Is this enthusiastic exaggeration, to say that death when it got into the love of Christ would become life? No, it is sober fact. Death got into a missionary home in Foochow, China; father and mother were killed in the Vegetarian Riots. The four children escaped, met together, and decided on their revenge—they would get the best education possible and come back to China and serve those who had killed their parents. They did. Death didn’t separate them from the love of Christ; death became life—a life of dedicated service. Alongside those two graves is another grave—that of the only daughter of a widow in Australia. This daughter was killed in the riots. The mother said, “I have no other daughters to give; I’ll go myself.” At sixty-two she sold everything, went to China, set up a school, and for twenty years served the people who killed her daughter. Death got into the love of God in Christ and became life—unwittingly so. Death got into a German missionary home in Purulia, India, and took an only daughter through leprosy. The parents said, “Now that death has taken our daughter by leprosy, we’ll see what we can do for other lepers.” They set up the greatest leper home in the world. Death became life—life to the daughter, life to the parents, life to thousands of lepers—life! “O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?” Death getting into the love of Christ has no sting and has no victory. It is transformed into life.
Spiritual death which separates us from God, the source of our life, and which separates us from our highest selves and our greatest possibilities, is a calamity. But physical death to those who are in Christ is not a calamity but opportunity. It is a part of redemption—the redemption of our bodies. It is a sowing—a sowing of a mortal body and reaping an immortal body; it is a sowing of a diseased, broken-down body and the reaping of disease-free, death-free, decay-free body. So death cannot separate—it can only integrate.
THE PRAYER
O Jesus, Thou hast shown us that Thou art the Resurrection and the Life. Death brought Thee life. So begone my fear of death. I embrace it in His name and transform it by His grace and power. Death can only separate me from weakness. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY
Death is the anesthetic that puts me to sleep while God changes my mortal body to immortal.
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