"Oh, of course, I intend to be saved sometime! But there is no use in being in a hurry about it. I'll take my chance, even at the eleventh hour. Remember the dying thief!" Thus carelessly said a young man at the close of a gospel meeting when spoken to about his soul.
"Which thief?" pointedly asked his questioner.
"Why, I had really forgotten there were two. I mean the saved one," was the reply as an anxious expression came over his face.
"Yes, one was saved and is in heaven now. The other who had an equal opportunity for salvation is wailing in hell. What warrant have you that you will not spend eternity as he will rather than as the other?”
It was a word fitly spoken, an arrow that pierced the joints of his harness. The young man was led to see the folly of further procrastination and that night he received the Lord Jesus Christ as his personal Savior and was saved for eternity.
Thousands like him forget there were "two thieves." They remember the mercy of God that saved one while forgetting the judgment of God meted out to the other. Carelessly they wander on hoping to be saved at last; but oh, how many to whom the gospel was often presented are cut off in their sin and damned forever! Too long they have presumed on the patience of God and rejected His grace until "there was no remedy.”
Which thief, reader, we affectionately ask, would you be like? We remember asking this once of a very refined and lovely young woman on a steamer. Her indignant reply was: "You do not mean to say I have got to go to heaven like the dying thief, do you?”
"No, madam," we replied, "you do not have to. If you reject Christ, you will have to go to hell with the other.”
And so we would remind the reader: The saved thief believed on the Son of God, and is with Christ now.
The lost thief scorned a Savior, and is in the depths of woe.
You must be with one or the other for eternity.