If only He Changed His Mind

I was just now thinking of – well, I’ll call him Bob. He was somewhere around 80 when he died a few months ago. He’d been a member of a large denominational church much of his life. Years ago, that denomination was a bastion of faithful Christian doctrine. But over the years, Satan’s children infiltrated the denominational seminaries and pulpits. And now, well – if God calls something evil, they have another opinion. Bob boasted his denomination was full of ‘intellectuals’. He said they have learned to adjust with the times. God is a God of love, he often told me. So he certainly understands when a woman needs to have a choice to kill her baby in the womb. And God approves of the sexual needs of practicing homosexual men and women. After all, Bob said, God created them that way. Over the months before he died, Bob engaged me in discussions about what his church has come to teach about sin. I know he was trying to help me see the errors of my old fashioned intolerance. He was adamantly unimpressed when I opened my Bible and showed him what God said about sin, righteousness, and about judgment. I don’t know why I was thinking of him this evening. But a Scripture from Matthew 7 came to mind as I remembered our last conversation together: “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.’” I hope Bob changed his mind before he breathed his last. I hope he repented of his sins and decided, even at the last moment, to reject what his church still teaches – and about what God demands. Because if he did not change his mind, he has by now heard the Lord Jesus speak those chilling words to him: “I never knew you; Depart from Me, you who practiced lawlessness.” And hearing those words surely would have been the worst day of his life – and the very sad and tragic beginning of his eternity. If only – oh, if only he had decided to follow the Jesus of the Bible.