the proGnosis

I’m going to die on Wednesday 23^rd October, 2024. I’ll be 48 years old. However, if I change my personality from pessimistic to optimistic – I’ll die on January 5^th, 2047, aged 71. Now, that’s not so bad, is it.

By the way, ProGnosis hasn’t joined the realms of extremelysillyprophecy.com, but I did check out deathclock.com earlier on.

Why am I thinking about death?

1. I am burying a member who was a dear saint and example in the faith, on Friday
2. In Casualty 1907 there was a plot when a large number of children had died during the night and the nurses struggled with the sovereignty of God in the morning.

You see, can I work out when I am going to die?

Is it in my hands….at all?

Let me tell you something else that has happened. I tend to arrange my preaching about 3 months ahead. Indeed, this present series (The Gospel of Luke, ‘Will the real Jesus please stand up’) was decided last November. Sometimes this can be frustrating as I want to preach in response to a situation in the church or community, but have made a decision to preach through book of the Bible, and therefore let the Bible set the agenda itself, and so cannot do that. Yet I am continually amazed at how God intertwines the events of our lives and the next section of Scripture that needs to be preached on.

You see, this Sunday (2 days after the funeral) I have to preach on Jesus raising the widow’s son. And so I’ll get to explain how Jesus’ heart goes out to mourners (6:13) and that He has authority over death (v14). Isn’t that amazing?

God is in control.

God knows what He is doing.

And just as He has His hand upon my puny preaching in tiny Ammanford Evangelical Church, He has His hand on our lives…. and deaths.

The lady I am burying on Friday asked me to read Psalm 139 to her on a few occasions, meditate on this:

1 O LORD, you have searched me and you know me.

2 You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. 3 You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. 4 Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O LORD. 5 You hem me in—behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me. 6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. 13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. 14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. 15 My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, 16 your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. 17 How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! 18 Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand.