My Grandfather is About to Die

As the cancer continues its relentless assault on his vital organs, my grandfather will soon surrender his life. If he lives until Sunday, he will be 93 years old.
There will be a funeral. My family has asked me to officiate the service. So over the past few weeks, I have been thinking about the tough hour in front of me.

Because the funeral will be out of state, I don’t know many of the other people who will participate in the service. I don’t know all of the things that will be said or left unsaid. For those reasons, I wanted to write some thoughts ahead of time.

Many wonderful things will probably be said about Charlie. He has been married 71 years to my grandmother (who is a spry 89 years of age). He taught a men’s Sunday School class at a Baptist church for 60 years. He made a lot of money in the steel industry and gave a lot away.

When the Boy Scouts in our area were about to financially collapse, he rescued them. He volunteered countless hours and leveraged countless connections as the area president. He saved Scouting for thousands and thousands of boys.

Personally, I will appreciate his time and support in my life. Story after story was related to me to instill virtues like hard work into my life. He was thrilled that I became a preacher. He made numerous special trips to visit my family and hear me preach. He always encouraged me and loved me as I transitioned through childhood into manhood.

I expect there to be much talk of heaven around the time of the funeral. Truly, the resurrection and heaven are the Christian’s comfort. “But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13).

I’ve noticed that in almost all southern funerals there is talk of heaven. Stacks of good things are said about the person who died, with almost everything else about the person left unsaid. Sometimes the things not said scream out by their absence.

Although my grandfather was a sinner and made plenty of mistakes over the years, I am thankful there won’t be any such screaming silences in his service.

Stop and think forward to your funeral service. Unless Jesus comes first, you will die, and most likely you too will have a funeral. Things will be said about you and your life. Unsaid things may linger in the room as well. Will there be talk of heaven at your funeral? If you die in the south, probably so. But will it be true talk of heaven, providing real comfort for the hearers, or will it be the wishful and empty kind?

Even when the talk of heaven has a solid foundation, wrong ideas can still be communicated. When there is much talk a person’s goodness, such as spiritual good works or humanitarian virtues, and then there is much talk of heaven, the hearers at the funeral can take away the wrong meaning. There are sentences in the Bible that cut directly against the unintended message of such services.

In Paul’s letter to the Romans, he clearly said, “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one” (Romans 3:10, 11). He goes even farther when he says, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23).

The fact that these realities are unspoken at funerals does not alter their authenticity. When it comes to commending himself to Jesus, my grandfather has nothing going for him! Seriously. The Bible says that no one does truly good things that are worthy of God’s acceptance.

In order for a good work to be truly good, it must start with a perfectly pure motivation. The motivation required by God is the glory of God. In other words, any good work that is motivated by anything other than unmixed love for God does not qualify as fitting for heaven.

In addition to that, the Bible teaches that every man is a sinner. Sin is anything that we say, do, or think that does not match up to the standard of God’s revealed will in the Bible. The Bible says we all commit sins, because every since Adam and Eve sinned in the garden everyone has been born with a sinful nature. Each of these sins will be punished: “For the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).

Another sentence in the Bible that cuts across the unspoken message of most funerals is in Paul’s letter to the Galatians. “I do not nullify the grace of God, for if justification were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose” (Galatians 2:21). The idea that a person can do enough good works to pay for his own sins is a complete contradiction of the cross.

The reason Jesus died on the cross was because he loves sinners like you and me and my grandfather. God poured out the righteous wrath that sinners deserve on Jesus on the cross. Because Jesus was fully God and fully man, and because he had lived a perfectly obedient life on earth, he was uniquely qualified to bear God’s wrath on behalf of sinners.

Of course, on the third day, God raised Jesus from the dead. Not only does this give Christians the only hope we have for our own future resurrection, it also proves that all that Jesus said and did in his earthly ministry was valid. The resurrection is God’s divine stamp of approval on Jesus.

All religions are not the same. There are not many roads to peace with God. There has only been one resurrection. There is only one divinely approved path to God—through Jesus Christ.

A sentence I quoted earlier from the letter to the Romans was actually incomplete. Let me finish Romans 6:23 at this time. “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

My hope and comfort for my beloved grandfather is not that he was such a good man. My hope is that he recognized that his goodness was not good enough to please God. He turned from his sins and his inadequate goodness and entrusted his life to the risen Lord Jesus Christ.

I hope kind comforting words will be said at my grandfather’s funeral. I hope they will be said at your funeral and my funeral as well. But, I hope the most important reality at the time of our death will be that we renounced our goodness, and relied only on Jesus for our hope of heaven. No matter what is said at our funerals, if that is true of us, we’ll be together for ever in glory!