What is your only comfort in life and in death? For centuries, believers have learned the Christian faith beginning with that question. It’s the first article in the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563. Why start there? Because death is our common fate. Unless Jesus returns first, we will all die. To find comfort in life, we must know how we can face death. Hope comes only in trusting the one who died to take the curse of death and who crushed the power of death by His resurrection. “Christ has been raised from the dead” (1 Cor 15:20). That is the only statement that can transform how we live each day and how we prepare for our earthly life to end.

The hope of the resurrection spurs us to sing. That’s why a group of songwriters from Getty Music wrote the modern hymn “Christ Our Hope in Life and Death.” Like the Heidelberg Catechism that inspired it, this song is honest about death. There is no need to shrink back from mentioning death in our hymns because we know the Living One who has conquered death forever. The Christian can sing hallelujah because Christ assures us of our glorious future. Now and ever, we confess: “I am not my own, but belong—body and soul in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.