Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread":
After you’ve been married to a wonderful one for over 66 years and you lose her, you grieve and the tears come.
It used to be that she looked to me for answers to questions; now I think of her as being on a different level; I must speak of her with a new sense of respect, yes, with a touch of reverence, for she has been given a new gift I have never had—yet. It’s a new “blessing” most special:
Says the Bible, speaking of our day today,
“Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the [Holy] Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them” (Rev. 14:13).
Not everybody who dies “from henceforth” is so highly honored: only those who “die in the Lord.” And my Grace did; when we were about to eat our last little supper together [not knowing], I asked God’s blessing on it; she said a fervent “amen.”
Jesus describes in detail those specially “blessed” ones; they are students as it were in a special elevated class—“they who shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead ... they [cannot] die any more: for they are equal unto the angels, and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection” (Luke 20:35, 36).
I know my darling Grace is at rest, “sleeping” in Jesus, for “if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him [that is, from the dead]” (1 Thess. 4:14). But she is being “accounted worthy” in that great pre-Advent judgment; her death has been “precious in the eyes of the Lord”(Psalm 116:15); He too has grieved with me just as Jesus grieved with bereaved Martha at Lazarus’s funeral (John 11:35), but her death was received by Jesus and treasured by Him for He has enrolled her in that special “class.”
In reality she “sleeps in the dust of the earth”(see Dan. 12:2), but being enrolled in that special “class,” she is “a child of the resurrection.” To Him to whom a thousand years are as a day (Psalm 90:4), God sees her as already resurrected, for He “calleth those things which be not as though they were” (Rom. 4:17). I used to cuddle her in my arms and answer questions; now she is somebody above me in God’s great kingdom—now sleeping, but “in Jesus.” In God’s eyes, she is already resurrected; my job is to believe by faith, and to let that faith work its beautiful fruit of at-one-ment with Him, reconciled to Him, reconciled to His holy law, at one with Him, in harmony with that pre-Advent judgment that Jesus has described. I grieve, but I live “in Him.”
Be sure to check your e-mail for "Dial Daily Bread" again tomorrow.
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