Choose Your Death

We, us, the human race all share one planet where we pursue one individual goal - to live. People want to live a life full of purpose and pleasure, yet we fall prey to a pattern that constantly pressures and pulls from the very things we want to do, the person we want to be.

The image you have for you begins optimistic and hopeful, but our dreams become dull from a nagging pull and the senses erode to a perpetual malaise. We begin talking more about the past and less about our future while every second on the clock ticks we accept that we are one more second closer to death. The aforementioned pattern emulates frostbite by first numbing the extremities, but death creeps its way to the core, like an entangling ivy never satiated with where it is now, rather fueled by what more can it grip.

Then the day comes that your heart beats its last and your story has been written. Let me ask you, were you who you wanted to be as a child, or did the pattern lull you into a stagnancy interrupted by death, a euthanized end (some may say mercy killing)?

What, if anything, can be done to avoid the pattern? First the pattern must be identified. Many would say the pattern is being the progeny of bad parents, possessing too much money, possessing too little, the haunting of a harrowing past, not educated enough, too educated, or ruined by indoctrination of some sort. It is clear. It cannot be those because for each classification given there have been successes and busts.

What if I told you it was a condition everyone is born with, a condition that no person can be cured by any doctor, medicine, philosophy, or way of life. The name of the condition commonly goes by "death". Death, the end of every living thing on this earth.

Do you feel that? The weight of inevitability brought on your soul when you really begin to meditate on your mortality. The fact that all who have ever breathed a first breath have too gasped a last. The binding, inexorable reality that there will be a day you and I will wake up for the last morning - the eve of our eternity. What comes next: nothingness, an ethereal existence as a wandering spirit, heaven, or hell? The true scope of this question is much too broad for this particular writing, but instead an awareness of necrosis (end of life).

It seems fair to say that we've established some grim certainties - the ubiquity of lives lived numbly, all lives end in death, and there exists a mass uncertainty of our forever thereafter.

[Enter stage left "change of course"]

I will not apologize, beg, or even attempt to persuade, despite my natural inclination to explain everything written, but there is no need. Self-denial is such an obstinate state of mind that no matter the power or passion infused in the plea it is only met with justification and cynicism  from the accused, and for this very reason I will state the disease and the cure with no peripheral musings.

1. We have all sinned against a Holy God and are sentenced to death. (Romans 3:23)
2. Nothing that you can do can save yourself from this death sentence. (Romans 6:23)
3. There was a pardon from the Judge over 2000 years ago when One innocent man went to die in our stead. (Matthew 27:46)
4. His name is Jesus  (Luke 1:31)
5. If you want to know Him then you can, but you must repent and die to self. (Matthew 3:2)
6. Many are deceived and believe they are good, but Jesus could not be farther from them. (Matthew 7:21-23)
7. If you believe you know Him, but fail to obey his Word, seek Him, speak with Him daily then you really do not know Him at all. (John 14:23)
8. Jesus destroyed the pattern that affects humanity by defeating death and taking captivity captive. (Ephesians 4:8)
9. You will die because death is certain, thus one question remains. (Hebrews 9:27)
10. Will you die to sin, or to Life?  (Matthew 25:44 or 1 Corinthians 15:31)