Subject: It's time to get serious!

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2000 17:04:30 -0700 (PDT)

$10,000 per month GUARANTEED! We've all seen messages like this, and I hope that 
you too are doing well with your program. However, today I'd like to take a break 
from the usual money making matters for a moment if I may, and address something 
immensely more important to all of us. For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole 
world, and lose his soul? ( Matthew 6:21 )
The biggest and most dramatic need of mankind is to become right with God. To become 
right with God is to become saved from God's wrath and be renewed by the Holy Spirit 
and be given eternal life (Matthew 25:46). This is called salvation. What is salvation, and 
how can one become saved?

The moment of salvation is the moment of truth, when we take off our rose-colored 
glasses through which we thought that somehow all would be well with us, and we stop 
kidding ourselves that we are really rather fine people. The moment of truth is when we 
take our heads out of the sand and face the truth about ourselves.

One truth that we learn from the Scriptures is that we are desperately wicked. The Bible 
declares in Jeremiah 17:9, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately 
wicked: who can know it?"

The Bible says in Romans 3:10-18:

As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: There is none that understandeth, 
there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together 
become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one. Their throat is an open 
sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips: 
Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness: Their feet are swift to shed blood: 
Destruction and misery are in their ways: And the way of peace have they not known: 
There is no fear of God before their eyes.

These verses tell us of a horrible truth that we must honestly and frankly face. God is 
telling us that we are like poisonous snakes. God is telling us that we are altogether 
rebellious against Him in every fiber of our beings. All the good things that we have been 
doing are not at all pleasing to God; we do them for our own selfish reasons or because 
we think that through them, God will look with favor upon our spiritual corpses in which we 
have no life. Moreover, we are enslaved to Satan, who is our master if we are unsaved 
(Ephesians 2:1-3).

Another truth that we must face is that because of our sins, we are under the wrath of 
God. God's Word declares in Romans 6:23, "the wages of sin is death." The death that 
God has in view is not merely physical death but it is spiritual death. That is, God 
declares that because of our sins, we must be eternally in hell under the wrath of God, 
paying for our sins. God created us good and after His image; therefore, we are 
accountable to Him for our actions.

God says in Matthew 12:36, "But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall 
speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment." Our thoughts, words, and 
deeds, when viewed in the light of the perfection of the law of God, will prove beyond a 
doubt that we are sinners. To pay for these sins, we must be cast into hell and suffer 
eternal damnation. What a heartbreaking, impossible future there is for us if we are 
unsaved. We might have thought we were good people with the best still to come in our 
lives, and now we discover the awful fact that we are corrupt sinners subject to the eternal 
wrath of God. Can there be salvation? Can there be a way of escape from this horrible 
predicament?

Another truth that we must face is that God has provided a marvelous, glorious, wonderful 
way of escape from our sins and the wrath of God, and that way is through the Lord Jesus 
Christ. The Bible tells us to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ (John 3:16). God so loved the 
world that He not only provided for the redemption of the universe, but He also provided for 
the redemption of those who recognize their bankrupt spiritual condition and cast 
themselves on the mercy of God. For these people, Christ became sin (II Corinthians 
5:21), that is, Christ took all their sins upon Himself. As our substitute, He was judged by 
God as He stood before the Roman governor, Pilate. Christ was found guilty for these 
sins, and God poured out His wrath on Him as He, as our substitute, paid for these sins.

Wonderfully, we do not have to understand how all this happened. However, it is 
imperative that we recognize the truth that in Christ and only in Christ is there salvation. 
Somehow, through Christ, God's wrath has been satisfied, and we are no longer under 
condemnation before God. The Bible declares in Romans 8:1, "There is therefore now no 
condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after 
the Spirit."

Those who have placed their trust in Christ have realized their hopelessly sinful and lost 
condition. They realize that their sins were sending them to hell; they have begun to see 
the terrible nature of sin, and within their lives, there is a tremendous desire to turn from 
their sins. They know that Christ must be Lord of their lives. Because Christ is God who 
has given us His Word, the Bible, they begin to have an ongoing desire to know more and 
more about His Word. As they learn from God's Word, they want increasingly to be 
obedient to all that they find there.

The Bible declares in I John 1:9, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive 
us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." This verse teaches us that 
somehow through Christ, those who trust God will have their sins forgiven. This is what 
salvation is -- to be saved from the wrath of God, which we otherwise deserve because of 
our sins. Salvation is to abandon ourselves to Christ as our only Lord and Savior.

Before we are saved, both in body and soul, we are spiritually dead; we lust after sin. We 
are in rebellion against God and we are slaves of Satan. By God's mercy, He reaches 
down into our lives and begins to open our spiritual eyes and spiritual ears so that we see 
our utter sinfulness, and we begin to hear from God's Word the importance of turning to 
Christ as our only Savior, the only Way by which we can be reconciled to God the Father. 
As God works within our hearts, we begin to more and more sense our terrible 
predicament. We realize that we are only a breath away from eternity; and if we die 
without the Savior, we will eternally be in hell. In our uneasiness, we begin to cry to God 
for help. As the publican of old, we pray, "God be merciful to me a sinner" (Luke 18:13).

At some point, unknown to us, God gives us brand new souls. The soul is the spirit 
essence of man. The soul is the part of man that leaves the body at death. If we are 
saved, it is in our souls that we go to live and reign with Christ in heaven. It is in our souls 
that we experience eternal life. It is in our souls that we become born again. It is in our 
souls that we are new creatures. It is in our souls that we have been raised with Christ, 
that is, we have experienced the resurrection. It is in our souls that we never wish to sin 
again. It is in our saved souls that we have an ongoing, never-ending desire to be obedient 
to God's Word.

Because our souls are brand new after we are saved, our lives are quite different from 
what they were before salvation. It is true that in our bodies, we still lust after sin. Our 
bodies have not yet experienced the resurrection. But because we have received our new 
souls, we feel terrible when we sin. In our new souls, we feel violated by our sin. 
Therefore, we find true happiness only as we live obediently before God. Increasingly, 
then, we deny the lusts of the sin which our bodies crave, and we focus on the Lord Jesus 
Christ, whom we earnestly love and who has become the Lord of our lives.
Oh, it is my sincere desire that you will come to believe this truth, as time is getting very 
short for us all. May the Lord bless you and give you a heart to love Him and follow Him, 
so that you too, may glory in Him, and in the everlasting joys of heaven, for how shall we 
escape the great judgment day of God if we neglect His wonderful, merciful plan of 
salvation? TODAY is the day of salvation my friend. Please, don't put it off till tomorrow, 
for you may not have tomorrow! Many of us will not! Remember, all our days are 
numbered! Each and every day over 145,000 people die, and the majority of them had 
absolutely no idea that this would be their last day! God is here right now watching you as 
you read this message. What will you do with it? Will you turn to Him for forgiveness, or 
will you continue to stick your head in the sand and hope that all will turn out well? It's 
your soul that we are talking about dear friend, please believe this truth and act ont it 
today! Time is running out on us all. I want you to know that I am praying for you.