Are You Ready To Meet Your Maker?

James 4:13-15, “Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that.”

The Bible reminds us in our text passage how short life is. I watched a sad but interesting documentary about the Eastland ship in Chicago, which was top heavy and turned on its side in 1915 and killed 844 passengers and crew. So sad and totally avoidable!

The Full Story Of The Eastland Disaster (1915)

My thoughts are upon how many of the dead were saved. Did most of them go to Hell? How many went to Heaven? Oh how frail is our human life. I like to watch YouTube videos about scuba diving deaths, cave deaths, fatal bear attacks, Mayday (plane crashes), strange ways that people have died, et cetera. As a born again Christian and a soulwinner, I like to live close to stories of death, which keeps me on my toes as a Baptist preacher by constantly reminding me how brief and frail human life is.

I was reading about several tragic deaths on People magazine's website today:

1. Man Whose 3 Friends Froze to Death in His Backyard
2. 5 Kids Dead in Indiana House Fire: ‘A Horrific Tragedy in Our Community’
3. 5-Year-Old Boy Spends His Birthday in the Hospital After Surviving Crash That Killed His Mom
4. Tech CEO Dies After Freak Accident on Stage in Front of Crowd at Company Party
5. Missing Hiker Dies on New Hampshire Mountain amid Bitter Temperatures: ‘He Died Doing What He Loved’
6. 12-Year-Old Girl Hit and Killed By Car While Running from Separate Crash
7. 11-Month-Old Boy Dies After Being Found with Burns from Furnace That Was Leaking Steam: Police
8. 3-Year-Old Girl Dies in Multi-Vehicle Crash Just a 'Few Short Miles from Home' in New Jersey
9. Woman Dies of Suspected Hypothermia at Oregon Retirement Home: 'Very Sad'
10. Oregon Teen Relives Moment She Rescued Baby After 3 People Were Killed by Collapsed Powerline
11. 75-Year-Old Hiker Dies After Falling About 100 Ft. Over 'Extremely Steep' Cliff on Mount Baldy
12. 9-Year-Old Killed After Crawling Under School Bus Was Cancer Survivor: 'He Had Already Been Through a Lot'

That is all sad and unfortunate. I am thankful that the little baby was saved from death. Dear reader, death might be at your door at any time. We are all living on borrowed time. You never know when the death angel will appear to take your life. The Grim Reaper doesn't care how you feel or what you think when he comes for you. Hebrews 9:27-28, “And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation.”

You've likely heard the popular adage: Today is the first day of the rest of your life. But dear friend, have you ever stopped to realize that today might be the last day of the rest of your life? Proverbs 27:1, “Boast not thyself of to morrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.” The most important decision you will ever make is whether to receive Jesus Christ as your personal Savior or not. It's that simple. Do you know for sure beyond any shadow of a doubt that you would go to heaven if you died right now? You can know friend.

If you have been struggling with assurance of God's gift of salvation, as I did for several miserable years after I got saved, I can help you. You can email me at KINGJAMESBIBLE77 @ GMAIL dot COM (which is my only ministry email). I'd love to help you freely as your friend. I've never made a penny for serving God and have always refused any money when people kindly offer it. People love to give money to people who help them, but I don't do it, I just want people's continued interest in my ministry, so I can be a blessing to them.

There is no shame in admitting that you have doubts. The Bible says in 1st Corinthians 10:13a, “There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man...” That is, we all deal with similar temptations. In other words, if people are honest, we've all dealt with doubts at times about our salvation. I sure did! But I can confidently say without wavering that I have not had a single doubt about being saved for over 20 years now. I gratefully owe that to God for leading me across the paths of some doctrinally sound preachers; namely, Pastors' Jack Hyles, Curtis Hutson, Max Younce, Ray Stanford, Hank Lindstrom, Ralph Yankee Arnold, Harry Ironside, Thomas Cucuzza, et cetera.

It's been rightly said that the most dangerous place to be in the world today is in a mother's womb (because of the evils of abortion). That is tragic but true! Likewise, one of the most dangerous places for a lost person to be today is in a church. Sadly, 99% of churches are wrong on God's plan of salvation for mankind. That includes all false churches (cults)l such as, Roman Catholics, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventist, Church of Christ, Lutherans, United Methodists, Unitarian Universalist, et cetera. Tragically, I humbly think that 85% of Baptist churches are also wrong on the Gospel.

Dear friend, if you want to be saved, God is freely offering you eternal life as a gift. You don't need to ask Him for it because God is already offering eternal life to you. Jesus was born of a virgin. He lived a sinless perfect life. He was God in the flesh, the God-Man. Jesus paid a debt He did not owe because we owed a debt we could not pay. He was crucified on the cross in our place to pay our debt of sin. He was buried. Three days later Jesus physically resurrected from the dead and appeared to many people, including His own twelve apostles. This is the “Good News” (i.e., the Gospel).

1st Corinthians 15:1-4, “Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; By which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain. For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures:”

There you have it, THE GOSPEL:

1. Jesus DIED on a cross for our sins.
2. Jesus was BURIED.
3. Jesus bodily RESURRECTED from the dead three days later.

The only requirement to believe the Gospel is to realize that you are a GUILTY SINNER. Romans 3:19-20, “Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin.” God's Old Testament law silences all men of our self-righteous boasting. We have all broken the Ten Commandments. We've all stolen, lusted, murdered someone in our heart with hatred, coveted, dishonored our parents, put things before God in our life (idolatry), et cetera. We are all guilty sinners in the sight of a holy God.

You need to know why you need to be saved (because you are a sinner). You need to know what you are being saved from, which is death (Romans 6:23). Jesus took the sting our of death (1st Corinthians 15:55-56). The penalty of sin is to be punished in the fires of Hell forever (Revelation 20:11-15; 21:8). Jesus died to save us from death. When a Christian's body can no longer sustain our earthly life, we have a home in Heaven (2nd Corinthians 5:1). Death for the believer is really a graduation to Heaven, when our life's journey of learning is over. Psalms 116:15, “Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.”

If you come to God as a guilty sinner and simply by faith receive Christ's sacrifice on the cross as full payment for your sins, believing that He was buried, but then resurrected from the dead three days later, you are immediately, irrevocably and forever born again. That's it! Nothing more is required or allowed by God. You are a SINNER and Jesus is the SAVIOR.

But don't you need to repent? Yes, but to "repent" simply means to change one's mind. From reading the context of the Bible and comparing Scripture with Scripture, we learn that we must change our mind about two things to be saved:

1. WHO WE ARE - We must change our mind to admit that we are a guilty SINNER in the sight of a holy God (Romans 3:19-20).
2. WHO JESUS IS - We must change our mind to admit that Jesus is the Christ, the only begotten Son of God (John 20:31).

Nowhere does the inspired Holy Bible teach that repentance means to turn away from one's sinning to get to Heaven. Ungodly men added those extra words (Proverbs 30:5-6). It is a dangerous and serious thing to mess with God's Word.

Are you ready to meet your Maker dear friend. If not, please take care of this matter right now. Getting saved is free, easy and simple. All you need to do is just BELIEVE that Jesus has already done it all for you through Calvary's cross. Jesus paid your debt of sin. It is the free gift of God (Romans 5:18). It is free for us, but it cost Jesus His life. Some critics of easy-believism (which is the only way to be saved), accuse free grace believers of preaching “cheap grace,” but dear friend, grace is not just cheap, it is 100% FREE!!! It is only free because someone else paid for it. That's right, Jesus paid for our sins with His precious blood (1st Peter 1:18-19).

“More people will die and burn in Hell, because they're trusting too much!”—Pastor Jack Hyles, “Yea, Yea, And Nay, Nay!”

“Everything that's hard and complicated about salvation is God's side of it!”—Pastor Jack Hyles, “Yea, Yea, And Nay, Nay!”

One of my favorite free grace preachers is Pastor Thomas M. Cucuzza, who presents the Gospel in this short 5-minute video...

Gospel Presentation By Pastor Thomas Cucuzza