Run hard in this life. As it did for Paul, life now means the continuing opportunities of fruitful labor for the joy and progress in the faith of others to the glory of God (Phil. 1:22, 25-26). The worldly view would have you toiling now to enjoy only this life because if this is all there is, then you should live life and put death out of mind—over there. But the gospel brings death in front of us, and compels us to work hard in this life for the kingdom’s sake because of what we know death isn’t—the end.

There’s a Chinese cemetery across the street from where I work, and every now and then I’ll take my break and go walk through the gravestones. As I walk around, trying to make out what I can at each site, I’m forced to a place of contemplating death—and I think this is a practice we all need more regularly in our lives. Interestingly, if the Lord tarries, death is one of the few things every single one of us will experience personally at some point. Not everyone experiences the beauty of music, the warm love of a friend, or the joyful embrace of their parents, but everyone will experience death. For this reason, it seems like we should spend more time considering death and how its certainty impacts how we live our lives now.

Under Emphasized

In our culture, we do everything we can to avoid thinking about death—at least in a positive sense. We do, however, spend a lot of time thinking about how we can delay or avoid it. We pour our money and time into gym memberships, diet plans, and self-help books in hopes of staving off death, and maximizing our enjoyment in what we know we have—this life. Our Western world is starving itself of the life-giving implications of death.

Not many of our churches these days have graveyards at the entrance, or on the grounds. Nowadays we place our dead, like the topic in general, out of the way over there.

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