Why I am a Christian (18)

Watching Christians Die Confident and Unafraid Is Inspirational

In 2012 I jotted down all the reasons I could think of why I am a Christian. I found 26 so I decided to serialise them in a blog every fortnight for a year.

I have so far covered themes linked with science, philosophy and theology before looking at five different facets of Jesus (I could have explored many more). Then I looked at the inspiration, invincibility and influence of the Bible.

These last nine posts are more personal and are based on my experience. As I’ve said before, my conversion was experiential - emotional even - and I only came to think through the logic of my faith afterwards. I would have said when I was 17 that I am a Christian because I have experienced something like nothing else I have ever known. That hasn’t changed. But I say now that I am a Christian first of all because I think Christianity is true, and I think that there is good circumstantial evidence to support it. Only secondly do I say that I’m a Christian because it works for me.

But work for me it certainly does. My experience of Christ is real. He is not like an imaginary friend (though I struggled to make friends as a child I never invented one) nor is it like Father Christmas or the tooth fairy or anything of the sort. I worked out that these were fictitious at the age of about 6 and Kathie and I resolved never to mislead our children by encouraging them to believe they were real. 

The first thing from my personal experience that inclines me to being a Christian comes from accompanying Christians in their final days and being involved in their funerals.

The Baptist preacher David Pawson sometimes speaks about a man he knew in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire who was told that he had only a few weeks to live. He took the news calmly, thanked the doctor and returned home. He then sent out invitations to all his non-Christian friends. The invitations read “Come and stay with me. Come and see how a Christian dies!”

I have had the privilege of visiting Christians who know that their battle with serious illness is going to result in death. Generally, they don’t feel that “beating cancer” means staying alive. As John Piper puts it in his little booklet Don’t Waste Your Cancer “Satan designs to destroy our love for Christ. God designs to deepen our love for Christ. Cancer does not win if we die. It wins if we fail to cherish Christ.”

I remember vividly one woman smiling gently and saying to me: “I don’t much care for leaving my friends just now but I’m not afraid at all. I know I’m going to a wonderful place.” I would travel to see her wondering what I might say that might be of any comfort. I would come home feeling that the visit had been more beneficial to me than to her.

Her funeral was a tremendous celebration of her life but it contained an appropriate expression of our grief at parting. The abiding memory for me was a rousing “There is a Redeemer” – a song she had specifically requested.

When I stand in glory

I shall see His face

And there I’ll serve my King forever

In that holy place

Christian funerals have a quality about them that is unique. What I mean here is funerals arranged for committed Christians rather than funerals with Christian elements for people who have only the vaguest notions of the Gospel and probably haven’t been near a church since their wedding or baptism. In genuine Christian funerals - yes, there are tears but they are usually a release of emotion and gratitude, not bitterness and not anger. Overwhelmingly there is a sense of victory, of triumph, of homecoming.

And in Christian writing, death is often referred to as sleep – something to wake up from refreshed in the light of a brand new day.

“Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.”

(I Thessalonians 4.13-14)

Another beautiful death happened about a year earlier; another woman with a strong and radiant faith. On her death bed, she gathered friends round and lifted her voice in praise with them in the week she died. I’m told they exhausted the entire hymn book and felt uplifted, grateful and full of joy as they sung happily of Christ’s incomparable glories and grace.

Strangely enough, about halfway between those two deaths, I was asked to visit a man who was not a Christian but who wished to see a priest before dying. He was quite frail when I saw him. He had been a critic of Christianity and had evidently made decisions in his life that he now regretted. I noticed Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion in his bookshelf; though it was full of books, the spine of that book caught my eye among the other volumes.

He was resigned to the inevitability of death, somewhat forlorn and manifestly not at peace. That’s why he had asked to see me. We talked for about an hour, mostly about matters personal to him, and he accepted my offer to pray with him at the end. Though he was evidently wealthy, it was quite pathetic that he had only recently seemed to realise that he wasn’t able to take anything with him. As they say, there’s no prize for being the richest man in the cemetery. It was remarkable how a sense of stillness and grace settled in the room as we prayed. I think he felt it too but I do not know whether he made his peace with God before he died. I hope so.

In the Anglican Service of Ordination, the Bishop reads a list of things that newly ordained ministers are expected to do and it includes “they are to minister to the sick and prepare the dying for their death.” I have found it a great honour to accompany people at the end of life and I am rarely unmoved by the experience. It is, in short, an inspiration to my faith in Christ and it affirms his authority over death in my experience.

I am in good company. The British historian and author A. N. Wilson became a cause celebre amongst sceptics when his withering attacks on Christianity followed his embracing of atheism. But around April 2009, Wilson stunned his readers by returning to Christianity, celebrating Easter at his local church. He wrote about his U-turn in the Daily Mail and I understand exactly where he is coming from:

“My own return to faith has surprised none more than myself… my belief has come about in large measure because of the lives and examples of people I have known, not the famous, not saints but friends and relations who have lived and faced death in light of the resurrection story, or in the quiet acceptance that they have a future after they die.”

This summer, I read Simon Guillebaud's book Dangerously Alive. It's a collection of diary entries and newsletters from his time as a frontier missionary in genocidal Burundi, at that time (1998-2009) the most dangerous place to live on Earth. The scale of human depravity recorded in that book makes for sobering reading. But Guillebaud, along with other Christian ministries like Scripture Union, Tearfund, Youth for Christ and Partners Trust International, made a huge humanitarian and spiritual impact on that country, most of the time in peril of his own life. Here's one passage that is typical:

"I sped around the bend in the road on my motorbike, but quickly scrambled to a stop, surprised to see a figure in the middle of the road, just ahead of me. He was holding a grenade in his hand, ready to blow me up. I knew this for a fact - he had made his intentions clear two days before when he'd written saying he was going to cut out my eyes. I'd had sleepless nights over the threat, of course, but I'd gone to stay at someone else's place for a while and was varying my routes around town so that he wouldn't know where to lie in wait for me. My guard waved at me - a pre-arranged sign not to approach. This was both surreal and yet chillingly real. God, what on earth shall I do? If it has to be, I'm ready to die. Let's go..."

For me, to live is Christ; to die is gain. (Philippians 1.21).

Put alongside the vacuous nihilism expressed by Bertrand Russell before his death, it is no surprise which philosophy draws me and which one leaves me cold. Russell said: "There is darkness without and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendour, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment, and then nothing."

Oh wow…

In a recent book, leading atheist French philosopher Luc Ferry reflects on what death means.

“The truth is, when we admit the difficulty common to all philosophies, that none of them really have an answer to the question of death... On the other hand, the Christian religion really does have an answer to this question. Without hesitation, it promises the resurrection of our soul and our body, so that we will meet our loved ones again after death. The philosopher does what he can but it’s only a stop gap measure, making the best of a bad job by talking about the beauty of renouncing immortality, of being part of the cosmos so that our atoms will continue to exist... The originality of the Christian message is that individuals are no longer mortal. It is not just the fear of death which has been defeated but death itself.”

Well, yes. Christians do not hope against hope when it comes to death. The Bible teaches that people are saved from hell and eternal death not on the basis of what they have done but on the basis of what Christ has done.

As John Wesley said of his conversion experience: “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.” (My emphasis).

That’s why Christians have assurance of salvation and perfect peace in death.

That’s why a young, pretty mother-of-two Rachel Barkey was able to speak so confidently just four months before her untimely death from cancer at the age of 37 in 2009. Here is a video link to her final speech. As you can see in the video, she is not in denial; she is clearly emotional about having to leave her husband and children so soon. But the overwhelming theme of her address is gratitude. 

This is the way I want to die whenever the time comes. And that’s the 18^th reason I am a Christian.

How do you want to die? Please don’t live in denial by constantly putting the question to the back of your mind. And where's the wisdom in putting off thinking about all this until old age sets in?

None of us knows for sure when our life will end. If yesterday was an average day, 150,000 people died. I'm guessing most of them had plans for the following week...