This past spring, I said my final goodbye to my grandfather at the ripe old age of 104. He had lived a remarkably full life by any measure. He grew up during the Great Depression and had lost his father when he was only 12 years old, forcing him to find a job to help support his mother and younger siblings. As a young man, he had answered God’s call and taken his own family to the mission field in Ecuador and eventually Mexico, serving overseas for more than two decades. Well into his nineties, he remained actively involved with the work of his local church and the Christian retirement village where he lived, driving the facility’s bus for outings and taking people twenty years his junior to their doctor appointments in his own car when they could not drive themselves.
A week before he passed, we had gone down to California to celebrate his birthday. Even at 104, he lived independently in his own apartment unit and had only days prior been put on hospice with around-the-clock in-home nursing support. As we prepared to head for the airport, we stopped by his apartment to say goodbye, knowing it would likely be the last time we would see him on this side of heaven. When we had said our final words, he introduced us to the young woman from the nursing service who was caring for him that day. He told us, “She is a new Christian. We’re going to have a Bible study.” After decades in active ministry service and just a week before the end of a very long and full life, he was still making disciples and building up the body of believers.
Finishing well simply means that Jesus finds us still actively engaged in His mission when the time comes for us to depart.
At the end of Acts, we find Paul setting this same example. He has spent years traveling the world to spread the Gospel, often at the cost of beatings and imprisonment. He has just been saved from shipwreck and a venomous serpent and is entering into house arrest and a trial in Rome. Yet despite all this, he continues the same pattern he has followed throughout his ministry career – staying in fellowship with other believers (Acts 28:14-15), preaching the Word to those who would listen (Acts 28:23), and never stopping his kingdom work (Acts 28:30-31).
If we want to finish our faith journey well, we need to hold fast to these things. If we are doing it right, the end of our faith journey will look no different than its beginning or middle. The principles of that kind of life apply no matter how young or old we are in our faith. We are meant to be in community with each other as the body of believers, so that we can both be supported by others and give our own encouragement to them: “Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another – and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” (Hebrews 10:25). We are called to preach the Word at all times, regardless of our circumstances: “Preach the Word, be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke, and encourage – with great patience and careful instruction.” (2 Timothy 4:2). Finally, we are to keep our hands engaged in the work until the day we are taken home by Jesus. As a friend of mine likes to say, “There is no retirement in God’s kingdom.” Paul – and my grandfather – understood this well. Even as he awaited his impending martyrdom, Paul was still exhorting others to carry on the faith: “For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time has come for my departure. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” (2 Timothy 4:6-7).
God has not hired us to perform a job from which we will eventually retire, but He has called us to live a life on mission with Him. Finishing well simply means that Jesus finds us still actively engaged in His mission when the time comes for us to depart.
