“When I have fears that I may cease to be” is not just the title and first line of a John Keats poem.

It’s the storyline for the human condition.

What living person hasn’t feared the power of death?

No one wants to “cease to be.”

Yet, our lived experience is that death conquerors all who breathe. It silences every voice and forces us to relinquish our grasp on what we value:

He laid down His life, paying the ultimate price for sin: death.

And then He did something no one else has done before or since.

He Who willingly laid down His life, took it up again. He was dead, and then He got up from the grave to live forevermore.

Resurrection means that, for those who trust in Christ’s sacrifice, death no longer reigns supreme.

Since the children have flesh and blood, He too shared in their humanity so that by His death He might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. (Hebrews 2:14-15)

For the Christ follower, life conquers death.

This was my hope and consolation as I sat in a Methodist church in Georgia at the memorial service for a dear friend.

She had suffered much; and it seemed for all the world that she had lost her third battle with a debilitating cancer. And yet, the eulogist declared that in their last conversation my friend had declared confidently that she did not fear death.

An ordained clergywoman, she had trusted Christ for the forgiveness of her sins and the salvation of her soul, and she sought to bring others into right relationship with Him through a life of love. Her testimony was that of Job:

“For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me!” (Job 19:25-27 ESV)

The apostle Paul, suffering imprisonment for preaching the gospel, echoed that same confidence:

“For I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that Day.“

Paul encouraged his friend Timothy not to fear, for our Savior Christ Jesus “abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.”

It is in relationship with Christ that we are freed from fear and find confidence both to live and to die in Him.

For to live is Christ and to do is gain!