therefore He is declared to be the Son of God with power.  He rose; therefore we, if we trust Him, may partake in His Resurrection and in some reflection of His glory.  The old Greek architects were often careless of the solidity of the soil on which they built their temples, and so, many of them have fallen in ruins.  The Temple of Immortality can be built only upon the rock of that proclamation—­Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.  And we, dear brethren, should have all our hopes founded upon that one fact.

So then, for us, the calm, peaceful passage from life into what else is the great darkness is possible on condition of our having beheld the risen Lord.  These witnesses of whom my text speaks, Paul would suggest to us, laid themselves quietly down to sleep, because before them there still hovered the memory of the vision which they had beheld.  Faith in the risen Christ is the anchor of the soul in death, and there is nothing else by which we can hold then.

As the same Apostle, in one of his other letters, puts it, the belief that Christ is risen is not only the irrefragable ground of our hope that we, too, shall rise, but has the power to change the whole aspect of our death.  Did you ever observe the emphasis with which He says, ’If we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him?’ His death was death indeed, and faith in it softens ours to sleep.  He bore the reality that we might never need to know it, and if our poor hearts are resting upon that dear Lord, then the flames are but painted ones and will not burn, and we shall pass through them, and no smell of fire will be upon us, and all that will be consumed will be the bonds which bind us.  He has abolished death.  The physical fact remains, but all which to men makes the idea of death is gone if we trust the risen Lord.  So that, between two men dying under precisely the same circumstances, of the same disease, in adjacent beds in the same hospital, there may be such a difference as that the same word cannot be applied to the experiences of both.

My dear friends, we have each of us to pass through that last struggle; but we may make it either a quiet going to sleep with a loved Face bending over our closing eyes, like a mother’s over her child’s cradle, and the same Face meeting us when we open them in the morning of heaven; or we may make it a reluctant departure from all that we care for, and a trembling advance into all from which conscience and heart shrink.

Which is it going to be to you?  The answer depends upon that to another question.  Are you looking to that Christ that died and is alive for evermore as your life and your salvation?  Do you hold fast that Gospel which Paul preached, ’how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day, according to the Scriptures’?  If you do, life will be a calm, persevering, expectant waiting upon Him, and death will be nothing more terrible than falling asleep.