Daily Lesson for April 3, 2017

Today's Daily Lesson comes from Psalm 31 verse 5:

"Into your hand I commit my spirit;
you have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God."

Two years ago my friend and mentor Ted, who was badly sick with cancer and only had a month or so to live, came to speak to our church in what he titled, "A Conversation About Death and Dying with a Dying Man".  Ted was very straightforward and he very much wanted to disabuse everyone of the denial of death. It is the acceptance of our death, he said, which truly allows us to live.

Death frees us from the notion that anything else save God can save us.  Death puts everything into perspective. In the end, it is not our job or our title or our income or our access to good health care, or even our own righteousness.  We all have a death to pay; and in that death we die and everything dies with us.  Only God remains.  Only God can save us.

And as the psalmist prayed, "Into your hands, I commit my spirit."

In the old funeral liturgy there is at the end of the funeral service or at the graveside a rite of committal and final commendation.  The committal is the final act of the people on behalf of the deceased. At that moment in the service I always offer a prayer to God where I offer the deceased up to God and imagine in my own mind God taking them into his strong yet gentle hands.  "We trust them with you, dear LORD," I say, "and we trust you with them."

In the end it all has to be in God's hands. And it will be. It will be in God's good and steady hands.

In the end only God can save us. And we trust that He will.