survive, he said, I will go to him, he cannot come to me. When a child dies by God's grace, inasmuch as they have no consciousness and therefore no responsibility for sin, they most certainly enter into the immediate presence of the Lord. But the unborn child who dies as a result of abortion, I don't like the word fetus, I don't find an equivalent in the Bible.

That child too that has life, sovereign life, though is never allowed to exercise it on earth, goes into the presence of God. When Mary, the mother of Jesus, finds herself talking to Elizabeth, her older cousin, who also is with child, Elizabeth says that the child within me actually was filled with joy because somehow in the prenatal state, John the Baptist recognized that he was in the presence of his unborn cousin, Jesus of Nazareth. If you wanted any more proof as to the viability of life before physical birth and the importance of the child that is in its mother's womb, you find it in that scripture or back in the Psalms where the psalmist says that he was known by God when he was in the security of his mother's womb.

On death, is there such a place as purgatory? Do you slip into a sort of twilight world where you do some form of expiation, make some attempt to remedy the sins that somehow have not been covered by the shed blood of Jesus, as is the classic teaching of the Catholic Church? And the answer is with great respect to the Catholic Church, there is not one shred of evidence to support that. The whole doctrine is built on a misunderstanding of what the Apostle Paul means when he says that when we stand in the presence of God, what we do and have done will be tested by fire and he uses that metaphor to describe the refining process as God investigates, inquires into the way we have lived our lives since we confessed Jesus as our Savior. Does the believer go immediately to heaven on death? Indeed, they do.

Shall we know? Shall we know each other in heaven? Well, if heaven is greater than anything that we experience here on earth, one of the most wonderful experiences that we have is surely fellowship with one another, then that has to be conserved, that has to be improved, that has to be benefited from even in a more wonderful fashion than we enjoy it now. When our Lord Jesus was on the Mount of Transfiguration, Elijah and Moses appeared to him. They were both recognized even by the disciples.

They engaged in conversation with our Lord. When the Apostle Paul writes to the Thessalonians, he says that when I get to heaven, you will be my joy, you will be my crown. What does he mean? Well, I spent my life, at least part of it, spreading the gospel, telling others about Jesus Christ, you included, and as a result of what I shared, you made a response and there is a sense in which you are my joy, my crown.

I have led you to the Lord. The anticipation is by the Apostle that he will know and enjoy the fellowship of those that he has led to Jesus. So put all that together and what do you find? The Christian gospel that speaks about God being at the end of our lives as he was there at the beginning is indeed the most wonderful truth and as it's necessary for you to recognize that God is your creator who gives you life, so it is equally important for you to recognize that at the end, you've got to be with him to answer for the way that you have lived and more particularly, to answer the question, what was your response to what my son did when he lived 32 years on this earth? What was your response to the death that he died on the cross and the empty tomb whereby the New Testament is taught your sins can be forgiven if you confess him as your savior.

Let's pray. Jesus said, I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes on me shall never die.

The most important thing for you is to ensure that you know Jesus Christ as your savior. How can you do that? By simply saying, Lord Jesus, come into my heart. Take away my sin.

Let me now enter eternal life, this side of heaven. May I never eternally die because of what you have done on the cross for me. Lord Jesus, I take you and the salvation that you offer and commit my life to you, thanking you, Father and Holy Spirit, for making such redemption possible.

Lord, bless this word to all of our hearts and make us ready for that final hour when we slip from this world into the next. In Jesus' name, amen. This tune was written by a man who actually helped to found the Sunday School movement and made quite an impression in my home city in Yorkshire, Sheffield.

A man who had a great faith in Jesus Christ and influenced thousands towards the gospel. Number 37. Let's stand.

Father, again, we thank you for your words so clear on this subject. We pray for those who've recently known bereavement. We thank you for your grace that extends to all those who are sorrowful.

We thank you, too, for so many instances of deathbed conversion where people realize in those last moments that they have to stand before God and grip on to what little knowledge they have of the Bible and of the cross work of Christ. We praise you that Jesus taught that just a little grain of faith would be sufficient to bring someone from this life into the eternal realm and to know bliss forever. So, Lord, be with all those who mourn.

Those who are not too sure of the state of loved ones who've gone on before, grant, O Lord, your assurance and your peace. And of all of us here, grant a holy disturbance if it be the case that we've been playing fast and loose with these things. Enable us to ensure that we have embraced our Lord Jesus, that He is indeed our Savior and that He is our passport into your immediate presence.

So send us on our way rejoicing in the goodness and the grace of God and help us to be of help to one another, especially when tragedy strikes, when death comes, and when we need consolation and love and support and tears and compassion. So hear our prayer and send us on our way, seeing you more clearly, loving you more dearly, following you more nearly throughout the days, months, and years ahead of our lives. Amen.