No words more completely capture the believer’s position in God’s eyes than the Bible’s assurance that he or she is “in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). To put this stunning certainty as simply as possible, it means this: all the righteousness of Jesus shining through His life of perfect obedience to God’s law is imputed to you (counted as yours), and every last iota of your sin is imputed to Him (counted as His), and its penalty paid in full in His death. Grasping this will surely transform your view of death and all that follows.

When my American friend John Gillespie was the pastor of Grace Community Church in the English village of Morval, Cornwall, he wrote a weekly pastoral letter to his congregation. In 2010, fifty-two of these were published (under the arresting title Beware of Living Too Long!). So, when Tabletalk invited me to write this article, one of them sprang to mind. In a letter headed “How Well Will You Die?” John wrote, “Study to die well and you will live well.” Here are four ways in which you can do so.

Remember gratefully (and often) when you first came to living faith in Christ. Not every conversion matches the Apostle Paul’s Damascus road drama, but for every believer there was a time when the “old . . . passed away” and things became new (2 Cor. 5:17), a time when they truly made the Christian faith their own. In my own case, there was a day in 1954 when God rescued me from years of religious performance and replaced them with a living experience—and I can never forget it!

In one of his best-known hymns, the occasionally melancholy English poet William Cowper asked: “Where is the blessedness I knew when first I saw the Lord? Where is the soul-refreshing view of Jesus and His Word?” Whenever you seem to be in a slump, wrap your mind around that “blessedness,” that “soul-refreshing view”! Remember again the joy you sensed when your experience matched that of Christian in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress—“his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble; and so continued to do till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more.” Or, if you cannot remember a time when you didn’t believe in Jesus, recall when you first understood the depth of God’s forgiving grace.

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