Mechanical buttons or keys on my computer begin to stick. The malfunction continues and will be repaired or it may be time to change and buy a new computer. The buttons on my shirt get loose. I need to sew them tight or lose them and the use of the shirt. But the Bible always stays the same even though pages are torn or the binding comes loose.
The message of the gospel doesn’t malfunction, become loose, need repair or change. In just a few words the message, Jesus saves you from hell, can always be relayed.
Late one night a few years ago, at 2:00am, I was speaking with someone on the telephone in a different time zone far away. I was groggy from sleep and not fully awake. I heard myself speaking and knew I wasn’t conveying what I could have expressed if I were fully awake.
There were spurts of clarity and I noticed the difference between the unclear thoughts and the lucid moments. The call was important and somewhat brief so I strained my brain focusing on the necessity to get my message across and spoke the best I could.
The next morning, my late-night conversation ran through my head. Mixed feelings surfaced about how I wasn’t able to articulate the message of my book The Threshold as clearly as I intended to. The short message should have been; “We pass through time, the doorway of life, like a threshold before going into eternity in heaven or hell.”
However, the following morning, I could also hear those words I said that did come through clearly those encouraging words describing my hope. In my “Conversation with Clayton”, a radio personality in Melbourne, Australia, I mentioned how my heart bleeds for young people in their teens, twenties and thirties, the millennials .
They face political failure in most countries in the world. They are looking at a dying planet with less good air, water and food. They see deep social division among friends, families and governments arguing about right and wrong, fair and unfair, with no unifying central agreement. Even talks about God are fuel for dividing people. But that’s the world we live in.
Hostility and evil are right alongside good and just. This Earth and the dead and living are all part of God’s plan. Life is a gift and time is what it is until it’s over.
Only Jesus is the difference between eternal heaven and hell and that is the message our Lord Jesus Christ commanded His followers to tell. A message for the time we live in.
Matthew 28:19-20 “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Amen.
One of my hopes for writing The Threshold was to expose how Jesus Christ saved me from hell and changed my life for the last 28 years.
I did this by writing of the first 36 years of my sinful life. By showing a life of reckless and carnal living I was hoping to spare the young readers the emptiness of chasing wrong sinful pursuits into the dead end of hostility with God.
By seeing my life of waywardness without the God of the Bible they could read onward and see how God reshaped my life honoring Him. By comparing my life before and after Jesus awakened me and gave me a living spirit alive to the things of God, the reader of any age would see the miraculous difference that the grace of God can make.
Clayton and I laughed at the beginning of our conversation when we both realized the awkwardness of different time zones. At the end of our interview, we both prayed for the will of God to work in the hearts and minds of the listeners with a sincere appeal for the salvation of young souls.
After I recalled the conversation with Clayton I realized how insignificant I was. The messenger isn’t as important as the message, Jesus saves. Believers pray more souls will heed the call.
Romans 10:9 that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.
Sincere belief will produce fruit of true repentance, turning from sin and compromise and living in obedience to the teaching of the Bible.
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