Some time ago a Christian commercial traveler, who was touring England, decided to pay an informal visit to an old associate in London. This associate was now a highly successful business man, with whom he had been well acquainted when both lived in Canada years before.
In fact, the visitor, his brother Jim, and the now extremely wealthy top executive had lived, played and grown up together in the same poor street in Toronto.
On presentation of his business card to the uniformed attendant at the door, the traveler was escorted into the private office of the great tycoon who had not forgotten his boyhood chum. He greeted him warmly and after the old acquaintance had been renewed, he inquired as to his brother Jim.
"How is Jimmy?"
"Jimmy is dying of cancer."
"That is too bad. He and I are both the same age, you know— both over seventy. Both of us are now living on borrowed time. He should not complain."
"Jimmy is not complaining. He has the peace of God in his heart. He knows Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior, and is peacefully waiting for Him to call him home to heaven," replied the visitor.
The reference to God, Christ and heaven was apparently ignored completely by the great business leader, who again commented: "Well, Jimmy has lived a good life; we are both now living on borrowed time."
"How true," said the visitor. "You recall that you and Jimmy are the same age; and you acknowledge that you are living on borrowed time. Now tell me, what are you doing on your borrowed time?" With a triumphant smile, and with devastating frankness, the reply came: "I am making a lot of money!"
"But what will your money profit you after you are dead? You can't take it with you. You are an astute business man; tell me, when your borrowed time has run out, what about your soul and eternity?"
"I'm much too busy to think about it."
"But if you never think about it, if you do not have to do with God about your sins and take Christ as your Savior as Jimmy did, some day you will wake up in hell, lost forever."
"Then I shall have a good time making a lot of money while I'm going there," was his sacrilegious reply.
On this note the brief visit ended. The faithful Christian friend that visited his wealth-possessed friend is now with Christ. So is Jimmy. Recently their boyhood chum who had become famous, the friend of royalty, prime ministers and billionaires, also passed into eternity at the age of eighty-two. He left an estate valued in the hundreds of millions. He boasted that he had made more money between his years of sixty-five and seventy than in the whole sixty-five years of his life before.
But "what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"
Had I health and wealth in fullest measure,
And a name renowned both far and near,
And no hope beyond, no harbor waiting
Where my storm-tossed vessel I could steer.
What though I might live without the Savior,
When I come to die how would it be?
Oh, to face the valley's gloom without Him!
And without Him for eternity!
A daily newspaper once ran a contest for the best definition of the meaning of money. One of the published answers was: "Money is a universal provider of everything but happiness, and a passport to everywhere but heaven.