||Evangelistic Tract|| The resurrection of Jesus is the ground for his people to have confident hope in the face of death. This tract aims to share that hope.
Death
||Pastoral Passage|| In light of the current coronavirus pandemic and the use of vaccines to ward off its serious ill effects, I would like to share two incidents – deaths – from the life of Jonathan Edwards. Edwards’ faith was in the same God and gospel we have today. The same confident hope is offered and there are the same expectations for selfless, humble, purposed living.
Christians have a distinctive view of the world and a particular, Christ-centered spirituality. It is in light of this that we would like to reconsider the appeal of euthanasia. We have identified five reasons – five fears – why people, Christians included, might wish for assisted dying, and shown how the hope we have in Christ confronts these fears. All of them are understandable, and forgivable, yet none of them are so dark that this hope cannot sustain his people through them.
Experience will teach us that although Christian hope should give us gladness, it does not remove but only blunts the varied griefs we suffer and does not fill the hole left in the lives of those left behind.
A materialist worldview asks too much of people. It isn’t a good deal.
A lesson from an important feature of the world of John Bunyan’s ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’.
Chris Northcott 