Today's daily lesson comes from Psalm 31 verse 5:
5 Into your hand I commit my spirit;
you have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God.
Last week I held the hand of a man at the moment of his death. In the time prior to his passing on I read to him the Scriptures, prayed the Lord's Prayer, recited the Twenty-third Psalm, and told him and his family what I try always to say to those nearing the end of this life, "We trust his life with God, and we trust God with his life."
Death is the ultimate act of trust. In dying, we must come to terms that there really is nothing on earth that can save us. Wealth is meaningless, medicine has no answer, all knowledge gives way. Naked and unknowing we came into the world and naked and unknowing we go out. Death strips us of all that we might cling to in hopes of being spared, and finally we are faced with the one essential question confronting all that lives and dies: Are we going to trust that God is - That God is able, That God willing, That God is trustworthy, That God is kind, That God in ultimate control, That God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob -- the God of the living and not of the dead?
From His cross, Jesus prayed the Psalm: "Into your hands I commit my Spirit." When his own hands were useless --nailed to the tree of death -- Jesus entrusted Himself to the hands of God; and for that though He was dying a brutal and ugly death on the outside, on the inside He was at peace.
When death comes -- as it does in many ways and shall for us all in an ultimate way-- it is not a moment of horror or dread, but a time for peace, and for the living out of our faith in the One who is and was and shall be again.
We trust our lives with God, and we trust God with our lives. And in the end that is all; and it is everything.
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