CEMETERY SERMONS

Recently on a rainy East Texas spring day after speaking at Teen Mania I went to a small cemetery in Garden Valley, Texas. I was there to pay my respects and thank God for the lives of two men of God buried there – Keith Green and Leonard Ravenhill.

As I walked to Keith Green’s grave, I recalled that tragic day in the summer of 1982 when this influential musician-prophet was suddenly whisked into heaven at age 29 in a plane crash just beyond the property of Green’s Last Days Ministries (now the headquarters of Teen Mania Ministries). Compounding the grief felt by multitudes of young Christians, Keith and Melody Green’s three year old son, Josiah, and their two year old daughter, Bethany, also died in the crash.

The gravestone marking where Keith, Josiah, and Bethany are buried bears the hopeful reminder that they are “Gone To Be With Jesus.” Inscribed on the stone is John 12:24: “Except a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it brings forth much fruit.”

These short cemetery sermons call us
to ask some serious questions.

Keith’s life and ministry continue to bear much fruit today as his passionate love for Jesus, so powerfully expressed through his timeless music, is discovered by a new generation. There at his grave I softly sang the song he and Melody had written shortly before his death:

There is a Redeemer, Jesus, God’s own Son
Precious Lamb of God, Messiah, holy One.

Jesus, my Redeemer, Name above all names
Precious Lamb of God, Messiah, O for sinners slain.

When I stand in Glory, I will see His face
There I’ll serve my King forever, in that holy place.

Thank You, O my Father, for giving us Your Son,
And leaving Your Spirit ’til the work on earth is done.

Just a few yards away is the grave of Leonard Ravenhill, Keith’s mentor and a powerful prophetic voice who called the church to all-out devotion to Christ. Standing there I remembered how his book Why Revival Tarries had so stirred my heart years ago. And I chuckled as I remembered Ravenhill’s response to someone who asked him if he thought they were living in the Last Days. “I think we’re living in your last days,” Ravenhill replied. Whatever we’re going to do for Jesus, we’d better do it now. We don’t have the promise of tomorrow.

Often Ravenhill would say, “My main ambition in life is to be on the devil’s most wanted list.” I think he made that list. Inscribed on Leonard Ravenhill’s simple stone the old prophet still probes and preaches: “Is what you’re living for worth Christ dying for?”

These short cemetery sermons call us to ask some serious questions:

• When your life is over, will you be “gone to be with Jesus”?
• Is what you’re living for worth Christ dying for?
• What will be your epitaph?