Dear Friends,
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John Wesley, speaking of the Methodists of his day, once said, “Our people know how to die well.” That’s an interesting statement, is it not? But it is true not only of the Methodists but of true Christians in all ages. Today’s devotional will explain. God bless you.

Because of Calvary,
John Janney

• II Corinthians 5:1-8 (ESV)

  1 For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 2 For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, 3 if indeed by putting it on[a] we may not be found naked. 4 For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. 5 He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.

  6 So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, 7 for we walk by faith, not by sight. 8 Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.

“In the heathen part of the catacombs of Rome, the inscriptions over the place where their dead were buried are full of lamentation and despair. Indeed, the writers of those inscriptions do not appear to have been able to find words in which they could express their great distress, their agony of heart, at the loss of child, or husband, or friend. They pile the mournful words together, to try to describe their grief. Sometimes, they declare that the light has gone from their sky now their dear ones are taken from them. ‘Alas! alas!’ says the record, ‘dear Caius has gone, and with him all joy is quenched forever, for I shall see him no more.’ Heathenism is hopeless to afford any comfort to the bereaved. But when you come into that part of the catacombs which was devoted to Christian sepulture, everything is different. There you may constantly read these consoling words, ‘He sleeps in peace.’ There is nothing dreadful or despairing in the inscriptions there, they are submissive, they are cheerful, they are even thankful; frequently, they are victorious, and the most common emblem is — not the quenched torch, as it is on the heathen side, where the light is supposed to have gone out forever, — but the palm branch, to signify that the victory remains eternally with the departed one. It is the glow of the Christian religion to have let light into the sepulcher, to have taken the sting away from death, and, in fact, to have made it no more death to die.” [Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit XLVI, (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1900), p. 39]