Sermon Tone Analysis

Erwin Lutzer, pastor of the Moody Church in Chicago in his book “One Minute After You Die” says, “One minute after you slip behind the parted curtain you will either be enjoying a personal welcome from Christ or catching your first glimpse of gloom as you have never known it.

Either way, your future will be irrevocably fixed and eternally unchangeable….

those who find themselves in heaven will be surrounded with friends whom they have known on earth… Every description of heaven they have heard will pale in the light of reality.

All this, forever.

Others – indeed many others - will be shrouded in darkness, a region of deprivation, and unending regret.

There, with all their memories and feeling fully intact, images of their life on earth will return to haunt them.

They will think back to their friends, family and relatives; they will brood over opportunities they squandered and intuitively know that their future is both hopeless and unending.

For them death will be far worse than they imagined.

And so, while relatives and friends plan your funeral – deciding on a casket, a burial plot, and who the pallbearers will be – you will be more alive than you have ever been.

You will either see God on His throne surrounded by His angels and redeemed humanity, or you will be feel an indescribable weight of guilt and abandonment.

There is no destination midway between these two extremes; just gladness and gloom.”

[ Erwin W. Lutzer.

“One Minute After You Die.” (Chicago: Moody, 1997) pp.

9-10]

This morning we are going to look at the question, “What is the first thing that will happen to us after we die?”

The Bible is the only trustworthy source about life after death.

I will take that one step further and state that Jesus is the only one qualified to speak authoritatively about death and the afterlife.

Turn with me to as we examine a story that will take us the next two weeks to complete.

Here in beginning in verse nineteen we find the story of Rich man and Lazarus.

Jesus tells a story that gives us a glimpse into life on the other side of death.

Three things you will discover one minute after you die.

1.

One minute after you die all earthly prosperity or earthly suffering is ended.

(vv.

19-21)

Luke 16:19-21

“The rich man is clothed in purple and fine linen, the beggar in rags; the rich man lived in a stately mansion; the beggar was laid by sympathetic friends at the gate of the mansion; the rich man had a healthy, well-nourished body, the beggar was full of sores; the rich man fared sumptuously every day, the beggar lived on crumbs from his table; the rich man had physicians to care for him, dogs licked the sores of Lazarus.”

[Herbert Lockyer.

“All the Parables of the Bible.”

(Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 1963) p. 293]

“The rich man is clothed in purple and fine linen, the beggar in rags; the rich man lived in a stately mansion; the beggar was laid by sympathetic friends at the gate of the mansion; the rich man had a healthy, well-nourished body, the beggar was full of sores; the rich man fared sumptuously every day, the beggar lived on crumbs from his table; the rich man had physicians to care for him, dogs licked the sores of Lazarus.”

[Herbert Lockyer.

“All the Parables of the Bible.”

(Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 1963) p. 293]

There is a huge contrast being drawn here between the life of the Rich Man and Lazarus.

These two men have nothing in common during their lives.

The Rich Man is extremely wealthy.

His wardrobe consists of only the finest clothes that money could buy.

He also had a large home.

The fact that he had a gate (v.

20) would likely make his home some type of mansion.

The Rich man lived in luxury every day, which tells us that he was flamboyant and flashy with his wealth.

The Rich Man is assumed to be healthy because there is no mention of any kind of physical problems.

Like many today he is living his life without ever thinking about what will happen when life ends.

It an irony that it is the Rich Man who remains the unknown in this story.

His name is not mentioned for a specific reason, he is not in a relationship with God.

Lazarus lived an extremely different life.

He was poor beyond our ability to truly understand.

Lazarus was very sick, being unable to work Lazarus was forced to become a beggar, because he had no means to support himself.

He was dependent each day on what the good will of others or he would have had nothing to eat that day.

We are told that he was so hungry that he was willing to eat the burnt, broken, and discarded pieces of bread from the rich man’s table.

Yet Lazarus was blessed in one key way, he apparently knew God.

The name Lazarus means “God is my helper.”

There is a direct connection between his name and the result of his eternity.

The rich man and Lazarus lived very different lives, but they had one thing in common… they both died.

At the point of physical death, the body ceases to function, but the soul and spirit of man continue to live on.

At death the invisible part of who we are moves out of the body and enters a new existence.

In the Bible compares this body of ours to a tent.

This tent gets old and we groan as we experience pain and suffering.

The longer we live the more tattered and feeble this tent becomes.

I love story told about the former president of the United States John Quincy Adams, and have used it many times at funerals.

When he was eighty years of age he was met by a friend who shook his trembling hand and said, “Good Morning, how is John Quincy Adams today?”

The retired chief executive looked at him for a moment and said, “John Quincy Adams himself is quite well, sir, quite well.

But the house in which he lives at present is becoming dilapidated.

It is tottering upon it foundations.

Time and the seasons have almost destroyed it.

Its roof is pretty worn out.

Its walls are much shattered, and it crumbles with every wind.

The old tenement is becoming almost uninhabitable, and I think that John Quincy Adams will have to move out soon.

But he himself is well, sir, quite well.”

It was not long afterwards that he had his second and final stroke and John Quincy Adams moved from his shaky tenement as he called it into his home not made with hands.

In our text both men died, and death changed everything.

For Lazarus life had held suffering and pain but his pain and suffering were ended.

For the Rich man life had been a time of abundance and ease, this too was ended.

All that we are told about the beggar death is that “he died.”

Nothing is said about his burial.

And the fact that we are not told of his burial leads us to believe that when Lazarus died his body was probably carted away to the city dump and burned along with the trash.

The rich man also died.

And although we are not told so, we can imagine that he was given a glorious sent off, the finest funeral that money could buy.

He would have likely had a large funeral with the best of preparations in regard to the spices and linens used to prepare his body, a nice tomb to lay his body in.

That sounds much like our own day, “How many people have prepared for their funeral without preparing to die?”

The Rich Man may have considered himself a religious man; he may have been faithful to the synagogue and may even have given lots of money to religious causes.

The revelation of where each man ended up after death would have astonished Jesus’ original audience and shattered their long-held assumptions about wealth being a sign of Gods’ favor and blessings.

The rich man had lived without God in this world, so he would live without Him in the next.

But not only did the rich man having no share with God, and thus lose God – forever, he lost even those things which had in this life.

Not only One Minute After You Die Will All Earthly Prosperity or Earthly Suffering be Ended but….

2. One minute after you die your eternity will begin!

(vv.

22-23)

Since there is such confusion today about what happens at death I believe that we need a brief explanation of the nature of death in relation to eternity.

Death takes place when the spirit leaves the body ().

But death is not the end; it is the beginning of a whole new existence in another world.

Charles Swindoll puts this way, “When people die, only their bodies go into the grave.

At the funeral it is merely the physical shell we see lying in the casket.

The real person, the soul/spirit, has already departed to either a place of torment or a place of comfort, depending on the person’s spiritual condition.”

[Charles Swindoll.

The Consummation of Something Miraculous: A Study of .

Bible Study Guide.

(Insight for Living, 1995) p. 2.]

When both men die, there is no pause in the action.

There is no break in the narrative.

There is no lapse of time.

In fact, the moment that these men die they instantaneously experience their eternal positions.

In verse twenty-two we read, "The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side.