The Sting of Death Extracted – Dwight Lyman Moody

The reason I like the gospel is that it has taken out of my path the worst enemies I ever had. My mind goes back to twenty years ago, before I was converted, and I think very often how dark it used to seem at times as I thought of the future. There was death! what a terrible enemy it seemed! I was brought up in a little village in New England. It was the custom there when a person was buried to toll out the age of the man at his funeral. I used to count the strokes of the bell. Death never entered that village, and tore away one of the inhabitants, but I always used to count the tolling of the bell. Sometimes it would be away up to seventy, or between seventy and eighty; beyond the life allotted to man, when man seemed living on borrowed time when cut off. Sometimes it would be clear down in the teens and childhood, for death had taken away one of my own age. It used to make a solemn impression on me; I used to be a great coward. When it comes to death, some men say, “I do not fear it.” I feared it, and felt terribly afraid when I thought of the cold hand of death feeling for the cords of life, and thought of being launched into eternity, to go to an unknown world. I used to have dreadful thoughts of God; but they are all gone now. Death has lost its sting. And as I go on through the world I can shout now, when the bell is tolling, “O death, where is thy sting?” And I hear a voice come rolling down from Calvary: “Buried in the bosom of the Son of God.” He robbed death of its sting; He took away the sting of death when He gave His own bosom to the stroke.

(D. L. Moody.)