August 15, 2011
Mission Accomplished
A service man returning from Afghanistan told the media that that their
unit’s mission was accomplished. Forming a leading question one reporter then
asked the soldier about the men who were lost on the mission and would not be
returning. The soldier confidently responded, “Their mission was accomplished.” In the church we often grieve over
what seems to be the untimely loss when a faithful servant dies. Maybe our
faith would be better served if we too looked at a fellow believer’s passing as
being a mission accomplished.
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Gail;
-----I think you express one of the more important realizations of the sense of well being in the security Christ makes for us. We can be saved and all, but death is still felt to be a slight of hand cutting us short and truncating our meaningfulness. Such feelings develop attitudes that there is a definite amount we ought to live and get done. If we are living short of that perceived amount, then we live with emotional pressures. If we are living long of it, we feel free and fulfilled.
-----Goals and plans are part of the sweat of the brow by which God made man to eat. But God did not make man to live by the sweat of his brow. He made him to live by grace. Eating by the sweat and living by grace are quite different. Sweating is for maintenance of physical life, food, clothing, shelter, transportation, etc. Grace is for maintenance of complete life, complete in time, quality of being, and relationship with others. Sweating is because responsibility has been placed upon our shoulders; burden has been given for us to bear. So we over focus upon that burden and begin to view it as our life when it is actually just a lot in life. For life is much different than toil; it is much, much bigger. It is received without sweat and toil because the responsibility for maintaining it is not ours.
-----So, for us who are alive in Christ, death merely divides a condition of life being confined to a faulty body in a faulty world from a condition of life entirely without fault in a perfect place. It is simply the dropping of the body and a relocation of the soul which had hungered for righteousness within it. Some plans and goals drop with the body, but not all. Those for the eternal praise and adoration of a genuinely loving God continue. Those for being kind and gentle and peaceful and charitable and the likes will continue unscathed by the division of the body from the soul. We simply will continue in those plans; only we will be doing them much, much more and better. “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” (Eph 2:10)
-----So, in a way, one’s passing in Christ is not about timeliness or accomplishment. His life is a giant thing of which we are merely minuscule, gigantically important pieces. The error of our judgment is that the measurement of timeliness is made by our eyes. Christ sees the innumerably more actions of His people aside from their perceived goals as the flow of life into which souls are spiritually born daily and reaped at death into the eternal security of His place. The completion of our plans is neither here nor there to our efforts’ effects which Christ uses for His causes. The reality of the love in which we have done them, the forbearance and forgiveness about their outskirts, the kindness and goodness of their substance, and their discernible generation from the character of Christ are the important aspects of those efforts. However complete or not were our plans and goals, Christ achieves effects on earth through each effort as we go. So death at any point in time is very timely.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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