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The sermon teaches that true Christian life begins when divine grace brings a sinner to faith in Christ’s atoning death and continues as a life wholly centered on Him. Earthly purposes such as wealth, status, learning, and comfort are exposed as inadequate measures of lasting happiness. For those united to Christ, death is gain because it brings greater fellowship with the redeemed, rest from earthly suffering, and entrance into glory while awaiting resurrection. For those outside Christ, death leads to fearful judgment, making the appeal to believe in the Savior urgent.
Theological center: Union with Christ through saving faith gives spiritual life now and eternal gain at death, grounded in Christ’s atoning work and culminating in resurrection glory.
Applications: Live wholly for Christ · Believe in the Savior · Examine your life’s purpose · Consider death’s final outcome
Primary texts: Philippians 1:21 · Galatians 2:20 · 1 Timothy 1:15
“For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” Philippians 1:21 HOW ominously these words follow each other in the text—“live,” “die.” There is but a comma between them and surely as it is in the words, so is it in reality. How brief the distance between life and death! In fact there is none. Life is but death’s vestibule and our pilgrimage on earth is but a journey to the grave. The pulse that preserves our being beats our death march and the blood which circulates our life is floating it onward to the deeps of death. Today we see our friends in health—tomorrow we hear of their decease. We clasped the hand of the strong man but yesterday and today we close his eyes. We rode in the chariot of comfort but an hour ago and in a few more hours the last black chariot must convey us to the home of all living. Oh, how closely allied is death to life! The lamb that sports in the field must soon feel the knife. The ox that lows in the pasture is fattening for the slaughter. Trees do but grow that they may be felled. Yea, and greater things than these feel death. Empires rise and flourish—they flourish but to decay—they rise to fall. How often do we take up the volume of history and read of the rise and fall of empires. We hear of the coronation and the death of kings. Death is the black servant who rides behind the chariot of life. See life! and death is close behind it. Death reaches far throughout this world and has stamped all terrestrial things with the broad arrow of the grave. Stars die mayhap. It is said that conflagrations have been seen far off in the distant ether and astronomers have marked the funerals of worlds, the decay of those mighty orbs that we had imagined set forever in sockets of silver to glisten as the lamps of eternity. But blessed be God, there is one place where death is not life’s brother, where life reigns alone. “To live,” is not the first syllable which is to be followed by the next, “to die.” There is a land where deathknells are never tolled, where winding-sheets are never woven, where graves are never digged. Blessed land beyond the skies! To reach it we must die. But if after death we obtain a glorious immortality, our text is indeed true—“To die is gain.” If you would get a fair estimate of the happiness of any man, you must judge him in these two closely connected things—his life and his death. The heathen Solon said, “Call no man happy until he is dead, for you know not what changes may pass upon him in life.” We add to that—Call no man happy until he is dead, because the life that is to come, if that be miserable, shall…