What Will Be In Your Eulogy?

If you were able to attend your own funeral, what would the eulogy say about you? What was most precious to you in your life?

The Last Words

What will be the one thing that people will say about you or me after you’re gone? Will it be, “Wow, he had a nice car collection,” or “She was really a good businesswoman?” What would be on your gravestone? What would your eulogy read like? What was most precious to you in this life? Whatever it was, was it really that important after the grave? Putting it bluntly, what would people say about you after you gone? Would it be, “She was really a good cook, He was one of the best mechanics I knew, she really had a good sense of humor,” or even, “they reached level ten in Candy Crush!” Or…might it be, “Jesus was most precious to her” or “he was faithful to the very end?” Sadly, people have to wait until funerals to hear anything at all about someone. People who might have had nothing to do with the deceased person suddenly show up and are saying all sorts of things about the person being laid to rest. What will they say about us after we’re gone? What one thing will people most remember about you and me? The answer to that is critical, because after death, there will be a judgment (Heb 9:27), so either settle the sin issue this side of the veil, or settled yourself, forever. Trust in Christ because He has paid for your sins…if not, you will have to pay for your own sins, which, in the end, will never end.

The Judgment of the Believers

Most believers desire to hear the words from Jesus Christ; “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master’” (Matt 25:21). Why did Jesus say that? It was because these stewards had multiplied what God had given them (Matt 25:16-17), so they were faithful stewards of what God had entrusted them with. They didn’t spend it on themselves or bury it. For those who are good stewards, Jesus will set them over much authority in the kingdom, but Jesus point was they were only stewards and not the owners of those talents. Stewards care for what they’ve been entrusted with, but they are certainly not the owners. Even so, they can be rewarded for their faithful use of what God’s given them, or they can be like the unfaithful steward who simply buried what God had given him. As a result, he’s shut out of the kingdom (Matt 25:27-30).

Part of those talents we can invest will be to give food to the hungry, drinks to the thirsty, make the stranger feel welcome, and visit the sick and those in prison, because that’s what we’re commanded to do (Matt 25:34-39), but if these things are entirely absent from a person’s life, Jesus could very well say, “as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me” (Matt 25:45), and tragically, “these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Matt 25:46). That’s not a typical worry for believer’s because long ago God appointed good works for us to walk in (Eph 2:10), and most of us will do at least some of them. It’s not that they do them to be saved; they do them because they are saved, and that might include visiting the orphans and widows, which James calls “pure religion” (James 1:27).

Judgment of the Unsaved

We are not really saved from our sins alone. We are also saved from the wrath of God. The Apostle Paul says tells those who have a “hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed” (Rom 2:5), and eventually, God “will render to each one according to his works” (Rom 2:6), but there is a vast different on the Day of Judgment for believers and unbelievers. For “those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury” (Rom 2:7-8). Today God’s wrath pounds against the dam of His patience and longsuffer, yet one day, the flood of His judgment will come crashing down upon all who have disbelieved in Christ and whom Jesus warned as having the wrath of God abiding on them (John 3:36b). The Apostle John writes, “And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done” (Rev 20:12-13), however, “if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire” (Rev 20:15). The Prophet Daniel spoke of a resurrection to judgment, about “many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Dan 12:2), but believers are “those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever” (Dan 12:3), so today is the day to decide which group you belong to; those who have repented and trusted in Christ or those who reject Christ and will regret it for all time.

Conclusion

Most of us don’t even think about the day of death. It might cross our minds from time to time, but most don’t spend our lives thinking about death, but it doesn’t matter what we think. There is a day appointed for us to die (Heb 9:27), and not one of us knows when that time will be. There are medical exceptions to that, but generally speaking, nobody knows when they will slip into eternity. And by the way, death does not discriminate as far as age is concerned. There is only one day that God has determined for our death, so today would be a great day to come to repentance and trust in Jesus Christ (2nd Cor 6:2). Your very eternity depends on that.

Article by Jack Wellman

Jack Wellman is Pastor of the Mulvane Brethren Church in Mulvane Kansas. Jack is also host of Spiritual Fitness and Senior Writer at What Christians Want To Know whose mission is to equip, encourage, and energize Christians and to address questions about the believer’s daily walk with God and the Bible. You can follow Jack on Google Plus or check out his book Teaching Children the Gospel available on Amazon.