The Majesty Of Jesus

Grace Emmanuel Church

Pastor Sam Chess

(Ever Think About Dying?)

(Preview can be seen on sermonspice.com: Ever think about dying (Worship Films)

Shocking…isn't it? This is one subject that many people don't have the answer to and, oddly, they don't even want to think about it…

People will spend a lifetime planning their futures. They will calculate every potential moment, until their last breath to make sure they have prepared for every eventuality…..they must get the maximum out of every breath they breathe in this life. They eat right, they exercise, they don't live under power lines and they recycle. More importantly they rigorously plan for maximum financial independence so they can enjoy every second of their earthly existence…

Good, way to live! …now, how have you prepared for what comes after this life?

Haven't given it much thought… I'm just hoping I end up in a good place…if there really is one.

Somebody, help me with this…where is the logic here?…..

A person can labor over what kind of financial tool one can use to give him/her the very best, guaranteed return.. so they enjoy life to it's extreme fullest. But when it comes to a future destiny, after this life… that can just be left up to chance, luck, hopes, maybes…

Whether I finished my life in a gated community or a trailer park is something I will not leave to chance…. but whether I spend all of eternity in heaven or hell will have to just work out however it works out.

People like C.S. Lewis used to argue: "If I live my life as a Christian and find out, after death, I had some beliefs wrong, I still will have lost nothing. If the un-forgiven sinner gets to the other side and finds out he is wrong he will have lost everything."

You'd have to be living in a bubble not to have heard something about Anna Nicole Smiths death. It had something of an impact on me… I was driving back from Orlando when the coroner announced his findings into her untimely death.

Here's a woman who lived every second trying to find excitement, and satisfaction in this life…..From her days as a Playboy centerfold to her marriage to a billionaire…… at thirty nine years of age, the accidental hypodermic puncture of an abscess putting more medication into a heavily medicated body leads to a accidental series of events that suddenly move her from this world to the next.

In a millisecond of time…any plans she had for this world don't matter any more. Suddenly she is forced to deal with any plans she did or did not make…for the next world. Death is the great "over-powerer". Death doesn't care if you are rich or poor, famous or unknown…prepared or unprepared.

No wealth can buy endless life.

It's not just us….. every animal, every plant no matter how big or small come to an end. Whole species become extinct….The world is littered with the ruins of whole cities that used to be flourishing and are now piles of ruins. Whole civilizations, some of whom have ruled the world…. have completely disappeared off the face of the earth. Yet somehow.. almost every tow-headed kid born on the earth manages to feel "invincible".

Psalm 103:13 The Lord is like a father to his children, tender and compassionate to those who fear him.14 For he knows how weak we are; he remembers we are only dust. 15 Our days on earth are like grass; like wildflowers, we bloom and die. 16 The wind blows, and we are gone— as though we had never been here. (NLT)

Friday night I watched a special on the life of Chris Farley…comedian… funny, funny guy. The special was very honest about his life. When you watched him, you would think he was the most fun loving guy in the world. He was, in fact, an intensely miserable person. Heavily addicted to food, alcohol, drugs, and prostitutes and his millions of dollars made were poured into those things.

I "Googled"; TheDeath of Chris Farley (which you don't want to do unless you have a strong stomach.) He spent the last four days of his life in a non-stop, non-sleeping binge with alcohol, morphine, cocaine, marijuana, and Prozac and his $2000 companion, Heidi. The last thing she did for him as he lay dying on the floor was to take photos of him (which are posted all over the Web)

The thing that shook me, a bit, was at the end of the TV special, when a Priest, his brother, and his Saturday Night Live co-stars got up and said that he was now in a better place. The "God of Love", they said, had welcomed him into a place of rest from the demons that had haunted here on earth. They said, if you listened carefully, you would be able to hear waves of laughter coming from heaven where Chris Farley was entertaining the angels. I saw, on the Web, that they were quick to point out that Farley died at age 33 …. "just like Jesus Christ".

I can't say what happened to Chris Farley, one minute after he died, but we've got to get serious here about the reality of life, and death, and the hereafter…

If you're going to use the Biblical God, and heaven, as the reward one receives for their life, on this eart,h then you have to attach to it, the pathway that the Bible says you must follow to get you from here to there.

If you are going to the destination of the John Hancock building, in Chicago, where Chris Farley lived, and died, you are not going to leave here traveling west and ever arrive in Chicago. Every destination you ever arrive at has directions. If you follow the directions you get there…if you, arbitrarily, follow a system of chance, and luck, you will never arrive at your destination.

The whole world believes that about everything in our lives, from travel to career choices, to financial decisions, to relationships. You arrive at the destination you have carefully planned…. Except for eternity…. We just hope that one will turn out well.

We can all sit here and shake our heads at the poor life planning of Chris Farley and Anna Nicole Smith. The reality is…every one of us here.. are equally guilty of sin.

Roman 3:23 … all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (NKJV)

It's a lot easier to apply the word sin to a man who's female relationships seemed to be exclusively with prostitutes than it is to apply that word to the attitudes we show to those we are in relationship with… or the fantasies that sometimes swirl around in our minds.

Slavery to sin doesn't stop at cocaine and prostitution…. It includes lying, and anger, and gossip, malicious attitudes and on and on the biblical lists go…. and somewhere, on one of those lists, is you and me…

I can not say this strongly enough… The Bible does not ever under-emphasize sin in any one…in any form!! The cover biblical lists cover huge spans of sinfulness on purpose. God will put murder on the same list as not being nice to your parents… why? Being deceitful (white lie) shows up with adultery with the same promised consequences…why?

It's the last sentence, there, that we get to the heart of the matter… As you read through Romans 6 you could almost get the idea that heart change is just something you choose to do. You're doing wrong… you make a decision to do right.. you start doing right. The End! As some of the people on the video said… if you do enough good you will assure yourself a peaceful place in the hereafter. Is that right?

If sin were that easy to change.. the world would not have needed a Savior. We wouldn't be sitting at the beginning of a Passion Week if we could have fixed our own sin.

Here's where the whole "death thing" comes into the picture… Everyone is sinful, from the really bad ones to the only-a-little-bit-bad ones. Everyone's sin earns the same wages!

The wages of sin…all sin…big sin…little sin… known sin…. unknown sin….is

DEATH!

Death is not something God made for this world. God is life. Everything about God is thriving with life. God can't die…. The ingredients for dying are not even present in who God is.

Death is the absence of life…all life comes from God. Death only came into the world because sin sucked out the very life of God

All three become the wages of our sins…not because God wants it that way…it's purely a function of what our sin deserves. Sin eliminates God's presence…. God's presence is life. The opposite of God's life is a lack of life- Death.

It's like light and darkness. Darkness is not an entity in itself. Darkness is just the lack of light. When all the light is removed from a space you are left lightless. When all of God is removed from mankind you are left- lifeless.

One of the residues sin, and the curse, has brought into this world, is that we all have physical death to look forward to. Sooner or later it will come to us all. Truth is…because of our sin, everyone of us, have earned spiritual and eternal death as well and we don't have the power to do one single thing to stop it!

Our sin says:

That really is the whole of the story in a nutshell. That's what everyone of us deserve whether we are Anna Nicole Smith or Mother Theresa….and that's what every one of us would get… if it hadn't have been for the events, this same time of the year, 1968 years ago. (+ or -)

Because you and I could do nothing to change our sinful position…. Because we were "lost in our sin" and slaves to sin and the evil one…. The only way for any of us to become free from sin, was for someone to defeat the power of sin itself. The power of sin is death! The only way to break the power of death was to break the power of sin. No human being could break the power of sin because every one of them were slaves to sin. Yet in order for there to be a solution to humanities sin problem… a human had to take on the evil one and his hold of slavery over mankind and forcibly break the hold of sin.

If God would come to this earth, become fully human, absorb the full effect of mankind's sin on himself…. pay the penalty for every persons sin, then manage to take on the very root of evil itself, defeat satan, sin, hell, and death, then rise again, alive and sinless, the curse of sin would be broken forever.

1) Physical Death >>>>>> New glorified physical life

That's the story this Passion Week represents: