Living and Dying with the Saints in Wheaton

By David McNutt

I once had a conversation with a prominent evangelical figure during which I unexpectedly found myself being chided for where I was born. Being from Iowa, this person suggested, meant that he was somehow less susceptible to the realities of sin that clearly, to his mind, must have affected me being from California. Looking back, I think that I can safely say that his comment was intended to be tongue-in-cheek, but it still rubbed me the wrong way. It suggested, at the very least, a lack of humility. It might have even pointed to an underdeveloped doctrine of sin, as if sin doesn’t affect the lives of people in the Midwest, and an equally underdeveloped doctrine of grace, as if grace somehow stopped at the border of my home state.

Death has no time for such sarcasm.

The prospect and the reality of death quickly remove the not…