Cemeteries in a Churchyard

Cemeteries in a Churchyard

12/10/16

This topic seems like it would be a creepy setting to have as a message from God but in truth, it is a defining concept that God wishes us to remove from our state of life.  The idea that mankind has such a site in a place of life is incomprehensible and can only represent a method of humanity that serves only as a reminder of the failure due to the path of sin we accepted.  God is a representative of life and nothing but life and His House should never be symbolized as a haunting or eerily kept crypt.  Real life is what God wants for our lives and unless we turn from our ways and return to Him, we shall fulfill and fill this cemetery setting with a bunch of spiritually dead people along with the physical.  God is calling us to repent and to allow Him to restore our lives so that we may live and not die.

On a social media website, I am a member of some strange pages, or at least many would label them as such.  Nothing demonic or horror filled but some of the pictures that the hosts place on those pages can give some people the creeps when viewed.  I have to admit that I have always found pictures of churches that had cemeteries in their yard quite fascinating, and at one point in my life wanted to be buried in a cemetery such as this.  When I was a young man living in Cleveland, Texas we would regularly travel to a larger town where my brother lived called Huntsville.  On the way to this town, about ½ the way there was a small church building that we would pass.  Nothing unusual about the building for it looked like one of your typical small community church buildings with no special outward appearances present with the exception of a small cemetery that was next to the side of the property.

The cemetery was small in size and had a fence around it with one gate that allowed entrance and exit for those who wished to visit a gravesite.  Each time I would pass by that church I was fascinated by its setting and I could not help but wonder who was buried in that cemetery.  Call me weird, but my fascination for that cemetery has never died away and while I have no idea if the church is still standing or not I continue to think about that cemetery every once-in-a-while.  I have never had the courage to take the time to stop and try to look at the graves there, and I would never hop the fence to find out but my curiosity still continues about the presence of people and how they lived and what allowed them to physically sleep in a place near a church.

Being a person who studies history I have no escape from looking at a gravesite or two while I am doing some research on a topic.  I have at times found myself chasing a large rabbit when I have to get information from a cemetery and end up spending way too much time looking at details about other areas that are not relevant to my current search.  I have also come into contact with this type of setting in some of the television shows that my wife and I watch on a normal basis as well.  Many of these shows are mysteries that are set in England and a good portion of them contain at least one scene near a church that has a cemetery on its property.  Through these references I have found myself moving close up to the TV trying to get a glimpse of the “names” that are on the tombstones, just to figure out how they fit into the setting of the story.

During a recent television program that we were watching God dropped a truth about the Church in my heart and how cemeteries are a focus and a reflection of how we view God and what the ministry of the Church represents in turn.  From the beginning of Genesis until the last verse in Revelation God is doing His best to reveal that our lives have a purpose and a specific meaning that we need to share with people who do not know God and all that He wants us to have.  We have become so caught up in the world affairs and trying our best to accept the world’s standards by putting on an accepting face that we have lost the true meaning of what God represents.

God created us in such a manner that we shall never die but through our choice of sin in our lives, we now have to face the fact that on physical terms we shall not experience this forever lifestyle.  But there is a spiritual aspect that God placed in our lives that represents a direct descendent of Him and it is this portion of our lives that shall live forever and it is this portion of our existence that we need to keep away from the cemeteries.  No, I am not talking about the physical cemeteries but the spiritual one that represents total and complete separation from God, you know, the one that our enemy lives through and cannot redeem himself in any way possible with God.  Here is a nugget for you to chew on for a while.  No matter what lies Satan tells you we must remember that he has no desire to go back to God and to serve God in ANY capacity.  Satan's one and only goal is to take as many people to their eternal separation from God as he did when he fell from heaven and took 1/3 of the angels with him.  Satan is a bad dude and represents only cemetery life, stay away from him!

As God dropped this truth in my heart concerning His Church He referenced that the Church has a cemetery mentality when it comes to God and what He represents to the world.  A few months ago I was listening to a documentary about churches in medieval times the host mentioned how it was possible for someone to be buried in a church cemetery and what it meant to the family, the church family and public when one was buried here.  I did not think upon it too much at the time but a few weeks later I was reading a book about the friaries in Ireland and it contained a large section of work that dealt with this subject of burials.  I found out that one had to be an influential member of a church organization, contribute heavily to the church in many ways, and then have a trust inside the church to even be considered being buried here.  This floored me, for it meant that one had to buy their way into a churchyard cemetery and how you lived for God matter little or nothing.

It was then that God tied all of this information together and placed it in my heart to write to His people the words that He wants us to understand.  It is obvious that we have maintained this secular mentality about the Church instead of placing God first in our lives and contending His message of eternal life.  Through our willingness to prostitute ourselves in the name of the Church and for the Church we have incorporated a cemetery lifestyle in our hearts.  The ways of the world can not provide anything except for death, so why would we even wish to be apart of something so damning?  The only explanation is that we have allowed the infiltration of our enemy’s goal for our eternal lives into the walls of our Temple (us) enough to warrant a status change on our hearts.  The honor in serving Christ is just that, it is Him who we serve and not the Church itself.  We have lost this truth and focused our responsibilities on the Church and when we do that we automatically focus our attentions on ourselves.  Think about this for a moment.

It is a delicate yet easy concept to understand when we put into place the words of God through His Word but the moment we take our focus off of Him our lives become self-centered through ourselves instead.  Peter found this out when Jesus called him out of the boat and to meet Him on the water.  As long as Peter’s eyes were on Christ he was fine but the second he focused on the surroundings and the others in the boat, he sank like a rock.  It is this truth that God wants us to realize that we need to get our eyes off ourselves and once again return them to Him.  While we cannot escape the physical cemeteries in our lives we most definitely have the opportunity to escape the eternal cemetery.  The state of the Church has become its own State and not the testimony of Christ.  Our hearts have bought our way into the closest gravesite to the church building that we can obtain.  We have failed to recognize that we are the representatives of Christ, His Bride and through this truth, we have fallen in love with ourselves instead.

Our goal should never be a cemetery or to present a gravesite as the final outcome of any life.  Our goal should be doing our very best each day to keep as many people as possible from cemeteries, especially the spiritual and eternal cemetery that the world so desperately seeks to bury us.  As I am writing this message, my parents are on their way to Texas to officiate a funeral. A funeral for a man that has special meaning to my family and to me especially for if this man and his wife would not be listening for God’s voice one night a long time ago I probably would not have been around to declare God’s words to those who are reading them today.  Henry Jasper heard God’s voice that night and obeyed the message that he received from God.  I am so thankful that he listened to God for at that moment I was not and in truth I had no clue as to why God wanted me around.  Mr. Jasper represented a Church that is alive and not one that is buying a grave close to a building.

Pictures of gravesites and cemeteries on the grounds of church buildings shall continue to intrigue me but ever since that time when God spoke to me concerning this topic, I cannot help but reveal a different tone to what my eyes view.  I cannot help but wonder what truth those people now have when they met God on that day and I cannot help but wonder what their lives represented as they stood in front of their Creator.  Building a church building or financially stabilizing a church organization does not make you a saint in God’s heart, the willingness to listen to His voice, living His Word, and spreading the uncompromised Word of God does.  Creation all the way through Revelation gives nothing but a hope of life eternal, not a picture that represents our lives as a cemetery, gravesite, or tombstone.  I understand that Mr. Jasper no longer breathes the air of the world but at the same time, I do know that he breathes the air around God now which represents the real life that God intends for all of His children to have.

God is calling us to get up out of our graves – pews if you wish – and to go outside the walls of the church buildings and start acting like the Church His Son began.  Our time in the grave should be over!  Do not allow the enemy to steal the truth away from billions of people all in the name of the belief that you have bought your way into heaven through your heartless and meaningless confession of faith and salvation.  For if you do not follow Christ’s command to teach the world the uncompromised gospel then the previous sentence is what you are living.  Repent and allow God to restore His Word of life into your heart and then we shall see the real change in the world and in our hearts that we truly desire.  Jesus said in Luke 9:60 “Jesus said unto him, Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God.”  This saying of Christ comes into light when one understands the exact reasoning of the status of the Church.  It is now easy to understand why Jesus said such words because you now know why He said them.  The individual components back then were looking to make their gravesites as close to God as possible but Jesus wanted them to teach about life instead.

DLB