You’ve heard that saying—right? That someone is living in Lala land? Well, I have a reality check for all of us. We ourselves may be in Lala land, deluded, if we live as if this life is the real thing—that there is nothing more important than this moment in time, believing it will never end, and that afterward there will be no day of reckoning.

     In fact, I recently spent time with a friend who was caring for her elderly father-in-law, a man who has denied the existence of God for years, despite their every attempt to talk to him about his eternal destination. Even to the end, he refused to believe He needed Jesus Christ.

     After suffering with terminal cancer for several months, he died two weeks ago, but it was the way he died that left an impression I will never forget.

     I wasn’t there at the time, but my friend Bobbie said that about twenty minutes before death he began src
eaming, frantically brushing at the covers, trying to put out the fire he saw and felt burning him. Can you picture that? And as if that wasn’t bad enough, he looked up and began src
eaming even louder, terrorized by the specter of demons who had come for him--to escort him to his final destination in hell. A man barely able to move tried desperately, with all his remaining strength, to get away from the horrifying creatures before him. For him there would clearly be no rest after death.

     Bobbie said she could do nothing to comfort him, and she is haunted to this day by his horrifying end. Just hearing this story made me realize that we are all but a split second, a single breath, away from eternity. Eternity that never ends.

     We often go about our daily lives, unaware or perhaps unwilling to accept the reality, that our lives are but a fleeting moment in time, and they can end suddenly and without warning.  Now is the time to choose our destination. Today is the day of salvation.

     We human beings struggle with the idea of eternity, forever…

Because everything on earth begins and ends we learn we can survive anything for a little while. But the truth is--forever never ends. Suffering and humiliation never end in hell. Isolation, hatred, pain, helplessness, regret and hopelessness never end once we pass through the veil into eternity.

     Pastors rarely talk about hell anymore. They seldom speak of the need for salvation, for the blood of Jesus to be applied to our hearts to cover our sin, in order to spend eternity with Christ. They rarely say we must ask Jesus to forgive our sins and to cleanse us, (I John 1:9), making us children of God, adopted into His family, with heaven as our eternal destination. Without that, we have, according to scripture, no hope of escaping hell’s judgment. (John 3:16-19).

     But you and I need to grasp this truth and realize that people die everyday go somewhere afterward—either heaven or hell.

     It’s easy to read the obituaries in the daily paper and not grasp the truth that the dead are either in glory with God or in hell forever. There is no third option. Man’s soul is not annihilated at death. It lives somewhere forever, depending on what we did with Christ while we lived.

     The reason Jesus has not returned yet is that He is waiting for people to come to salvation. And the fact that you and I are not winning souls means His coming is delayed.

     It’s time to get real, to change our focus from acquiring things, wealth, success, and power to what really matters. We need the mind of Christ, the Word of God, to remind us of what’s really important, because scripture says, “He that wins souls is wise.”

     Time is short. Jesus is coming soon. And people are dying everyday headed for a Christ-less eternity. What will we do about it?

     If you are not sure you will go to heaven when you die, click on this link, which will take you to “How to Become a Child of God,” and accept the gift of salvation today. You’re not guaranteed a tomorrow.