For a moment my thoughts drifted back to 1999. I was in my first year of ministry at First Baptist Church, and that fall I had attended a Bible conference at another local church less than thirty minutes away. James Boice was the keynote speaker, so I had the privilege of hearing (and meeting) him in person. This was quite an honor for me, for I’ve had a great deal of respect for Dr. Boice over the years. He became the pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia in 1968, the year I was born. Moreover, Dr. Boice decided at the age of twelve to become a minister of the gospel. This is exactly how old I was when I sensed God’s call to full-time gospel ministry.
Just months after I had the joy of meeting Dr. Boice and hearing him expound the Word of God, he was diagnosed as having an aggressive form of liver cancer. He found this out on Good Friday, just two hours before he was scheduled to preach. Dr. Boice mounted the pulpit of Tenth Presbyterian Church for the last time on Sunday, May 7, 2000. He announced to his stunned congregation that he was rapidly dying of cancer. He said to them,
Should you pray for a miracle? Well, you’re free to do that, of course. My general impression is that the God who is able to perform miracles--and he certainly can--is also able to keep you from getting the problem in the first place. . . . Above all, I would say pray for the glory of God. If you think of God glorifying himself in history and you say, “Where in all of history has God most glorified himself?” the answer is that he did it at the cross of Jesus Christ, and it wasn’t by delivering Jesus from the cross, though he could have. . . . And yet that’s where God is most glorified.”
On June 15, 2000, at the age of sixty-one, James Montgomery Boice died peacefully in his sleep, just eight weeks after his diagnosis. Exactly two weeks earlier, my own mother had peacefully entered into the Lord’s presence.
How do you think you would react if you were given news of your impending death? Would your heart and mind go immediately to the glory of God as revealed through the cross of Jesus Christ? The apostle Paul lived with the cross always in view. He boasted only in the cross (Gal. 6:14) and made his life count for Christ.
Right now I am forty-two. I may not live to be forty-three. Perhaps I’ll enter the Lord’s presence when I’m fifty-two, as was my mom, or maybe I’ll go to heaven when I’m sixty-one, like Dr. Boice. Whatever the case, one thing is for sure: “Only one life will soon be past; only what’s done for Christ will last.”