This podcast will help you get ready to face the inevitable unpleasant things that will happen in your life — things like trouble, suffering, sickness, and death — the death of people you love and your own death. Trouble, suffering, and death are common threads that run throughout all of humanity. They are inescapable. You will never meet a person who has not, is not, or will not experience these terrible things in life. Yet, we attempt to hide from these inevitabilities, to pretend they don’t exist or that they won’t happen to us. Our world is filled with news of people dying, children suffering, entire government systems and organizations enduring trouble and turmoil, but we tend to see these as things that only happen to “other people” and never to us. Trouble, suffering, and death come equally to all people, of all races, from every socio-economic status, of every religion, in every country of the world. It makes us all equal. This podcast will show you how to accept these realities of life, and not just cope, but face trouble, suffering, and death in your own life and in the world with confidence, courage, class, and most of all, with faith, hope, and charity.
The Bible says in Revelation 9:6: “And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.”
The featured quote for this episode is an old Celtic teaching paraphrased by John O’Donohue. He said, “We do not need to grieve for the dead. Why should we grieve for them? They are now in a place where there is no more shadow, darkness, loneliness, isolation, or pain. They are home.”
Our topic for today is titled “The Christian Funeral, Part 3” from the book, “The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come” by Rob Moll.
— The Traditional Christian Funeral and Mourning Rituals (Continued)
Christians have always incorporated local cultures and particular practices into funerals, but “there is nevertheless a unifying force in the practice of Christian funerals,” writes Emory University professor and preacher Thomas Long: “the gospel narrative.” If we are to recover the funeral to its place of significance in the life of the church, we must start here. For in baptism, we were buried in Jesus’ Death, and we arose in His Resurrection. As Paul says in Romans 6:3-5: “Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death. . . . If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection.”
The Christian funeral is a worship service that dramatically recognizes “that the Christian life is shaped in the pattern of Christ’s own life and death.”
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Daniel Whyte III has spoken in meetings across the United States and in over twenty-five foreign countries. He is the author of over forty books including the Essence Magazine, Dallas Morning News, and Amazon.com national bestseller, Letters to Young Black Men. He is also the president of Gospel Light Society International, a worldwide evangelistic ministry that reaches thousands with the Gospel each week, as well as president of Torch Ministries International, a Christian literature ministry.
He is heard by thousands each week on his radio broadcasts/podcasts, which include: The Prayer Motivator Devotional, The Prayer Motivator Minute, as well as Gospel Light Minute X, the Gospel Light Minute, the Sunday Evening Evangelistic Message, the Prophet Daniel’s Report, the Second Coming Watch Update and the Soul-Winning Motivator, among others.
He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Theology from Bethany Divinity College, a Bachelor’s degree in Religion from Texas Wesleyan University, a Master’s degree in Religion, a Master of Divinity degree, and a Master of Theology degree from Liberty University’s Rawlings School of Divinity (formerly Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary). He is currently a candidate for the Doctor of Ministry degree.
He has been married to the former Meriqua Althea Dixon, of Christiana, Jamaica since 1987. God has blessed their union with seven children.
BCNN1 WP 