Pleasant Stone Devotional Meditation: July 19

“Bring my soul out of prison … “ ~ Psalm 142:7a

Perhaps some of the deepest suffering is the lot of those who live, as I lived for so many years, in the prison of the “dread of extinction” by death! When you believe in absolutely nothing beyond this earthly live, you are, as Paul says, “of all men most miserable.” God has built right into us a desire to live!

Even an injured bug will fight and fight for its little bug-life. Human beings fight to live when their physical bodies are eaten up with disease. Something deep inside us, if we are in our right minds, throbs with an almost desperate desire to keep going.

“Continue ye, in my love,” Jesus said. He knew about this longing to live forever because He is also the Creator God. He put it in us in the first place. For all the eighteen years of my adult life in which I [Eugenia Price, the author] believed in nothing after this life, I resented deeply the idea of dying. I looked at my grandmother’s body lying in her coffin and wished I could believe in some kind of god so I could hate him for creating her and then letting her die. She loved living and then she was dead. Or so I believed. My grandmother was a Christian, and of course, she had merely stepped fully into life, with no limitations. But I didn’t believe that. I believed that this earthly life was the end of all life. I “lived up” every minute of it. Never condemn anyone who “lives it up” in this life. He or she is trying to get what’s available here and now! But Jesus Christ breaks the power of rebellion (sin) in our lives by giving us eternal life. The kind of life we were created to enjoy. The prison of the “dread of extinction” is a shadowy, desperate place. But the way out has been provided. Jesus cries:

"… I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die …”