Dear Friends,
It’s amazing the ways some of us find to torment ourselves. We raise questions like, “What does it mean if I’m afraid to die?” Of course it only means that I am afraid to die when I don’t need to be. Today’s devotional will explain. God bless you.

Because of Calvary,
John Janney

• Psalm 23:4 (ESV)

  Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,[a]
  I will fear no evil,
  for you are with me;
  your rod and your staff,
  they comfort me.

“Says one, ‘I tried myself, the other night, by asking, “Could you die without fear?“’ That is a kind of test you need never put to yourself. Suppose Peter had been for weeks trying to see if he could walk on the water, he could not have done it; but the instant that Christ bade him come to him on the water, he could do it, but not previously. John Bunyan, in his earlier days, imagined that, being a child of God, perhaps he could work miracles, so he thought he would say to one, of the puddles in the road, ‘Be dry;’ but he felt that; he ought to pray first, and as he could not find any promise that he should be able to do that sort of thing, the miracle never came off. What is the good of your having the grace to die with if you are not going to die yet? When you come to die, if you believe in Christ, you may die without the slightest fear. You need to be a great deal more troubled about living than about dying; that is the far more serious thing of the two; yet you need not be troubled about either living or dying when it is written, ‘Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I wilt help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.’ ‘I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee’” [Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit XLVII, (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1901), p. 69]