The Great Concern: Preparation for Death (Pearse)

Are you prepared to die?

Sadly, too many people are not ready to face the inevitable.

In this book, Edward Pearse delivers ancient wisdom and encourages us to make preparation for death our great concern. Admittedly, it is a hard task that may seem uncomfortable at first. Nevertheless, Pearse faithfully directs us to pursue Christ and all His benefits so that we will be prepared to say farewell to this poor, vain, perishing world and make provision for an eternal state.

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Table of Contents:

A Proposition for the More Profitable Improvement of Burials by Giving of Books

1. Are You Prepared to Die?

2. An Important and Hard Task

3. Attaining Victory and Glory

4. The Finality of Death

5. The Foolishness of Being Unprepared

6. Prepare Yourself Now!

7. Consider Death, Life, Eternity, Delay, and Prayer

8. Pursue Christ, Assurance, Peace, a Good Conscience, and Purity

9. Pursue Greater Levels of Grace

10. Pursue Diligence, Communion, Christ’s Righteousness, and God’s Presence

11. Death for the Believer

Appendix: A Proposition for the More Profitable Improvement of Burials by Giving of Books

Author

Edward Pearse (ca. 1633–1673) earned a bachelor of arts degree from St. John’s College in 1654. In 1657 he was appointed preacher at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, the historic church adjacent to Westminster Abbey in London. The following year he was appointed lecturer at Westminster Abbey.

Ejected from office in 1660, Pearse probably continued to live in London. There is some evidence that Pearse may have resumed preaching as minister of a dissenting congregation at or near Hampstead.

Pearse died of tuberculosis at about age forty. When he knew that death was imminent, he fretted that he had done so little of what he intended for the Lord and prayed that some of his work might be useful after his death.

Endorsement

“Edward Pearse died of tuberculosis at the young age of forty. On his death-bed, he prayed for his work to be useful. Thanks to the providential hand of God, Pearse’s prayer was answered by this RHB reprint. While this book is filled with practical advice on dying and death, Pearse’s chapter ‘Pursue Deeper Levels of Grace’ is a vein of pure-experiential-Puritan gold. Pearse asks the reader: ‘would you indeed have all ready and in order in your souls for a dying hour?’ The answer he gives, ‘rest not in low and ordinary, aspire after the highest and noblest strains of grace.’ Don’t settle for the cheap and the mundane and then die; rather, pursue with holy hunger life’s most delightful Grace, from whom all graces flow, and with a voracious appetite feed on them until the day you die!” — Christopher W. Bogosh, co-author of Dying and Death: Getting Rightly Prepared for the Inevitable