by J. C. Ryle

"Today," says our Lord to the penitent thief, "today shall you be with Me in paradise." He names no distant period; He does not talk of His entering into a state of happiness as a thing "far away." He speaks of today this very day in which you are hanging on the cross.

How near that seems! How awfully near that word brings our everlasting dwelling place! Happiness or misery, sorrow or joy, the presence of Christ or the company of devils all are close to us. "There is but a step," says David, "between me and death" (1 Sam. 20:3). There is but a step, we may say, between ourselves and either paradise or hell.

We none of us realize this as we ought to do. It is high time to shake off the dreamy state of mind in which we live on this matter. We are apt to talk and think, even about believers, as if death was a long journey, as if the dying saint had embarked on a long voyage. It is all wrong, very wrong! Their harbor and their home is close by, and they have entered it.

Some of us know by bitter experience what a long and weary time it is between the death of those we love and the hour when we bury them out of our sight. Such weeks are the slowest, saddest, heaviest weeks in all our lives.. But, blessed be God, the souls of departed saints are free from the very moment their last breath is drawn. While we are weeping, and the coffin is preparing, and the mourning being provided, and the last painful arrangements being made, the spirits of our beloved ones are enjoying the presence of Christ. They are freed forever from the burden of the flesh. They are "where the wicked cease troubling, and the weary be at rest" (Job 3:17).

The very moment that believers die they are in paradise. Their battle is fought; their strife is over. They have passed through that gloomy valley we must one day tread; they have gone over that dark river we must one day cross. They have drunk that last bitter cup which sin has mingled for man; they have reached that place where sorrow and sighing are no more. Surely we should not wish them back again! We should not weep for them, but for ourselves.

We are warring still, but they are at peace. We are laboring, but they are at rest. We are watching, but they are sleeping. We are wearing our spiritual amour, but they have forever put it off. We are still at sea, but they are safe in harbor We have tears, but they have joy. We are strangers and pilgrims, but as for them they are at home. Surely, better are the dead in Christ than the living! Surely the very hour the poor saint dies, he is at once higher and happier than the highest upon earth.

I fear there is a vast amount of delusion on this point. I fear that many, who are not Roman Catholics, and profess not to believe in purgatory, have, notwithstanding, some strange ideas in their minds about the immediate consequences of death.

I fear that many have a sort of vague notion that there is some interval or space of time between death and their eternal state. They fancy they shall go through a kind of purifying change, and that though they die unfit for heaven, they shall yet be found meet for it after all!

But this is an entire mistake. There is no change after death; there is no conversion in the grave; there is no new heart given after the last breath is drawn. The very day we go, we launch forever; the day we go from this world, we begin an eternal condition. From that day there is no spiritual alteration, no spiritual change. As we die, so we shall receive our portion after death; as the tree falls, so it must lie.

If you are an unconverted man, this ought to make you think. Do you know you are close to hell? This very day you might die; and if you died out of Christ, you would open your eyes at once in hell, and in torment.