ETERNITY: ONE PRAYER AWAY

Tuesday 25 February

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. Romans 10:9 (NKJV)

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. John 3:16 (NKJV)

If a man was sentenced to die because of all the heinous, gruesome, murders he committed and in his last moments before his execution responded to the message of salvation in a simple prayer and got saved, all of heaven would rejoice over him. If you were aware of his story you might even share the same sentiment.

The Bible says that in that moment he would have passed from death to life. In other words, he would receive eternal life and be present with the Lord for eternity. It’s important to note that before receiving Christ, this man was dead spiritually speaking. It is only after salvation that someone actually lives instead of merely exist.

Romans 5:12 tells us that sin entered through Adam and brought death or separation from God to mankind. Apostle Paul says in Romans 7:9 ‘I was alive once without the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died’. When you first came into this world you were alive without the law, but as soon as you choose to sin, the very presence of the law was waiting to condemn you. This is why the Bible says ‘whoever believes in Christ shall be saved but whoever doesn’t believe is condemned already’.

He also explains, ‘The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law.’

When they see a prisoner moving on death row they shout out ‘dead man walking’. This is an apt description of the person without Christ. You are dead as in separated. This is the first death. You are a living soul cut off from the source of all life who is God. The second death is total destruction of the soul and body. This is the finality for those who choose to reject the message of salvation. For this man however, he stepped into eternity. But doesn’t everyone you might ask? Heaven or hell?

The truth is, there are not two destinations where people spend eternity. There is eternity with God and destruction when death and Hades are cast into the lake of fire.’ This is why this devotion is titled eternity: one prayer away because only those who accept Christ will gloriously live on into eternity and the endless age to come.

The good news is you can be re-united with God from the seperation of the first death and rescued from the destruction of the second death. It is not God’s will that any should perish but that all should come to repentance. Remember God didn’t create sin; man did. The modern term for sin is disobedience. When Adam disobeyed God and obeyed Lucifer, Satan was the result. Directly Adam created sin and indirectly he created Satan.

This is why all of us needed to receive eternal life that could only come via God’s perfect sacrifice in Jesus Christ. He did it for the ‘whosoevers’. All of humanity. God never exaggerates. If He says ‘whosoever’ then that is exactly what He means. In John 3:16 He promised us that no matter who we are or what we have done, we would not perish but have eternal life both now and in the future.

How can a single prayer and a confession that Jesus was God in human flesh save the worst of the worst? Let me break it to you, sin is not graded by God on some scale from mild to severe. That is human consequences to the degree of the act. This means you telling a lie is as bad in God’s eyes as the worst crime ever committed. Sin is sin. Sin had to be punished on man. It was; on the body of the man Christ Jesus. He ‘tasted death for every man’.

Don’t think for a second that you can lose this salvation either. Why? Because you didn’t make it so you can’t break it. You were born of the Spirit which is eternal and can never be reversed. Be confident of this truth and tell the good news of the love of God and freedom from sin and death through Christ to others so they too will spend eternity with Jesus.

APPLICATION

‘And I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither shall anyone snatch them out of My hand. My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of My Father’s hand.’