I. The one chief thing which the Lord had to accomplish upon earth was a death. That death He would have held in perpetual remembrance in His Church. The great thing which a Christian has to learn is to die daily. How to die is the great lesson for those whose "life is hid with Christ in God." We may easily appear to countenance that slavish occupation of the mind with the mere circumstance of death and experience of dying, which is the source of so much of that sickliness of soul which enfeebles the Church in our times. When I say "learn how to die," I am not thinking of the shrinking flesh which has to be mastered; that is a simple matter. Nor do I refer to the dread meeting with the realities of the eternal state to which the angel of death ushers us. I mean by learning how to die, learning how to lay up treasures which we may carry with us through death, to enrich the life which we shall live in the sphere beyond. We are dead, as the Lord was dead, to that which sin has made of His world. And what was He alive to? "My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me and to finish His work."
II. Our Lord gives no hint that man can be a being of two homes very happy here, very full of the good of this world and very satisfied with it, while very ready at the same time to find a home in the world to come. The Lord's life seemed to say the very opposite of all this. The blessed life for man lies beyond death. Give up the world as a home, give up life as a scene of perfect satisfaction and joy. Take up thy cross; make life a pilgrimage. This is the Christian philosophy of life, wherein whoso walketh and worketh, not weary of patience, not shrinking from the cross, is thrice blessed, blessed with the blessedness of the Lord Jesus.
III. The Lord would have us simply live in a sphere which is above the shock of earth's perturbations. The man who lives a heavenly life on earth will be in no unseemly haste to get out of it. That is the Christian expectation of death. It is the half-developed, the half-experienced, who would pluck half-ripe the fruit of immortality. To the complete Christian, death is only supremely welcome when the work of life is nobly done, and its rich fruit is treasured up on high. And that moment is only known to God. "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith." When we can take that song upon our lips, it is time to go hence, to fall asleep in the arms of death, to awake in the bosom of the everlasting glory.
J. Baldwin Brown, The Sunday Afternoon,p. 227.
References: Colossians 2:20-22. J. H. Newman, Sermons on Subjects of the Day,p. 199. Colossians 2:22-23 .Expositor,1st series, vol. xii., p. 289.