Words of Grace – Dec. 1, 2016

WordsOfGraceThe doctor’s office was packed full of patients waiting for their names to be called.  The doctor, however, was moving at his usual snail’s pace.

An elderly man who had been waiting for more than two hours slowly stood up.  As he started to walk toward the door, the receptionist noticed him and called out, “Where are you going?”

“Well,” he answered, “I figured I’d go home and die a natural death.”

The Second Epistle of Paul the Apostle to Timothy was the last epistle that Paul wrote.  He was in a prison cell in Rome, awaiting his execution for the cause of Christ.

“For I am now ready to be offered,” he wrote, “and the time of my departure is at hand” (4:6).

Paul knew that it was about time for him to depart from this world.  He had written, in Philippians 1:23, about “having a desire to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better.”

In his second epistle to the church in Corinth, Paul wrote about being “always confident.” He knew that while he was at home in his body down here, he was “absent from the Lord” (5:6).

He was also confident in death. He was “willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord” (v.8).

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