Ever wonder how you are going to finish your life’s race? We all have
known people who completely abandoned their faith and turned into bitter
people. What can we do to make sure that never happens to us? The Apostle Paul
encouraged Timothy to learn to draw his strength from the grace of Christ.
Secondly, he exhorted him to endure hardship like a good soldier and compete as
a trained athlete and finally, be patient like a hardworking farmer (2 Tim
2:1-7). Paul also asked Timothy to reflect on this theme of being faithful to the
end. Timothy not only reflected on it, he did it. He, too, was imprisoned, but
he like Paul remained true to his convictions, and he lived out his calling.
Timothy and Paul finished well.
One of the greatest examples of faithfulness in modern years is the life of
Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was a pastor, seminary professor and ultimately a
prisoner of Hitler. Bonhoeffer lived in tough times that coincided with the
rise of Adolf Hitler. The Nazis did everything possible to draw the church into
their plans, and for the most part they were successful. However, there were a
few like Bonhoeffer who fiercely opposed the Nazi domination of the church and even founded a
defiant church that stood for Biblical principles. Eventually, when Bonhoeffer
saw the Final Solution, which was the systematic elimination of
the Jews and other undesirable people, he joined the resistance movement. The Nazis
thought they could silence the man by putting him in prison, but it didn’t
work. Bonhoeffer continued to write from prison, producing some of his finest
works from the prison cell.
Bonhoeffer was hanged at Flossenburg Concentration Camp in Germany at
dawn on Monday, April 9, 1945. His execution was according to Hitler’s orders
that were carried out even after Hitler himself was dead by his own bullet. Hitler,
being pathological, saw to it that his enemies would not see freedom. Even when
it looked like Bonhoeffer might be released and finally was not, he remained
faithful to his Lord. As his lifeless body hung on the gallows, his words
became his testament. The testament of a man who finished well.
One English
officer who was in that last meeting with Bonhoeffer before he was executed
wrote about it:
Bonhoeffer always
seemed to spread an atmosphere of happiness and joy over the least incident and
profound gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive. He was one of the very
few persons that I ever met that for whom God was real and always near. On
Sunday April 8, 1945 Pastor Bonhoeffer conducted a little service of worship
and spoke to us in way that went to the heart of all of us. He found just the
right words to express the spirit of our imprisonment. The text on which he
spoke on that last day was “With His Strips We are Healed.” He had hardly ended
his last prayer when the door opened and they said, “Prisoner Bonhoeffer come
with us.” That had only one meaning for all prisoners—the gallows. We said our
goodbyes. He took me aside and whispered “this is the end, but for me it is the
beginning of life.” The next day he was hanged. He was 39 years old.[i]
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