A Minute Meditation – Our Obituary?

When Alfred Nobel’s brother died, Alfred opened his newspaper to the obituary column to read about it. Much to his surprise, the newspaper had mistakenly heard that it was Alfred who had died and so he was able to read his own obituary.

He was shocked to read that he was being remembered as the man who had invented dynamite. The article described the death and destruction that his invention had brought upon mankind. Alfred Nobel then decided to change his life so that he would be remembered for something other than explosives and death. He established the now-famous Nobel Peace Prize which is awarded each year to someone who has made a great contribution to peace.

How would our obituary read if we had just died? Would we be pleased with what it said about us? Would we like to change our life now, so that our obituary might read differently?

Thanks to modern technology, we can understand how everything we say could be recorded. God’s technology far surpasses anything man has invented or ever will invent. He knows what we think, even before we have actually thought it. Are we prepared to answer for every idle word that we have uttered? Fortunately, a tape recorder that records can also erase. God has promised to forgive, and He is willing to cast all of our sins behind His back and remember them no more.

If we are not pleased with what we think is now recorded opposite our name, it is not too late to change it. To do so, however, will involve changing our ways. Nothing is impossible with God, yet He cannot remember the kind things we never did, the visits to the widows we never made or the cups of cold water we never gave.

In his message to Sardis, Jesus Christ praises those who overcome and he says “I will not blot out his name out of the book of life.” Could our name have been there and removed because “I know that you have the reputation of being alive, even though you are dead?” That was the problem in Sardis.

We have a name. What kind of a name do we have? Some people are really dead and just don’t know it. Dead people do not visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction; dead people do not give cups of cold water to the thirsty. They are the living dead who, as Paul puts it, “are dead in trespasses and sin.”

Paul gave hope that those in this sad condition could be changed. He wrote, “But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) and hath raised us up together and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” This good news should encourage us that we can change our obituary notice even more than Alfred Nobel changed his. We can change the way we live and give God some positive things for Him to remember.

Jesus, in the only picture we have of the judgment seat, tells us that “inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” The opposite was “inasmuch as ye did it not, etc.”

Are we dead or alive? Are we doing or not doing? Do we have a name that we live, but are really dead? Jesus has exhorted us to be watchful and strengthen the things which remain and to overcome so that he will confess our name before his Father and before his angels. “He that hath an ear, let him hear.”