Lord, Forgive Me
Lord, forgive me. How long do you think it takes to say those three words? Surely, not very long. No more that a second, maybe. That’s how long it takes to be saved from an eternity of punishment for your sins. I won’t win any popularity contest by asking the question, but due to the events of the last week or so, I must ask it anyway. Has the Lord forgiven you? I He you God and Savior? It only takes one second, but you don’t have a second to waste. You don’t know what God knows. Our lives are not promised any longer that right now.
Ecclesiastes 9:12 (NIV)
12 Moreover, no man knows when his hour will come: As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken in a snare, so men are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them.
Romans 10:9 (NIV)
That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
If it only take a second to ask for forgiveness, how is it the men fall unexpectedly? The answer is, ”because men do not believe” The forgiveness we seek, must come from the heart, and be firmly held on to, or it is of no use and our cry for mercy is in vain.
1 Corinthians 15:2 (NIV)
By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.
Why is this important? Jesus is going to return some day, and only believers will be saved. I am not saying that a person that is not saved is bad. I am saying that they are lost, and unless they call upon Jesus to forgive and save them, they will be lost when they die, or He returns. The only thing that will save a person is their faith in Jesus Christ; nothing else. Look at Ecclesiastes 9:12 again. This is what verse 11 says: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.
We place so much trust in these things. We believe that we can tell if God loves us or not, but what we have or how strong we are. Verse 11 begs to differ.
Mark 4:14(NIV)
14 The farmer sows the word. 15 Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them.
My heart is broken for the Japanese people, and for everyone who is lost. There is no time to waste. All is not well on earth. Simply talking about the “times” is not enough. We need to act upon what we know.
Matthew 24:4-8 (NIV)
4 Jesus answered: “Watch out that no one deceives you. 5 For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Christ,’ and will deceive many. 6 You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. 7 Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. 8 All these are the beginning of birth pains.
If you don’t believe this, there is nothing I can say that will convince you. I am praying that all of us turn to Christ. He is not ours alone. He came to save the world, not my world. Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but through Him. If you are not saved, or if your faith he grown weak, please pray about what I have written. Each passing second finds people who have waited too long, or who don’t believe or love the truth.
2 Thessalonians 2:10-12 (NIV)
They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. 11 For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie 12 and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.
Lord, Forgive Us
