Death Comes Without Warning

I'm at the stage in life where I have more friends out of this world than in it. I've been to a lot of funerals. I've seen a lot of corpses laying in coffins.

The figure lying there, which was once animated with a life force and personality, now is silent, motionless, cold, lifeless. It will happen to you, friend, sooner or later. There'll be you there in that casket, with your friends and family mourning you.

How you spent your life for God and how you lived your life for Christ will be all that matters when they stick you in the cold, dark ground. When it is all said and done and a gravestone has your name on it, were you consumed with this present world and its enjoyments or were you consumed with Christ and the gospel? It may not mean much to you now while you have a mortgage and a car and material things, but all that will be dust to you then, things you can't take with you into eternity. All you can take with you into eternity are souls.

Did you labor for the souls of men while you were here? Some of you say, well, that's the preacher's job, not mine. You're dead wrong, friend, if you think you have no accountability for the spread of the gospel with your life while you had breath in your body. How many tracts did you hand out in your life? How many souls did you speak to about their soul? How many hours did you labor in prayer and intercession for the souls of men? How many tears dropped on the pages of your Bible as you yearned and ached to be more like Jesus? You have but a short time in which to live to make known Jesus Christ to your generation.

When you are called away by death, there is no more work for you to do here on planet earth. Are you living every day like it is your last? If you knew this was your last day on earth, how would you spend it in light of eternity? Every day should be lived like that, on the out-and-out for Christ and the gospel. You may be an eternity, friend, before this year is ended.

I was seated with two people, very dear to me, at a dinner table. They were both in their early fifties and in good health, and within six months' time they both were dead and in eternity. Death comes without notice.

When death comes, it often comes suddenly and without warning. In Ecclesiastes we read, For man also knoweth not his time, As the fishes that are taken in an evil net, And as the birds that are caught in the snare, So are the sons of men snared in an evil time, When it falleth suddenly upon them. I was in a hotel in Edinburgh, Scotland, getting ready to go have dinner, at the home of my friend Ian Murray, when I stepped into the shower, and I realized it was a death trap.

It had just been waxed, and there was nothing to hold on to. As my feet sped up and I was flipped upside down, out of that shower, on my head on a concrete floor, I fell on my head and my wrist. My wrist was broken in the fall, but it could have just as easily been my neck that was broken.

I could have left this world quite unexpectedly and suddenly. I almost died last year in the hospital while having routine surgery, but God spared me for a little while longer. You don't have the time you think, friend.

God's eyes are upon you every moment you are in this world, and he watches what you are doing, saying, thinking. He is keeping a book on you, with all your deeds written in it, whether they be good or evil. One day, you will stand before the King of Heaven, and give an account of your life to him, and how you lived it.

All that matters, friends, when we die, is how we live for Christ Jesus. There is a poem that's always made an impact on me. It's called His Plan for Me, and I want to read it to us, friends, as I close out this message.

Hear me now as I read this poem to us at this time. When I stand at the judgment seat of Christ, and he shows his plan for me, the plan of my life, as it might have been, had he had his way, and I see how I blocked him here and checked him there, and I would not yield my will. Would there be grief in my Savior's eyes, grief though he loves me still? Would he have me rich, and I stand there poor, stripped of all but his grace? While memory runs like a haunted thing down the paths I cannot retrace.

Lord of the years that are left of me, I give them to thy hand. Take me, and break me, and mold me to the pattern that thou hast planned.