Paul, in prison, is writing to this church to explain to them how he sees this season in his life. I referred to it last week as being, in many ways, a season upon which one would say it was a disaster. He had lost his personal freedom He had therefore lost his capacity to fulfill the desire of his heart in ministering and preaching the word of God to those whom God would take him to. In losing his freedom, he would lose his ability to go and visit the church and the congregations of the church of Christ. And so here he is in imprisonment, constrained by the reality of that physically and also with the prospect before him of not knowing what lay ahead. And yet he rejoices. He rejoices because what is happening through his life because of his concentration on Jesus Christ at this point as has been the case throughout his life as a Christian. What is happening in his life at this point is reaping a harvest among the hardened imperial guard, resulting in many people speaking about Jesus Christ, the church becoming emboldened, verse 14. And even though there are those who are maligning his character within the church, Yet Paul says, I rejoice. I rejoice. And in expressing that rejoicing, he makes this statement concerning his life. For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. Now I looked last Lord's evening at the first half of that statement, although I didn't actually say I was looking at the first half of it, The word that the Lord brought to you last Lord's Day evening was focused on the fact that Paul was living in Christ and that he lived for Christ. Because for Paul, life is Christ. Life is Christ. It's a strange saying, isn't it? Life is Christ. Not the church is important to me. Not my ministry is significant for me. Not the fact that people are kind and gracious to me. For Paul, his life is summed up in the person and the work of Jesus Christ. That's an astonishing statement. Because it means that everything in Paul's life was channeled through his relationship with Jesus Christ. Every single thing that Paul did in his life was channeled through his relationship with Jesus Christ. You can only do that if you have faith in Jesus Christ. You can only do that if you have a growing love for, knowledge of, and a light in the person and the work of Jesus Christ. If you do not believe in Jesus Christ, If you do not have a growing love for the person of Jesus Christ, as he has revealed in the word of God, if you do not have a growing understanding of who Jesus is today, then you cannot live with Christ the way that Paul expresses it here. And as we saw last Lord's Day evening, the reason why Paul was able to live in this distressing situation that he was in and endure the lack of freedom that he experienced was because of this single relationship he had with Jesus Christ. And I would exhort you I would exhort you to have a relationship with Jesus Christ, a relationship that goes beyond believing in Jesus Christ, but a relationship in which you are actually thinking, thinking about who Jesus Christ is and thinking about what Jesus Christ does. based on what he did during his life on earth, and that you commune with Jesus Christ through his word, that your life might be marked by him. You cannot live a joy-filled life if you do not live life in Jesus Christ. It simply cannot be done. Call yourself a Christian, you can do what you want, but unless Christ is in you and you're in him, you will find no joy and peace. The second portion of this verse, to die is gain. I want to look at that and explore what Paul is saying there. I want to look at what he's not saying before looking positively at what he is saying. The first point I want to make is this. Death is not a choice for us to make. Death is not a choice for us to make. The second point I want to make is that death is not a joyful thing. It's not a joyful thing. And thirdly, I want to look at the fact that death for the believer is truly a gain. First, death is not a choice to be made. Men and women die. We all die because of sin. Whatever we die of, the cause of our death, that is not the reason for our death. When someone says someone has died after a period of illness, they died because they had cancer. They didn't die because they had cancer. They died because they were a human being descended from Adam. who, as a sinner, suffer the consequence of that sin. And the consequence of that sin, from Adam on, has been death. That's the reason why we die. Death is the judgment of God for sin. We've been studying together in the book of Genesis, in Let's Worship God, in the Mets, And we know from the early chapter of Genesis that God said to Adam and to Eve, this is a tree of knowledge of good and evil. Of it you shall not eat, for surely in the day that you eat of it, you shall die. And you will read, as we work our way through those early chapters of Genesis, that death comes to man because of that judgment of God, reiterated in Genesis chapter 3, of dust you are and to dust you shall return because of man's sin. But reading this, you would think that almost Paul is conveying a sense here where he is at liberty to choose the timing of his death. He says in the 22nd verse, if I live in the flesh, which means fruitful labor for me, yet what shall I choose? I cannot tell, he says. It's as though he's saying, I can't tell which I'm going to choose. I'm hard pressed between the two. My desire is to be with Christ, for that is better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary. And you could almost, if you were to lift that out of context, say that Paul is advocating here that there is a right for the Christian to choose whether they want to continue on in life or whether they want to depart and be with Jesus Christ. Of course, that is not the case. We cannot, because of the hardness and the difficulties of our lives, take a decision that it would be better for us to be in the presence of the Lord, and therefore we are at liberty to take our own lives. We are not at liberty to take our own lives. There were men in the Old Testament who did, because they were in a state of depression, speak to God and say to God, that it would be better for them if they were not alive, but they were dead. Moses spoke with God in such a way. In Numbers chapter 11 verse 15, we read concerning Moses that because of the mental state that he was in, that he came to God and he speaks to God and he says, if you will treat me like this, kill me at once. If I find favour in your sight, that I might not see my wretchedness." The people of God had been complaining against Moses and God comes to, Moses comes to God and he says to God, if you're going to deal with me in this way, then just take my life. We know that Elijah had the same sentiment. Elijah, under the burden of the responsibility that he had to minister the Word of God, says in 1 Kings chapter 19, But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a broom tree. And he asked that he might die, saying, It is enough, O Lord. Take away my life, for I am no better than my father's. Jeremiah expressed the same desire. He wanted God to take his life. He says to God that he would have God to take his life. In Jeremiah chapter 20 verses 14 through 18. Cursed be the day in which I was born, the day when my mother bore me. Let it not be blessed. Cursed be the man who brought the news to my father, a son is born to you, making him very glad. Let that man be like the cities that the Lord withdrew without pity. Let him cry in the morning and alarm at noon. He speaks concerning his desire that his life would be ended. These men came to God and they spoke to God concerning the situation they found themselves in and they said to God if this is the burden that you're going to lay on me then why not just take my life? But that wasn't saying that they were felt deliberately to take their own lives. And we need to be very clear in this day and age in which we live where these issues will be raised no doubt by some in our land in the future concerning the right as they have been raised in the past in our parliament, the right to earn, the right to people, the individuals to take their own life, we need to be very clear that we do not have that choice. I know that I'm speaking to those who understand that, but it's good to have it clearly spelled out to us again. Secondly, death is not a joyful thing. When Paul says here, death is gain, He's not speaking of the fact that if I die, I will be in my dying filled with joy. Death is an enemy. Man was created to live. We were not created to die. Death is a consequence of man's willful, deliberate, autonomous rebellion against God. There are only two occasions in the Word of God when the people of God are commanded not to grieve the reality of death. Leviticus chapter 10, when Aaron's sons had disobediently offered strange fire on the altar, the Lord struck them dead. And Moses came to Aaron, his brother, and his surviving sons, and he told them, that is Aaron and his surviving sons, not to grieve for the sons that had been put to death. They weren't to grieve for those sons. Now, they were to let the people grieve for them, but they were not to grieve. And the reason why they were not allowed to grieve was because in their grieving, they might give the impression that what the Lord had done was not a righteous thing and one that they found acceptable. There's another occasion when God forbade the grieving over a lost loved one. When God suddenly took Ezekiel's wife and God told Ezekiel that he could groan silently, but they should not shed his tears or grieve outwardly because it was a sign of the impending judgment of God upon Judah that his wife had been taken. So there's only two occasions recorded in the history of the world in which the people of God are not to grieve the loss of a loved one. Internally, yes, but not to express it externally. The Lord Jesus Christ grieved. He grieved the loss of Lazarus, even though he knew that Lazarus was going to be raised from the ground. He grieved, and we know that Paul writes to the church at Corinth, and he tells us that we are at liberty to grieve, but we do not, rather Thessalonians, but we do not grieve as those who do not have hope. So death is not a great thing. Death is not something that we're to welcome. Death is not something that we're to delight in. We are to grieve the loss of a loved one. And sometimes in the church of Jesus Christ today, there's a mimicking of the world. wants to undo the reality of God's judgment and death. So the world says, let's throw a party as it were. Let's celebrate this person's life. Yes, they are grieving inside, but there has to be this front put on that's all right because they've gone to a far better place. And the Church of Jesus Christ have sometimes taken the truth of the fact that death is again, and in its misunderstanding, they have said, this is a celebration. It's not a celebration when someone dies. It's a cause for grief. It's a cause for hurt. And it does damage to believers. It causes damage to believers when Christians say, you shouldn't be grieving. They're in a far better place. It does psychological damage because we are designed, we are designed philosophically to grieve the reality of God's wrath in our lives. We have been designed to accept the judgment of God in this regard and to grieve the reality of the loss. If someone comes, a Christian comes along and says, you shouldn't be grieving, they're a Christian, they're in heaven. It's wrong. It's wrong. We grieve, but we do not grieve without hope. It's a different thing. It's a different thing. We do not grieve like the world which has no hope. We grieve. We grieve but not in the chaotic, not in the shambolic, not in the frustrated and angry way that the world does it. We grieve understanding the truth of what Paul says, that death is gain. What then is Paul saying when he speaks that death is gain? Well, he's speaking of the reality of what happens at death. He's saying that there's an objective consequence of death for the believer in Jesus Christ, which the unbeliever doesn't experience. Death is a judgment of God upon sin. But when death takes place in the life of the one who believes in Jesus Christ and has made Jesus Christ Lord of their lives by the grace of God, when that death takes place, there is something intrinsically important that happens in the believer's life that the world does not experience. And those who die in their trespasses and sins cannot experience nor will ever experience. And it's this gain, it's the after what happens in the event of death that Paul is speaking of here. He uses a word here that denotes department or departing and it's a word that's used of soldiers when they take down their tent. Paul's looking at it here and he's saying when the physical tent of life is taken down that's the departing. Sailors used the same word to describe a ship when it was being loosed from the moorings and it would set sail into the sea. If the death, the believer as it were, unleashes by the virtue of death their moorings to the world and then they're set sail into this new living experience with God. In political terms, it was used to describe the freeing of a prisoner. Farmers used to describe it, the departing as unyoking the oxen from the burden of the yoke that they had to carry in order to undertake the tasks of the everyday labor. So what Paul is using here when he's using this word depart, he's describing the setting off and the embracing of something new by virtue of freedom. And the freedom that we experience in death is freedom from the consequence of sin. You and I live every day of our lives with the consequence of sin in our lives. You and I live every day experiencing emotions, experiencing things physically because of the sin in our own lives, and indirectly because of the sin in the lives of others. When you die, you will be set free from the bondage of the consequence sin in your life. The hurts that you carry deep, the frustrations and the anxieties, the I wish that had never happened. It's not that you carry it about as a burden because it has been forgiven by the grace of God as you've confessed it and you've been set free from that burden. It's not that you're overwhelmed by that sense of guilt. any longer in your life. The glorious reality of forgiveness is that that guilt is dissipated and you don't have to carry it like the ungodly do their sinfulness. But that doesn't mean that we escape the consequences, the results of the fact of our sin and the results of the fact of other sins. And when we die, we will be departing from, we'll be set loose from the consequences of sin. We'll also be set free from the temptation of sin. Sin will no longer loom large on our daily schedule. We will not be subject to the temptation of that nature of the old man within us. It will be gone, and our wrestles with temptation, and those of us who seriously engage in the wrestle against temptation in our lives, those of us who seriously and methodically and intentionally think about the sins in our lives and quantify those sins and isolate those sins and seek to address those sins with all our energy, that will be gone. That sense of having to wrestle with sin and the temptation of sin, when we die it will be gone. And we'll not experience anymore the trials of God in our lives, those trials to purify us of our sins as he disciplines us, us as a father that loves us. We will be free from those trials because we will be perfect in Christ Jesus. Our souls at the moment of our death will depart and they will go into the presence of Christ. We will be made perfect in Christ. There will be no soul sleep. There'll be no annihilation. There'll be no reincarnation. There'll be no purgatory. Be clear, man of God, woman of God, be clear on this, that at the moment that you die, your soul will be made perfect, and it will go into the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ. And therein is the gain. For therein you will dwell with Christ. You will be with Christ in the presence of Christ in perfect holiness because of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Lord Jesus Christ has brought you to heaven. Through his death and his resurrection, he has brought you into the place of glory that is heaven. By his life and his obedience to the law, he has paid the penalty that is acceptable to God for your sin, and he has given you the righteousness, attributed to you the righteousness, that is His by virtue of His obedience to the law, and He has given that to you by imputation. He has handed it over to you. And so when you die, your soul at that moment in time, the penalty due to your sin, having been paid fully to the satisfaction of God in heaven, the Father having received the Son and exalted Him to the highest heavens, having received Him because of the satisfaction of His life on earth and His death on the cross, your sins having been forgiven, and the righteousness that you need to step into the reality of heaven being given to you by virtue of Jesus' obedience, your soul will be made perfect. And you will dwell with Him. You will dwell with Him. And therein lies the gain. Therein lies the gain. no more consequence of sin, no more temptation by sin, no more trial of God to purify us and make us holy by driving us away from our sin. And so when Paul speaks here of to live is Christ and to die is gain, he's not saying I have liberty to choose my death. He's not saying that I will find my death an enjoyable experience. He's not saying that when I die, people will be deliriously happy. He's saying that the object reality of my life will be again to me. It will be again to me. For at that moment in time, all that I have wrestled with in my life with sin will be gone. And I will stand in the glorious presence of the risen Lord Jesus Christ. I will dwell with Him in perfection. And that is the gain. That is the gain. And what a gain that is. And what a gain that will be. Amen.