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Romans 5:12–14 – Better Than You Think: Romans 1–5 – Philip Sasser – May 25, 2025
James Buchanan Sasser was born in 1857 in Laurel County, Kentucky. In 1882, when he was twenty-five, he married Cynthia Williams and two years later they had a son named Taylor. When Taylor was a year old, his mother Cynthia died and James left their small child to be raised by his father-in-law Reb (who was a somewhat shifty character) and mother-in-law Jane (who by all accounts was really wonderful), while he left Kentucky to seek his fortune out west.
In the last decades of the Old West, James Buchanan Sasser traveled to Kansas and then on to Idaho and then Oregon and then to California. And he never again returned to his old Kentucky home and never again saw his son Taylor who eventually grew up to be a man and have a son of his own that he named George.
George was my grandfather. George joined the Marines after Pearl Harbor and contracted malaria fighting in pretty bad conditions at Guadalcanal. In 1943 a medical transport ship landed him in California where he had heard that the grandfather he had never met lived. And so, sick and skinny, with his haversack thrown over his shoulder, he went looking for him.
And he found him. Not long after returning from war, he walked up onto a strange porch in Riverside California and knocked on the screen door and when an elderly, eighty-six year old man came to the door the young Marine who was my grandpa took off his cap and held out his hand and said, “Good morning, I’m George Sasser. I believe you’re my grandfather.”
Sixty or so years later, when he was dying, my grandfather recounted into a cheap tape recorder the significant moments of life. And in the recording he lingers over that singular event. He talks about the thrill it was to discover something of himself in this ancient man who must have seemed to him a relic of a different world. They had the same jutting jaw. The same love of books. The same deep intellect mixed with restless action. It was, I believe, deeply gratifying for my grandfather to discover so much of his own personality in the figure of the mythic man and to have met the man whose spirit had been imprinted so indelibly in his own nature. I think some key to understanding himself was unlocked in the long conversations the two of them had. He took a single photograph of the old man and then returned to Kentucky and never saw him or spoke to him again.
Sometimes my own dad would sum up why the Bible is so full of long lists of names and genealogies by saying “it matters who your pappy was”. That’s true. And it matters too who your grandfather was, and who his was. “The ancient world holds us to account,” Cormac McCarthy writes in one of his novels. “The world of our fathers resides within us.”
Today’s sermon is about Adam, our first father. And nothing in the ancient world holds us to account as much as him. Nor is there any patrimony that weighs so heavily on us as his. For it was Adam’s sin in the garden that “brought death into the world, and all our woe”. (Paradise Lost I.3) and when he fell that “earth felt the wound, and nature from her seat / Sighing through all her works gave sign of woe / That all was lost”. (PL IX.782-784).
Like my grandpa back in 1943, we’re going to knock on an ancestor’s door this morning. Not the door of a long-lost grandfather, but on the door of our first father, Adam, just east of Eden. We will recognize him when he answers, I think.We look just like him.
Let’s pray…
Romans 5:12-21 is structured as a series of comparisons between Adam and Christ.
Where Adam sinned, Christ was obedient.
Where by nature, Adam’s disobedience was imputed to all of humanity; by grace, Christ’s obedience is imputed to all who call on his name for salvation.
Where all humanity was mysteriously united to, present in, and guilty with Adam in his fall; the Christian is mysteriously united to, present in, and reigning with Christ in his resurrection.
Where Adam’s sin brought death, Christ’s righteousness brought life.
The histories and consequences of these two men are braided and woven together through the entirety of our passage. And in Paul’s formulation here, what is true categorically or functionally of the one, is necessarily true of the other. Adam and Christ are mirror images of each other: two men in history, two kingdoms on earth, two endings certain and secure. The great rivalry in Paul’s epistle is not so much between Christ and Satan as between Christ and Adam; and for us, the fight is not just between the Christian and the powers and principalities in the high places, but between the new man and the old man here in the low ones.
What Paul does here is use what was known about Adam to explain what was unknown about Christ; and then to use what was known about Christ to explain what was unknown about Adam. A thorough understanding of both is essential for perceiving with eyes of faith the lineaments of divine action in the created world. This is the machinery of creation. This is how the world was made. These are the hidden gears within history and within hearts that affect everything. Two men, two kingdoms, two endings.
Commenting on this passage my favorite old preacher Martin Lloyd-Jones writes this:
God has always dealt with mankind through a head and representative. The whole story of the human race can be summed up in terms of what has happened because of Adam and what has happened and will yet happen because of Christ… Understand Adam and in a sense you will begin to understand Christ. The relationship of mankind to Adam is a picture of the relationship of the redeemed to the Lord Jesus Christ…There have only been two heads to the human race, Adam and Christ. There will never be another. And every one of us is either “in Adam” or “in Christ. (D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans)
Because this passage is so central to the development and articulation of the doctrine of Original Sin, we will start by laying some theological groundwork and then move on to engage directly with our text. That direct engagement with Romans 5:12-14 will involve considering (1) the historical Adam, (2) our representation by Adam, (3) our union in Adam, and (4) the consequences of Adam’s fall.
But first, theology.
Fyodor Doestoevesky’s short novel Notes from the Underground begins with one of the most depressing opening lines of any book I know: “I am a sick man. I am an evil man. An unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased.”
I think we can all relate to that feeling. Maybe even this morning you shuffled into the bathroom, looked in the mirror and said something a little like that to yourself. It’s not too far, in fact, from Paul’s own words in Romans 7, “oh wretched man that I am, who will save me from this body of death.”
But here’s a question for you: if you were Fyodor Dostoevesky’s therapist, what would you tell him? Fyodor comes in, pays you his rubles, and says “Doc, I’ve got wretched-man-itis. Do you know what’s causing this?”
What would you say?
Now an actual therapist would probably tell Fyodor that he isn’t really evil, not actually unattractive, not actually wretched, not actually inhabiting a body of death. He might agree that his liver is diseased and tell him to lay off the vodka, but that would be it.
But what would your diagnosis be?
I’ll be even more grim. You aren’t a therapist. You’re the county coroner. It’s your job to explain the cause of death when someone has died under suspicious circumstances. One night you’re working late and the police come in with a body. Who is it? It’s the dead body of mankind, the cold corpse of humanity. That old lying, thieving, raping, murdering wretch has finally died. And you throw him up on that cold steel table and you get to work performing the autopsy. You cut open that body looking for the disease that caused such wickedness and you see it: every organ is covered with it, every bone, every cell.
Sin.
Where did this sin come from? How did it infect every inch of mankind?
The historic creeds and confessions supply the answer.
The great majority of scriptures cited as proof texts to this section of our confession are either historical accounts of what happened in the Garden of Eden or are descriptive statements about mankind’s current sin nature after the fall. The scripture that connects those two categories - the historical events of Genesis 3 with the Biblical descriptions of our present nature - is our passage. Romans 5:12-21 stands as the clearest and lengthiest basis for the doctrine of Original Sin in all of Scripture. It is the tissue that connects the history of what happened in the Garden of Eden with our present experience of the world as it is now. Why are things the way they are? Because all mankind was in Adam and therefore are now conceived in sin and by nature children of wrath.
Ok, with that as background, let's dive into some of the specific language of our text: Adam was an actual man and Adam was also a unique man.
“Sin came into the world through one man.”
Let’s not overlook the obvious: Adam was a man, an actual flesh-and-blood, historical person, who lived and died. True, he didn’t have a belly-button, but everything else was the same. Oh, and he was missing a rib, too, but besides that: just like you and me.
We believe that Adam was a man because Paul believed Adam was a man. In Romans 5 he makes this clear, and again in 1 Corinthians 15 and in 1 Timothy 2. Adam does not appear in these passages as a fictional character useful for demonstrating some moral lesson. He appears in these passages as he was: a supremely unique man - but a man, nonetheless - who was appointed by God to stand as our federal head at the inauguration of the Covenant of Works, and as our representative in the execution of that covenant.
And Paul is not the only New Testament writer to assume a historical Adam. In the gospel of Luke, Adam appears at the end of the genealogy of Christ. And in Jude he is named in the genealogy of Enoch. And lastly, in his teaching on marriage, Jesus himself assumes the historicity of our first parents.
This matters theologically. Moving Adam from the non-fiction to the fiction section of your mental library upends the created order of the spiritual universe. What is true of Adam is true of Christ. What is true of our fall in Adam is true of our salvation in Christ. What is true of our death in Adam is true of our life in Christ. And if Adam’s fall is nothing but a moralizing allegory, then so is Christ’s resurrection. And if Christ is not raised then we are dead in our sins and of all men most to be pitied.
In God’s delicate, perfectly tuned, moral universe, to unseat Adam as the actual, historical, head of the human race is to unseat Christ as the actual, historical, redeemer of the human race.
Why, then, might Christians be tempted to unseat Adam from such a place?
Well, because we like to appear reasonable in our secular world. We like to appear up-to-date and sensible. If you are a student in biology class, confronted by the pretended certainty of evolutionary science, the first three chapters of Genesis are embarrassing. How harmless it seems to begin making little compromises. Like Thomas Jefferson sitting in his study with a Bible and a pair of scissors cutting out all the miracles of Jesus that he thought were so unbelievable, you go to work: a little cut here, a snip there. Nothing serious, or really important, just a couple of sensible edits to make things fit a little better with scientific consensus. After all, when has scientific consensus ever been wrong?
But Romans 5 is clear: to call into a question a literal historical fall is to call into question a literal historical salvation.
And yet, while making no compromises on his historicity, we happily marvel at the truly unique place in human history that Adam holds. He was, our passage states, both “a man” and “a type of the one to come.” Adam was endowed with a spiritual significance unlike any other man in history.
If you’re like me, it can be easy to think about physical things and spiritual things as existing at two ends of a spectrum.
At one end you have concrete, tangible, observable stuff.
And at the other end you have spiritual, intangible, invisible, meaning.
And the closer something gets to one end of that spectrum the further it seems to move from the other end. But we should resist that. It’s not a Christian way of thinking. It can be easy to think that things like Original Sin or the forgiveness of sins, because they are matters of invisible spiritual meaning, must be divorced from the stuff of real people and real events occurring in history. But of course they aren’t divorced from physical reality. God has chosen to bring about the most profound spiritual events in human history not through gurus floating a few inches off the ground but through the juice of forbidden fruit and the iron of Roman nails.
In a conversation that became instrumental in CS Lewis’ conversion, his friend JRR Tolkien famously described Christianity as being the “true myth”, the one story among all the great stories of the world that was both the most magical and the most real. Later in life Tolkien returned to that same idea. “Legend and history” he wrote, “have met and fused” in Christianity. I love that. “Legend and history have met and fused” in Christianity. And I can think of no two greater instances of that fusion than in the person and work of Jesus Christ and in the fall of Adam in the garden. They were real. It really happened. And it was all just as strange as a fairy tale. In our Father’s world, that is no contradiction.
Verse 12 of our passage says it plainly: “Sin came into the world through one man”.
Then Paul returns to the same idea again and again over the next nine verses.
“Many died through one man’s trespass” (v 15)
“For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation” (v 16)
“Because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man” (v 17)
“One trespass led to condemnation for all men” (v 18)
“By the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners” (v 20)
This is not a foreign concept for Christians. The one standing in the place of the many. Jesus our representative; the Christian, clothed with a righteousness not his own. The fundamental posture of saving faith is one of pointing to Christ. Our essential claim being “I’m with him. Not my works, but his. Not my blood, but his. Not my punishment, but his reward.”
I used the term “imputed” earlier, but didn’t define it. Let’s do that now. To impute is to “place responsibility or blame on a person for acts of another person due to their relationship.” Our understanding of this concept of imputation is central to our understanding of the gospel.
But here’s where our passage gets a little uncomfortable. Our understanding of this concept of imputation is also central to our understanding of the fall and original sin. Because what Paul shows us in Romans 5 is that the same representative relationship, the same sort of imputation that exists between Jesus and the Christian by virtue of our spiritual birth, exists between Adam and humanity by virtue of our physical birth.
But what was good news with Jesus, is bad news with Adam. And not just bad news but, if we are honest with ourselves, news that can feel deeply unfair.
Yet this is what Paul asserts, here.
Here is the Westminster Confession of Faith: “[Adam and Eve] being the root of mankind, the guilt of this sin was imputed, and the same death in sin and corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity, descending from them by original generation.”
This is an easy concept to understand at an intellectual level, but a difficult one to accept emotionally. What we happily receive and perceive as the greatest of all gifts when considering Christ, we rightly receive with horror and perceive as the greatest of all curses when considering Adam.
Here’s the problem: if we don’t actually deserve Christ’s benefits because they are a gift, does that mean we don’t actually deserve Adam’s punishment? If Adam is only our representative, that’s a little bit like when your congressman gets caught accepting a bribe in Washington. Yes, we’re embarrassed and mad, but we don’t go to jail!
So how is this problem resolved?
Our passage speaks to this problem. Adam’s sin is imputed to us. But it is not only imputed. He is our representative, but he is not only our representative. He is our federal head, but he is not only our federal head.
How do we know this?
Before solving the dilemma of God’s justice and the doctrine of imputation, however, we must first state emphatically that the standard by which we determine whether or not something is true is not our notion of fairness. Nor is our understanding of fairness the basis on which we judge God to be good and holy.
Our understanding of what God has revealed is imperfect, our feelings are twisted by sin, and what God has chosen to reveal of himself and his providence is incomplete. If scripture stated clearly and unequivocally that Adam’s connection to us was solely as our representative and that his individual sin was the sole basis for humanity’s fall, then that would be the end of it. When Scripture speaks, we are silent.
There are, however, reasons to understand Adam as more than just our representative and that reason lies at the very end of verse 12 - “because all sinned.”
Let’s read it in context: “sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.”
The imputation of Adam’s sin to us is certainly in view here, but so is something else. If death is the punishment for disobedience, and death spread to all men, it must mean, Paul postulates, that all sinned - even before their physical birth. The phrase “because all sinned” is taken by many in the Reformed tradition to mean that in the garden Adam bore in himself something of our own nature, indeed of our own personality, such that his sinning was also our sinning. Not that we existed in the garden, but that we sinned in Adam. Not metaphorically, not symbolically, not by way of our representative, but actually.
Martin Lloyd Jones identifies the position I just outlined as the “realistic view”, meaning that, in some sense we were really present with Adam, in Adam, to such a degree that we are in fact guilty in the fall and not simply guilty by imputation solely.
Here is John Frame making a similar point. “Consistently with the rest of the passage, the “all sinned” in verse 12 must refer to the sin of all human beings in Adam. We should be reminded by this phrase that, strictly speaking, we do not bear the guilt of someone else’s sin. For the sin of Adam was in some sense our own sin, and therefore God is right to judge us for it.” (Systematic Theology, pg. 856-857).
And as much as Reformed confessions primarily have emphasized Adam’s role as our representative and federal head, and his sin being imputed to us, a careful reader of those same confessions can trace a thread running through many of them that suggest just the kind of realistic understanding of the fall that Lloyd-Jones and Frame put forward.
The Savoy Declaration of 1658, for instance, states that “By this sin they, and we in them, fell from their original righteousness.” Not “we because of them” but “we in them.”
Or here’s this one, from the Second London Baptist Confession on which our own confession is based: “Our first parents, by this sin, fell from their original righteousness and communion with God, and we in them whereby death came upon all.”
Or this from the Helvetic Confession: We hold, therefore, that the sin of Adam is imputed by the mysterious and just judgment of God to all his posterity. For the Apostle testifies that “in Adam all sinned, by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners” (Rom 5:12,19) and “in Adam all die” (I Cor 15:21–22) But there appears no way in which hereditary corruption could fall, as a spiritual death, upon the whole human race by the just judgment of God, unless some sin of that race preceded, incurring the penalty of that death. For God, the most supreme Judge of all the earth, punishes none but the guilty.
The prepositions here matter. We were in Adam. We were not with Adam.
Some in the “realistic” camp point to Hebrews chapter 7 for evidence that in some mysterious sense posterity is present in the physical bodies of their fathers. Remember what Hebrews 7 says: “One might even say that Levi himself, who receives tithes, paid tithes through Abraham, for he was still in the loins of his ancestry when Melchizedek met him.” This is fascinating, but I don’t think we need to go quite that far to find Scriptural evidence for the kind of realistic view that I am describing. We can find evidence for it by doing exactly what Paul does elsewhere in our passage: apply to humanity’s relationship to Adam what we know about the Christian’s relationship to Christ.
And what do we know about the Christian’s relationship with Christ? We know that we are united in him. United to him in his death and resurrection. Grafted to his covenant tree. Adopted into his family. Made his bride. Made, in fact, a part of his body. All is not representation and imputation when it comes to our salvation in Christ. There are other kinds of relationships, other kinds of bonds, closer ones in fact - mysterious ones; incomprehensible ones, even - but nevertheless ones that are true and precious and real for the Christian.
But left to ourselves, by nature, apart from grace, we have no such part in Christ. Our portion is with our father Adam, alone, and in him we are co-conspirators and rebels against the God of heaven, united with him in death.
Let’s consider now the consequences of our union in Adam and our mutual fall.
12 Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned— 13 for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. 14 Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.
I don’t want us to get too distracted by the complicated wording in verses 13 and 14. All that’s really going on there is that Paul is stating that God’s judgment of Adam’s sin was universal. It was not confined just to Adam and Eve. Nor is it limited to those, like the Israelites, who had received direct commands from God in the Mosaic law and then disobeyed those commands. That’s what Paul means by death reigning “even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam.”
But again, let's not get distracted from the main point which is this: the consequences of our sin in Adam was the permanent infection of sin into the nature of the human race and the death of every living thing. That is what is meant by the term “Original Sin”.
I won’t bore you with lurid stories or crime statistics to emphasize this final point. We understand sin well enough. We need no reminder of the cruelty, banality, mendacity, egotism, perversion, and petty sloth in which the great mass of humanity - and indeed in which the great mass of our own lives - are daily mired.
And we don’t need any reminders of death, either. The crosses on the side of the highway are enough. The Facebook alerts about old acquaintances suddenly gone - and gone far too soon - are enough. Our walks through hospital corridors where we glimpse the sick and dying in their gowns are enough. Our aging parents are enough. Our own fears are enough. We need no reminders.
Cort Tangeman and I were talking a couple of days ago about this passage and he said something that surprised me. He said that he uses Romans 5:12-21 when sharing the gospel with people. I was surprised because in all the hours I’d spent meditating and studying this passage, evangelism had not once crossed my mind. 17th century Confessions? Yes! Re-reading Paradise Lost? Yes! Thinking about how to talk to my lost neighbor? No. To be fair, he then said that he also uses chapter 1 a lot…and chapter 3. And Romans 7. Oh, and six, too. So take that for what it's worth.
But the next day I thought more about how this section of Romans 5 might, indeed, speak and minister to non-Christians. And I think it has to do with what I said a minute ago: that people don’t need any convincing that sin and death are out there. And they don’t need any convincing how terrible those things are. Our shared suffering under Adam’s curse, the pervasiveness of sin, and the terror of death is a profound point of contact that we have with the world. The non-Christian may try to dull their conscience at the edges or bio-hack their way to another three or four years of life, but in their quiet moments they utter the same cry as the Apostle Paul in chapter 7: oh wretched man that I am, who will save me from this body of death?
They know as well as we do that this is not the way it is supposed to be.
The Christian and the non-Christian alike feel the ache of our mutual exile.
Exiled from our first and truest home in paradise.
Exiled from the God with whom we once walked in the cool of the day.
Exiled from the love of one another.
Exiled from our wise stewardship of creation
Work frustrated,
Worship twisted,
Brothers turned bloody.
The world feels it.
The world aches for its undoing.
And even creation sighs at the hope of Eden’s return.
And if that is you this morning, if you feel the ache of this homelessness. If you have knocked on Adam’s door only to recoil at the face of your ancient father; if you have wished for nobler blood and a richer inheritance - then know that the free offer of life in Christ is held out to you. “No bounty but thy blood in my body do I know,” the young knight Gawain spoke to his uncle King Arthur in the old English poem. To the natural born children of Adam, no poverty is so great as his blood in our bodies. To the grace-born children of God, no bounty is so great as Christ’s blood shed for them.
Next week Daniel will preach the remainder of this passage and part of his emphasis will be on all the ways in which Christ, the Second Adam, has undone the curse of the first Adam. If this sermon had been “Paradise Lost”, I suppose Daniel’s sermon could have called “Paradise Regained”? But how accurate would such a title be? Has Christ’s work resulted in paradise being regained?
Maybe a simpler way of asking that question is this: are Christians still under Adam’s curse?
Well, yes and no. In many ways the answer is no, Christians are no longer subject to the judgment of Adam's curse. We are in Christ now, not Adam. In him, death has been defeated. In him, we have been made righteous.
And yet we sin. And yet we die. What are we to make of this?
Here is a great comfort to leave you with: for the Christian, sin and death should not be viewed as instruments of divine punishment intended for our ill, but as instruments of divine providence intended for our good. In the faithful Christian’s life, sin and death remain our enemies, but enemies that God uses to drive us to himself. For the non-Christian sin and death are simply judgment. For us, for Christians, they are sanctified for our good.
I remember when I first read about the weight loss drug Ozempic how the article talked about the drug eliminating something called “food noise”. I had never heard of food noise before, but what I gathered was that it was a sort of constant, nagging, static hum of desire over food. Reading that article I remember thinking, “I don’t have food noise…But I have sin noise!” Original sin is like sin noise: just this incessant poke, poke, poke of sinful desires and sinful acts that never really goes away. I have bad news for you: there is no pill for sin noise. There is no “one weird trick” for putting our flesh completely to death.
And I think that’s by design, because the Christian’s fight for holiness, filled with battles sometimes won and sometimes lost, is a fight that brings us near to God.
If our temptations subsided, I suspect our fasting would, too.
If our sinful desires were wholly quieted, I suspect our prayers and confessions would be, too.
If our hearts stopped hearing the Lord’s assuring voice of forgiveness, I suspect our voice of praise would soon stop, too. Those for whom grace is sweetest, sing loudest. Those who have been forgiven much, love much. If we were not weak, how else could his power be perfected? The continued effects of original sin in the life of the believer are not meant to cause either despair or resignation, but rather a continued reliance on God and gratitude for his grace. Just as a dear doctor is never far from the thoughts of a sick man, so Christ is never far from the thoughts of the sin-weary Christian.
And what is true of sin is true of death, too. It is an evil that God uses to draw his children near unto him.
Because our hope as Christians is not that everything, physically speaking, will work out. A day is coming when the doctor will have bad news. And a day is coming after that when he will tell you that everything that can be done has been done and that you should make your final arrangements. And yet the Christian hopes. Why? Because our hope is not in life, but in Christ.
People sometimes think that the sort of ordinary lives of most people, because they’re normal and average, must necessarily contain a relatively narrow range of experiences and emotions. But as a normal, average, person, myself, I reject that view entirely. Good food and drink, an open window on a late spring evening, the consolations of scripture, the immensity of the sea, the embrace of your wife, the loud laugh of an old friend. These things represent not a narrow life, but in fact one that reaches to the furthest edges of human joy and divine blessing - and they happen all the time. These are the common diamonds of the day. We have been made to think that value is somehow related to scarcity. No doubt in economics that is true. But not in God’s economy. God has seeded his creation, even fallen creation, with lavish blessings.
But as surprising as it is to realize how much joy there is even in normal life, it can be equally surprising to realize how much sadness and death there is too, and how both these joys and sorrows occupy so much of our lives. My dad died nine months ago. I don’t think I’ll ever be the same. A dear friend who I have known for decades has terminal cancer. Again, I don’t think I’ll ever be the same. At some point everything won’t be ok.
You see, even ordinary lives like yours and mine are lived in extremis. At the moment of death’s approach, it makes no difference whether you are in a fox hole or in a hospital bed.
I’ll say it again: At some point everything won’t be ok.
And then, at another point, for the Christian, right after that, everything will be again. Forever.
Until that day, may we think often about our death and dying, not morbidly but soberly, and may those thoughts push us near to the throne of grace so that we might hear our savior plead for us there.
And may we think rightly about our death and dying, not sentimentally but filled with the knowledge of the eternal word of God, deep calling unto deep until at last called home to him.
And may we live differently in light of our own death and dying, not frivolously or indulgently, but quietly, nobly, and in a manner worthy of the gospel, redeeming the days for they are evil.
And when like travelers beholding a distant shore we at last discern the clear contour of our coming death, may we die like the leaves of autumn, gloriously, refulgently, and may the name of Jesus be on our lips.
Here are some other recent messages.
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