Contemplating Death and Judgment

When it hits you - when it really hits you - that life is a vapor, a fleeting moment in time that quickly passes - you begin to either fight for the beauty and dignity of what it means to be human or you throw yourself into the futility with meaningless vanity and self-seeking.

That our lives are beautified and given value, meaning, and purpose as they are found within Christ and His riches of love and mercy shifts how we understand the way we spend our time, our money, our words, and our desires.

What endures? What is beautiful and meaningful about our lives after our lives are over? If we never contemplate death, then we are shackled to today’s emotional experiences or gratifications, thinking that we are living. One of the most beautiful elements of the gospel as its power works within us and awakens and transforms our hearts and perspective is that we are now liberated to contemplate death without reproach or fear. We face the judgment seat of Christ with new confidence and resolve, where most men merely face death itself. We now set ourselves to face that which is beyond death.

The reason that the judgment seat of Christ matters - and that future moment in time is everything - is because it is the objective, external measurement of what was beautiful and meaningful about our lives. It is the determination about what mattered about us, without argument or debate and with no possibility of appeal.

It is a determination that stands alone, far above our own opinions of ourselves and far beyond the human measurement of the substantial and noteworthy life. No one else’s assessment of my life will matter. No one else gets to define its beauty. Was I important? Will my works endure? Was the way I lived beautiful, or meaningful?

I urge you to contemplate death, but with hope. We have a hope that rests in the fear of the Lord and His gracious, loving, but unyielding standards for what life is about and how it should be lived. How does Jesus define our lives and whether or not they were successful?

This is His definition: He declares our lives as beautiful to Him to the measure that they are lived with and in Him, for others, unto love.