HOW many there are engrossed with the pleasures, cares, or miseries of this passing life, but asleep to their soul's eternal interests! Asleep with the momentous question unsettled, "Where shall I spend eternity?”
Is this your case, dear reader, as it is of the vast majority of men and women around you?
"Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men," writes the Apostle Paul. "Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God." (2 Cor. 5:20.) This is God's attitude to you, my reader; all His claims against you as a sinner having been fully met by Christ's death on your behalf, in virtue of which He offers you full and eternal forgiveness of sins, and which will be received by you, if you as a sinner turn to Him for it, and trust Him as your Savior.
Oh! the mad folly of refusing or neglecting that which at once saves from hell, and fits for heaven.
The following sad incident tells of one, who slept thus through mercy's day, and who awoke to its consequences when too late. The daughter of one of the first families in a North of England town lay dying. Grief-stricken parents and friends stood round her bed waiting for her last breath. What was their consternation when, just before she passed away, she raised herself and said in tones they could never forget, "I am going to hell.”
We know nothing of her life. She may have been all that was amiable, and possibly one who had paid strict attention to what are called religious duties, but her dying words proved that she had never trusted Christ as her Savior, and without that, religion is but a blinding delusion—the lamp without the oil.
“I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with Thy likeness." (Psa. 17:15.)
What a contrast is this awakening with that of the one who rejects God's mercy, and who, when this short life is over, awakes to “everlasting shame and contempt.”
Your acceptance or rejection of Christ as your Savior will determine which of these two awakenings will be yours, my reader. Which shall it be? F. A.