How Being Honest about Death Brings Hope

We Can’t Escape Death

In the modern Western culture where I live and where I pastor, we live with more detachment from death than any other time and place in history. That’s partly because God has given us a great gift of modern medicine that’s pushed the average person’s lifespan to double what it was a hundred years ago. That’s wonderful. Thanks be to God for that.

We’re missing out on the ability to see just how powerful Jesus’s promises are to address what death brings to our lives.

But the problem that has come with the extra space we’ve had from thinking about death—the lack of up-close-and-personal-engagement—is that sometimes, we’re able to live most of our lives as if death is somebody else’s problem, not ours. Whether we want to talk about death or not, every one of us still dies. We may have twice the life expectancy of 100 years ago, but we still die.

Remember Death

Matthew McCullough

Claiming that the best way to find meaning in life is to get honest about death, this book aims to show readers the practical effect of remembering their mortality in order to make the most of their lives today.

Jesus’s Promise

In the meantime, while we aren’t talking about it, we’re missing out on the ability to see just how powerful Jesus’s promises are to address what death brings to our lives. We aren’t avoiding its effects, even if we aren’t talking about it. We still live with those. We just aren’t able to properly diagnose the problems we’re living with and that makes it harder to apply the medicine Jesus came to apply.

So, honesty about death is partly how we get serious about Jesus and see his relevance in every part of our lives.

Matthew McCullough (PhD, Vanderbilt University) is the pastor of Edgefield Church in Nashville, Tennessee, and the author of Remember Death: The Surprising Path to Living Hope.