mgpcpastor's blog

These sorts of posts pop up from time to time and they’re always worth reflecting on, particularly for Christians.
Make sure your family knows you want your funeral to be about Jesus and not about you.
People are under all sorts of pressure to conform to a pattern that makes a funeral all about the deceased and not about the one from whom they can find comfort in loss.
Or worse, a committed Christian may find that family members well meaningly arrange for a minister or celebrant whose idea of a proper funeral for a Christian is to read a variety of sentimental pieces of prose or poetry (with maybe a Bible passage included among them). This can happen if the family don’t have an active faith, and if the person who died has spent a long time in an institution and has become cut off from active church life. A very long and active part of who they are is simply pushed aside because it has been inactive for the season before their death.

Nancy Guthrie lays it all out. And suggests we take the step of writing down everything we want well in advance.
Here’s the intro…

I just got home from another funeral. Seems we’ve gone to more than our share lately. And once again, as I left the church, I pled with those closest to me, “Please don’t make my funeral all about me.”
We were an hour and fifteen minutes in to today’s funeral before anyone read from the scriptures, and further in until there was a prayer. Resurrection wasn’t mentioned until the benediction. There were too many funny stories to tell about the deceased, too many recollections, too many good things to say about the things she accomplished to speak of what Christ has accomplished on her behalf.
But then this wasn’t a funeral. It was a “Celebration of Life.” In fact there was really little mention of death or of the ugly way sickness slowly robbed our friend of everything. Christ and his saving benefits could not be made much of because death and its cruelties were largely ignored.

Read the whole post here.