O LOVE THAT WILL NOT LET ME GO
Facing death with courageous confidence in God
Edited by Nancy Guthrie. IVP. 160 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978 1 844 745 265
‘We should familiarise ourselves with death during our lifetime...’ (Martin Luther). ‘Look by faith to your dying, buried, risen, ascended, glorified Lord. Nothing will more powerfully overcome both the poison and the fears of death’ (Richard Baxter). ‘Suffering makes us want to go to heaven. Broken homes and broken hearts crush our illusions that earth can keeps its promises’ (Joni Erickson Tada). These quotations indicate something of the scope of this collection of short meditations on the theme of sickness, suffering and death.
Spanning five centuries, these excerpts from books and sermons help the reader to think Christianly about death itself, as well as the illnesses and bodily ailments that are reminders of our mortality. The words of familiar contemporary writers, such as Timothy Keller and John Piper, rub shoulders with those of preachers and theologians of ages past, such as John Calvin, John Owen and Charles Haddon Spurgeon.
One critique of the contemporary church is that we speak too little of death and lack a robust theology of suffering. All too frequently, sickness and suffering are viewed as good cause to doubt the goodness of God and, compared to previous centuries, little is said about dying well. This is why it is especially valuable to hear Christian voices, from centuries other than our own, teaching us that ‘sickness is the soul’s undressing’ and that death is ‘a divine appointment’; voices that not only comfort us with words of gospel truth, but also challenge us to ‘employ ourselves much in weaning our hearts from this world’.
There is comfort here for the sick and dying, as well as a heart-warming biblical corrective for those who, like this reviewer, think too much of this life and too little of the next. Read, take to heart and pass it on.
Nick McQuaker,
Director of Training and Development, Sussex Gospel Partnership
