For To Me To Live Is Christ, And To Die Is Gain.

Philippians 1:21.

The thought of death deeply terrifies some people. To the one who doesn’t know Jesus personally, it is the horrific passage to eternal suffering. But to the apostle Paul, death was appealing. He knew that to be absent from the body meant that he would be forever in heaven with Jesus—his best friend, his Saviour and the lover of his soul. John Bunyan (1628-1688), author of Pilgrim’s Progress, wrote:

Let death come when it will, it can do the Christian no harm, for it will be but a passage out of a prison into a palace; out of a sea of troubles into a haven of rest; out of a crowd of enemies to an innumerable company of true, loving and faithful friends; out of shame, reproach, and contempt into exceeding great and eternal…