The reason I like the gospel is, that it has taken out of my path the
worst enemies I ever had. My mind rolls back to twenty years ago,
before I was converted, and I think very often how dark it used to
seem at times as I thought of the future. There was death--what a
terrible enemy it seemed! I was brought up in a little village in New
England. It was the custom there when a person was buried to toll out
the age of the man at his funeral. I used to count the strokes of the
bell. Death never entered that village and tore away one of the
inhabitants but I always used to count the tolling of the bell.
Sometimes it would be away up to seventy, or between seventy and
eighty; beyond the life allotted to man, when man seemed living on
borrowed time when cut off. Sometimes it would be clear down in the
teens, and childhood, and death would take away one of my own age. It
used to make a solemn impression on me; I used to be a great coward.
When it comes to death, some men say, "I do not fear it." I feared it,
and felt terribly afraid when I thought of the cold hand of death
feeling for the cords of life, and being launched out to eternity, to
go to an unknown world. I used to have terrible thoughts of God; but
they are all gone now. Death has lost its sting. And as I go on
through the world I can shout now, when the bell is tolling, "O death,
where is thy sting?" And I hear a voice come rolling down from
Calvary, "Buried in the bosom of the Son of God." He robbed death of
its sting; He took the sting of death into His own bosom. If you take
a wasp, and just take the sting out of that wasp, you will not be
afraid of it any more than you would of a little fly. The sting has
been taken out. And you need not be afraid of death if you are in
Christ. Christ died for your sin. The penalty, the wages of sin is
death. Christ received the wages on Calvary, and therefore there is no
condemnation. All that death can get now is this old Adam. I do not
care how quickly I get rid of it. I will get a better body, a
resurrected body, a glorified body, a body much better than this. Yes,
my friends, "To die," says the apostle, "is gain."