“Make Me to Know My End”

Funeral of Major Max Unwin

Psalms 3

4 I cried unto the Lord with my voice, and he heard me out of his holy hill. Selah.

5 I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the Lord sustained me.

Psalms 90

12 So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

Death can come at any time and we need God to make us understand and know our end.

C.S. Lewis said that “there are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done'” (The Great Divorce, p. 72).

We will go to the place we choose to go to. God, in His grace, has put “stumbling blocks” across our paths to stop us going to hell. These obstacles or hurdles are there to make us consider our end and bring us to repentance and the will to say “thy will be done”. As Billy Graham once said in a sermon, God puts obstacles across our paths to stop us going to hell, such as: the prayers of a mother; a death of a loved one; the painful pangs of sin and conscience; the hearing of God’s Word, perhaps in a service like this.

Some people are like hurdlers – they jump across the hurdles that are in their paths; even when the hurdles are there to bring them to repentance.

May you also pray the prayer of the Psalmist so that God would give you understanding about the reality of death and give you the grace to say to Christ, “Thy will be done in my life.”