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What does it mean to remember death? In this episode of Pastors Talk, Mark Dever, Jonathan Leeman, Matt McCullough, and Ligon Duncan discuss McCullough’s book Remembering Death. McCullough shares his reason for writing Remembering Death. They discuss how society’s views on death have changed over time and living in an anesthetized age. The conversation explains how Christians can reclaim hope in heaven by remembering death and finishes by discussing practical tips for pastors to help their congregations remember death.

• Why Did Matt McCullough Write Remembering Death?
  
• How Has the View of Death Changed Over Time?
  
• Reclaiming the Hope in Heaven
  
• How Can Help Their Members Remember Death?

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Transcript

The following is a lightly edited transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.

Jonathan Leeman:

Hello, I’m Jonathan Leeman.

Mark Dever:

I’m Mark Dever.

Jonathan Leeman:

And welcome to this episode of Nine Marks Pastors Talk. Nine Marks exist for church leaders with a biblical vision and practical resources for building healthy churches. Learn more at 9marks.org. We have two guests with us today, and again, this is a conversation in front of a live audience.

So you might, the listener, might hear some laughing or sign or oohing and aging or I don’t know, watch in the background. First, we have Ligon Duncan, chancellor of Reform Theological Seminary, and an old friend of 9Marks. Ligon, thank you for being with us again.

Ligon Duncan:

Great to be with you, Jonathan.

Jonathan Leeman:

Second, we have Matt McCullough, pastor of Trinity Church in Nashville, an author of Remember Death: The Surprising Path to Living Hope. Remember, death, the Path to Hope, living Hope. That’s a strange title, Matt, and that’s what I want to talk with you about in this conversation. Brother, thank you for being here.

Matt McCullough:

Thank you guys for having me. It’s a treat for me.

Why Did Matt McCullough Write Remembering Death?

Jonathan Leeman:

Psalm 90 verse 12 says, so teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. In the opening pages of your book, Matt, you explain that as an euphemistic way of saying, we should be taught to recognize our death.

And then you write, I want to help us number our days to remember death as a form of spiritual discipline. What does it mean to remember death as a form of spiritual discipline? Matt,

Remembering Death as a Spiritual Discipline

Matt McCullough:

I certainly don’t mean it in the same sense that reading the Bible as a spiritual discipline or daily prayer is a spiritual discipline, but more a discipline of the mind, a discipline of perspective, an intentional looking for evidence of my own mortality as I make my way through my days. I think that’s what the Psalm is calling for, and I think it’s at the hinge point of that Psalm.

It comes as a part of a prayer for wisdom that’s where it starts, but it immediately moves into a prayer that God would satisfy us with his steadfast love. What I’m trying to argue in the book is that numbering our days offers us the kind of wisdom that clears the ground of false hopes and prepares the heart to long for God’s steadfast love and the gladness that comes from connecting with it.

Jonathan Leeman:

Interestingly, this is not a book for those who are grieving as such. You write again in the intro. I’m not writing primarily to those facing imminent death or to those grieving the loss of a loved one. Though I hope my observations will encourage them.

I’m writing to convince those living like immortals that they’re not actually immortal. I’m writing to those for whom death feels remote and unreal, something that happens to other people to help them see how a present acquaintance is important in their lives. Now, why’d you feel the need to write this book, brother?

Matt McCullough:

Part of it was for my own benefit. It’s a perspective I’ve been trying to learn from some of my forebears in the faith, a perspective that was central to the Puritans who have influenced me so greatly. But I say more than that.

More to the point is that in the early days of my life as a pastor, a 30-something-year-old pastor pastoring mostly twenties and thirties folks in the early days of their lives and professional careers, I found that two problems were occurring. One, their lives were full of stress over these ladders that they were climbing.

I mean, it’s very easy at that stage in your life to be always looking to the future and populating your future with all of your wildest hopes and dreams. The future is when I fill in the blank, establish my career, find the perfect spouse, have the kids that are going to fulfill these dreams, and that fills their lives with stress, anxiety over whether or not they’ll get there, young people problems.

Matt McCullough:

So there’s that pastoral challenge that I found myself regularly dealing with in counseling ministry. And then on the other hand, I was also dealing with what I’m sure all of us deal with in our pastoral context, trying to help our people see why Jesus is such wonderfully good news and to take a message that can sometimes be abstract Jesus as remote and unreal in the way that death can be and bring it home.

And I’ve found that death awareness can attack both of those problems at once. To recognize your own mortality and live with a sense of it is a wisdom issue that clears the ground of these false hopes that we’re never going to protect you from what you really deeply want to be protected from.

You’re building houses out of tissue paper with a rainstorm coming as one person put it. If we can help people see that, then they can actually be freed from a lot of the stress that can debilitate them, but that kind of freedom’s not all wanted. I wanted them to also then find the genuine and eternal freedom that comes from seeing Jesus is more relevant than they ever realized.

And I think that seeing Jesus in light of death is to see him in light of the context he sets up for us through his own teaching. And so I’ve been practicing that in the early days of my ministry and seeing it help people that I love and refining those talking points with them, with my friends is what ultimately led to the book

How Has the View of Death Changed Over Time?

Jonathan Leeman:

Something. When I’m doing these interviews in and around a book, I like to read a little bit of it because it allows the listener to get a feel, get a taste, and because I know you put a lot of labor into your words, right? And I like to honor that At one point you write, 300 years ago, it was impossible to avoid death because death was everywhere.

And then you go on describing that and then you say, the rise of modern medicine has had radical implications for the presence of death in our lives. Most of them are wonderful. But then you go on to describe how much it has changed, and then you say, all these medical marvels have come to us with a profound, often unnoticed side effect.

The reality of death has been pushed to the margins of our experience. Every one of us still dies, but many of us don’t have to think much about it one paragraph later, death by disease was often a slow, agonizing process without looking back was often a slow agonizing process without the help of pain controlling medication, this happened to someone you love.

Jonathan Leeman:

Perhaps in the room where you slept, in a place where you would see the agony and hear the moans or the screams. There was no isolating the young from the harsh reality of death. Now the experience of death has shifted from a familiar event in a familiar place, an event that occurred at the center of life to sanitized professionalized institutions that most people rarely visit in the modern era.

More often than not, our final days are spent in institutions, nursing homes, and intensive care units where regimented, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter to us in life. You’re arguing that our relationship with death has changed,

Matt McCullough:

Sort of. I’m saying that our perception of our relationship to death has changed, whereas our relationship, I think the relationship to death that really matters hasn’t changed at all. So the advance of modern medicine just allowed us to be

Jonathan Leeman:

Is like you won’t die. We’ve always wanted to deny death.

Matt McCullough:

Yes, absolutely. Now we just have a lot easier time of it because of these technologies that have done so many wonderful things for us. But the key is that the fundamental relationship we have to death is that we die. And that hasn’t changed at all. So we’ve got our work cut out for us in pressing into that fundamental truth.

Is Our Lifestyle Too Distracted To Focus on Death?

Jonathan Leeman:

Mark, you are a historian. What do you think? Do we live in an especially distracted age or anesthetized age? Are we able to successfully push death to the margins and does that affect discipleship?

Mark Dever:

Oh yeah. We are in a very weird time in human history. What Matt described a few moments ago about how death was very much in the living experience of families and friends is all over the pages of history.

I was a medieval history major as an undergrad, memento moray, remember death sculptures, plays, and drawings were everywhere. Drawings of scholars of Jerome with a skull sitting there on his death through death to remind us of his mortality to, as Matt mentioned, the Puritan period where just as good Christians part of the Catholic Christian tradition, it’s befitting and correct us to remember this.

I think it is more than history though. I think as he was talking, I was thinking about Hebrews 10 34 for you had compassion on those in prison and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one.

Mark Dever:

Well, the only way we get to that abiding possession is by passing through death unless we’re here when the Lord comes. I mean there’s a transition that we have where we are shed of this world and we are given the ultimate credit. Christ has bestowed upon us eternally these better and lasting possessions that the writer of the Hebrews refers to.

And it’s, I don’t know how you live the Christian life without that kind of hope otherwise you’ll be investing that kind of hope wrongly in what you currently see with your eyes. And that is a certain way to evacuate all lasting joy from your life.

Reclaiming the Hope in Heaven

Matt McCullough:

I’ve seen part of the purpose of this book is to reclaim the hope of heaven because often in my own ministry are deal with people that I interact with regularly. Heaven is often dismissed as a kind of otherworldly distraction, even by Christians who are more drawn in by the earthy language of a kingdom that we build here and now, and I don’t want to say that there’s nothing to that language obviously, but I think that heaven is central to the Bible’s story in its world.

Mark Dever:

Heaven is a vague three-story building in the midst of a bunch of skyscrapers of worldly possessions or attainments or ambitions. And that’s what it appears to us.

Matt McCullough:

Yes,

Mark Dever:

But the truth is those worldly skyscrapers are all going to be cut down to the ground

Matt McCullough:

Paper mache

Mark Dever:

And leveled. Absolutely. And the only thing that remains standing is the hope that we have eternally in Christ beyond this life.

Matt McCullough:

Yes.

Jonathan Leeman:

Am I right in thinking there was one of the Puritan pastor’s wives who kept a skull on her bedside? Have I heard you tell that story?

Mark Dever:

Sounds like them.

Jonathan Leeman:

Okay. Maybe that’s pure to an urban legend

Mark Dever:

Lady Joan Drake wondered about her salvation for 20 years.

How Can Churches Help Their Members Remember Death?

Jonathan Leeman:

That’s why I do love the title of your book, Matt. Remember death as the pathway to hope. That’s so counterintuitive to our age. Logan, you’ve been pastoring longer than Matt, you’ve done many funerals. Why is a present acquaintance with death so important?

Ligon Duncan:

I did somewhere between 25 and 30 funerals a year for 17 years. I’ve lost count of the suicide funerals that I’ve preached. One thing that amazed me, and maybe it’s the social location, maybe it’s the American South, maybe it’s the nominalism of the American Christian South, and an almost pathological denial of death was a common experience.

On one occasion, soon after I had gotten the first Presbyterian, a member of the congregation had gotten involved with the mafia and had built the mafia out of money they had threatened his life and his family and he took his own life in the driveway of his home. And I was called into this situation in the family.

And interestingly, his father was the sheriff of one of the local counties nearby us. The family had decided that they were not going to tell the children that their father was dead.

Ligon Duncan:

And I said you can’t not tell the children that their father is dead. They’re going to know that their father has not come home. And when you don’t tell them that right now, the scariest thing in the world that they can face is not knowing that they can trust the adults in their lives.

And if you don’t tell them, they will never trust you again on anything. And so the family huddled and they said, you tell them. So I held his 8-year-old boy and 9-year-old girl in my arms while I told them that their father was never coming home again.

And I met that kind of refusal to deal with death constantly in Christian circles. So I think it’s hugely important to teach a congregation this. And by the way, he says in the book, it’s not, I’m not teaching you how to die, but he is trying to teach you how to reckon with death. So yeah, I think it’s a huge pastoral issue that we do need to address.

Jonathan Leeman:

Man, at one point in the book you talk about how the language we use in and around funerals and at funeral homes kind of removes death. We use various euphemisms.

Matt McCullough:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s straight out of Milford’s book, the American Way of Death. Highly recommended. Yeah, it’s bizarre. I think that that’s changed some since she first wrote that book back in the fifties and sixties.

I haven’t spent a lot of time in funeral homes myself yet, so I can’t speak to it, but I think it’s still there. But to me, even bigger issue than the euphemisms that we covered all over with. It’s just the refusal to talk about it in general.

Let’s not even tell ’em that Dad has died. I mean, goodness, that doesn’t just happen. That comes from 20 years or more of not having talked about death. So it’s so jarring and unfamiliar that it’s immobilizing.

So you mentioned that in the book I say that I don’t see this as a book about how to prepare to die. It’s a separate tradition, but in another sense, I do see it as a long-range planning for the friends that I’m pastoring now preparing us to face death together.

Matt McCullough:

Lord willing, if we live to an average age in the United States 40 years from now, a bunch of us will be facing death around the same time. And I see this book as preparing decades’ worth of conversations toward that end, not only so that we’re not surprised by it, but so that we can say we’ve been preparing to hope on Christ in this moment all along.

I’ve mentioned this a couple of other times, not in the book, but just in conversations about it, I see in the background of this book, the final scenes of the pilgrim’s progress where Christian and hopeful reach the river. I see a lot of myself in Christ and expect to meet that river and fear for my eternal life.

And I love that hopeful is there with him, right? Christian, you can’t feel the bottom. He’s losing himself and the water’s rising above his head and Hopeful is the one who still got traction.

Matt McCullough:

And he tells ’em, I see them, the shining ones. They come for you. And I want to prepare a community of faith that can be there for each other. Who prepared to hope at that time?

And I think it starts when you’re in your twenties and thirties in denying what the world tells you really matters. Even as you go about building the lives that you can’t help but try to build. Of course, you get drained, you seek families, and you establish your lives.

I’m not saying don’t do that. I’m saying don’t be so foolish as to think that you’ll have arrived when you get there. And the beauty of Ecclesiastes for us is that it tells us that tomorrow is not actually our friend.

It’s our enemy that the short-term tomorrows that we fill out with our hopes are actually what we’re missing there is that the destination is not where we realize everything we’ve always been hoping for. The destination is the problem. When you arrive, you’re dead. If all that you have is life under the sun.

Jonathan Leeman:

So Ecclesiastes played a big part in your meditations. Any other passages of the scripture?

Matt McCullough:

Well, Psalm 90, which you already mentioned was huge early on in framing this as a wisdom first then a gospel pathway through death awareness Peter is where the title of the book comes from. I love what Peter does in chapter one, starting with this beautiful description of the inheritance that we have waiting for us, which is undefiled imperishable, and unfading.

And these are terms that don’t make much sense unless you realize, oh, they’re negating something perishable, fading, defiled. And that’s why he ends chapter one with Isaiah 40, all flesh like grass. And then in chapter two at the very beginning, he says, but you have come to Christ as the stone.

And I think there’s no coincidence that Peter is using all fleshes like grass withering away and contrasting that with Christ as the cornerstone. This fall I had a bunch of friends, we are in Tennessee, and A lot of our friends go down to the Gulf Coast for vacations.

Matt McCullough:

And this fall we had a bunch of friends who were headed down the week that Hurricane Michael came through. And I remember in the coverage, I knew they were going, I was paying closer attention than I normally do. I remember in the coverage they were talking about expected winds of 120 miles, 150 miles an hour.

And I remember that they were talking about these beachfront condos and houses that had been built to codes to sustain winds of up to 115 miles per hour, something like that. And everybody was freaking out because these winds, we already know these winds are going to be more than what these buildings are meant to withstand.

And I think that what Peter is showing us there through these images is that there is a storm coming with winds that the walls you erected for shelter will not withstand. It’s not if and nothing you do in between now and then is going to change it.

They just aren’t going to last. So we need to build on the stone that can survive it. And I think death awareness is how you get there.

Jonathan Leeman:

The Lord gives different gifts to the body. We see different things in other members of the body to help those of us who aren’t that part of the body. Brother, you and Mark, something you and Mark have in common is I think in some ways you’re both kind of old souls, right?

I think from a young age, these were the kinds of things to some extent you thought about Mark, I think you were that way as well. I remember the story you were telling about looking at your hand and that being a part of your conversion. Can you explain that?

Mark Dever:

Yeah. It wasn’t part of my conversion per se, maybe more generally, but yeah, as a 12-year-old looking at my hand and thinking this is going to be a skeleton in a box soon. What do I want to do between now and then? Is there a purpose and a meaning to this life?

Jonathan Leeman:

And just a wonderfully profound thought that we don’t typically live in. We don’t typically live there. We try to avoid that.

Mark Dever:

Yeah, I’m a bit of the opposite of that. I’ve always been particularly attracted to thinking about my own death, not imagining when it will happen or how it will happen. But I mean, I would say that’s a distinctive part of my personal piety.

If you were to be involved in my prayer life, hymns that I particularly love, poems that I appreciate, and phrases in scripture I meditate on. That’s why I have always tried to get rid of every wedding I can. So when Michael Lawrence came, I gave all the weddings to Michael here. I’ve been doing this for years over to you, Michael, but the funerals I wanted as much as I could.

I want the funerals because I love the hope that we have in Christ. And I think for a Christian, there is no more appropriate place for us to experience that and to tell this passing world about it than at a place where we have the most difficult time denying that this world is passing.

How Should Pastors Help Others Remember Death?

Jonathan Leeman:

It gives you the right sense of the weight of things, the measure of things, the length of things meditating on these things profoundly. So let’s get practical for a second. What should pastors do to help their members?

Like I said, okay, look, Matt, mark your old souls. Most people don’t at age 12, mark, look at their hands and think about that thing in a box. Our members don’t think that way. And yet you are both and Ligan are commending the value of these kinds of meditations. How do you help your people Remember death?

Ligon Duncan:

When I first got to Perez, one of my elders actually took me aside and he’s maybe 10 years older than I am, a wonderful, godly man, and said, Ligon, a little piece of advice, walk to a wedding, run to a funeral. And that was really good as a young pastor, 35 years old to hear from an older wiser brother.

And so I’d like Mark, I highly valued funerals, and not only when I was preaching them, but attending them. And our congregation did some special things. So for instance, when an elder died, the entire body of the eldership would sit together during the funeral and would line the pavement as the body was being taken out to the hearse if the burial was after the funeral service.

And so funerals were a big deal at first Perez and well attended. And consequently, I always wrote a distinct sermon for the funeral. And my elders would often say, ligan, your best sermons are actually your funeral sermons.

Mark Dever:

Same here. I repeat my wedding sermon. I have a new sermon at every funeral,

Jonathan Leeman:

Other things you guys do in your church gatherings in your preaching to help people remember death.

Mark Dever:

Pick your hymns carefully. There are wonderful hymns absolutely to use. So the best hymns you can imagine are going to have this theme clearly in them.

Matt McCullough:

Yeah, they’re everywhere in the hymns.

Mark Dever:

Yeah, true.

Matt McCullough:

I think also just pay attention to what your texts are teaching you as you preach expositionally. A lot of this comes from I have from a young age living with a strong sense of my own mortality and studying history and graduate school only fed that. I love all these people who aren’t here anymore.

And that’s a profound sense of wonder that comes with that. But it was really when I began preaching through the Bible as a pastor verse by verse that I began to see just how often the Bible goes there and just how unusual it is for people to hear you go there with it. So I think just add this to your application grid.

Where is this text speaking to us as mortal beings who have only one hope in life and in death? And you’ll find it in Genesis at the origin of all things.

Matt McCullough:

You’ll find it in the Psalms all through them. You’ll find it in the wisdom literature in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and Job, and you’ll find it in the gospels all through Jesus’ language, especially John. And then we’ve talked some about one Peter. It’s there.

So when you find it, I think go there and then be willing to put up with a little good-natured ribbing when you do. Because when you push past the taboo, people make fun of you for it and it’s all in good fun, but worth it. I think to put up with that.

The other thing that I’d say too is that as a pastor, one of the things you’re trying to do is engage with Jesus so you can show other people how to. So this starts with your own personal devotional and spiritual practices.

So I appreciate certain kinds of novels and works of history that just cultivate a deeper appreciation for the passing of time. I trust when I start to see it, then it’ll naturally come out when I try to help my people see what I see. And we can talk a lot more about that if you’re interested, but a lot of resources I think have helped me To that end.

Jonathan Leeman:

Matt, in a few minutes, I want to ask you if you have that conclusion with a favorite passage of the book that you would read to us if you got anything, a paragraph or something, but why are you thinking about it?

Ligon, any final thoughts on this brother? Ways you want to exhort the pastor’s listeners to remember death and help their church members to remember death?

Ligon Duncan:

Well, again, as pastors we are always looking for not only sources of personal edification in this area but also resources that can help us preach these messages that we have the opportunity to do at funerals. The Puritans do have a lot of material to talk about how to prepare us and our congregation to die well.

And so whether it’s reading Baxter or Kiffin or there’s just a Matthew Henry, Matthew Henry almost died when he was a young boy and lived with a profound sense of his mortality for the rest of his life that comes through in everything. And so when you come to those texts, blessed are the dead that die in the Lord and such in Matthew Henry’s commentaries and sermons.

You can best believe you’re going to get good material to help Christians think Christianly about death. And I just make that a regular part of your diet of reading that just ought to somewhere be in your reading where you’re looking and collecting and collating that material for your own edification and for your congregation.

Jonathan Leeman:

Again, just thinking of those Satanic words, you will surely not die, tells me that there is a satanic conspiracy, demonic conspiracies, which wants me not to think about this at all costs. And so there is a discipline of doing what is unnatural to the flesh and opposed to the forces of hell to think about death, to remember death.

Matt McCullough:

Absolutely. It’s important to me to also remember that certainly for my purposes in this book, it’s really about Jesus. The whole book is about him and what the serpent was trying to do, the way the serpent was trying to de CV was to remind her of what she had come to believe deep down that she was actually the center of the world.

That the show can’t go on without you. Right. You won’t surely die because then who would this all be about? Really who would watch this show without you? And what I hope to show through the book is that actually there’s a great freedom that comes from acknowledging I am not the center of the world.

I am utterly dispensable, but the one who is at the center of the world has made me his. And now I am not my own but bought with a price I belong to. My faith will be saved by Jesus Christ. And you only get there when you take death seriously.

Jonathan Leeman:

Amen. Mark, any final thoughts?

Mark Dever:

Yeah, I was thinking of these two ministers who were dear friends of Baptist ministers in the 18th century, Andrew Gifford and John Ryland. Andrew Gifford was older, he predeceased him. And in 1784 when John Ryland was speaking at the graveside, at the internment of Andrew Gifford’s body, Ryland said, farewell thou dear old man, we leave thee in possession of death till the resurrection day, but we will bear witness against the O king of terrors at the mouth of this dungeon.

Thou shalt not always have possession of this dead body. It shall be demanded of thee by the great conqueror. And at that moment, thou shalt resign. Thy prisoner, oh ye, ministers of Christ, the people of God ye surrounding spectators, prepare, prepare to meet this old servant of Christ at that day, at that hour when this whole place shall be all, nothing but life and death shall be swallowed up in victory.

Matt McCullough:

Amen.

Jonathan Leeman:

Thank you, brother. Matt, do you want to have the final word?

Matt McCullough:

I definitely don’t want to read anything out of the book after that.

Jonathan Leeman:

That’s what I’m thinking. Just let you off the hook.

Matt McCullough:

Thank you

Jonathan Leeman:

Brothers. Thanks so much for your time.