Porch Talks: Without This Comfort My Life Is Futile and My Death Hopeless

My only comfort in life and in death is that I am not my own but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

Without this comfort my life is futile and my death hopeless. 

• Outside of the powerful presence of God’s Word my confession can never be truthful. 
• Without the Word of God, I have no true knowledge of the necessities for living or of the essentials in dying. 

What does my communion with Christ do for the essentials of life the way the unbelieving world understands them? 

• What do they get out of it, they ask. 
• This comfort does not in any way connect with the sense of the essential need, as this exists in the world. 

I do not deny that God cannot use the needs as we all know them – 

• the blind alley into which life and the world appear to have stumbled – as a means in His hand. 
• The truth that it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven remains unshaken. 
• The gospel of Christ is mainly a gospel for the poor. 

God must use my needs – 

• that is, by His Word shine a suitable light on them 
• and turn the burden of need into a feeling of guilt. 
• Only then does God do something with that so that the comfort of communion with Christ may be applied. 
• Without this victory by God’s Word, my need and the need of the world become an accusation against God and an indictment of Him. 

In fact, without the reality that God’s Word wins me over, 

• I would never admit the absolute necessities of life. 
• Whenever some opportunity in life passes me by, 
• I dare not admit that life itself seems futile. 
• Nevertheless, invariably I will attempt to draw up new plans. 

Without Christ at the end of my failed life, death would overtake me still as a disappointment. 

• Without Christ, even if I was totally ruined and longed to die, 
• I would yet view death as a relief. 
• At that point, I would still have the outcome in my own hands. 
• Yet even then, my death would be a lie. 
• However, such dying would not be without hope. 

God’s Word alone cuts off all my chances 

• because it speaks to me about the curse that made life an ordeal and death a judgment. 
• The Word also reveals that the curse did not allow a single way of escape. 
• Suffering, ruin, and destruction become inescapable. 

In this way alone, Christ becomes the only “chance.” 

• Thus, when I confess that Jesus Christ is my only comfort in life and in death, 
• I presume there is no comfort anywhere else. 
• Jesus Christ is the only One, and He is also seen as the only One. 

If I still cling to something, I cannot see Jesus Christ. 

• The light that is visible in Jesus Christ also means that all other lights are extinguished.

Adapted Excerpt from The True Life by Simon G. De Graaf