He surely didn't intend to be lost--lost in hell forever. He always intended to be saved. When he was just a small boy he often heard his faithful Sunday school teacher quote a well-known verse from the Bible. It was this: "Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation" (2 Corinthians 6:2).
Then, when he entered college, Genevieve, the girl he liked a lot during his college days but didn't marry, used to talk to him about his soul's eternal welfare and the danger of putting off getting saved until it would be eternally too late. He usually listened respectfully but did not answer. One Sunday evening, as he and Genevieve were walking across the quiet college campus from a service at the church she attended, she asked: "Tom, when do you expect to be saved by trusting Christ as your Saviour?"
"Sometime, Genevieve," he answered.
"When will that 'sometime' be?"
"When I am not as busy as I am now, and I will have more time to think of those things."
"Tom," Genevieve said, as her large brown eyes looked squarely into his face, "that 'sometime' may never, never come."
They were near Genevieve's home by this time, and as it was getting late and Tom had lessons to study, he bade Genevieve a cheery goodnight.
Soon afterwards Genevieve and her family moved from town and she never saw Tom again.
One year after Genevieve's Sunday-evening warning, Tom met a girl at a college dance who became his wife. Ten months after they met they were married. No one ever spoke again, personally, to Tom about his soul's eternal welfare.
After his graduation, Tom and a classmate went into business together. The venture was a successful one resulting in increasing profits each year until a drunk driver drove through a stop sign at a high rate of speed. Tom's brakes screeched. There was a crash. Then all was silent. The drunk driver was unconscious. Tom was dead!
Tom would undoubtedly give a thousand worlds, if he possessed them, to be able to roll back time and stand with Genevieve in the old, tree-lined college campus and hear her inviting him to trust her precious and eternal Saviour. But Tom will never hear God's voice, his Sunday school teacher's voice, or Genevieve's voice pleading with him to be saved. To die without Christ is to be lost in a sinner's doom, not for a year, not for a thousand years, not a million years, but for eternity! Tom has found out how true Genevieve's words were: "Tom, that 'sometime' may never, never come."
Dear reader, are you saved for eternity? If you value your soul and are interested in your eternal destiny, be thankful that your feet still stand on the shores of time and that you now have the opportunity of being saved.
Because you, like every other person on earth, have "sinned and come short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23), Christ died to pay the penalty of your sins in order that you, the sinner, might be forgiven and made a child of God. If you will confess your sin to God and believe in your heart that Christ died for your sins, you will be saved (Romans 10:9). Do it now. Tomorrow may be too late.
--Fred Cowell
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