Do You Have Eternal Life Assurance?

Do You Have ETERNAL LIFE Assurance?

Recently, I was sitting quietly in our family room before going to bed. The windows were open because the night was cool. All of a sudden I heard a thud and then tires squealing. Assuming someone had just experienced a “fender bender” near by, I thought it was odd that I heard the thud first and then the squeal. Usually when there’s an auto accident, you hear the squeal as brakes are set just before impact, and then the thud. The other thought I had was that someone was just having a bad day. Then I heard sirens.

I am not a person who likes to see accidents, and since I don’t have emergency medical training, I didn’t go out to see what had happened. The next day I found out that a young man had apparently fallen asleep at the wheel of his car and had hit two motorcycles head-on. One of the cycles had a man and his wife on it. They were pronounced dead at the scene. The other cycle had one person on it, and he was in critical condition. I then understood why I had heard the thud and then the squeal. Since the young man was asleep, the impact likely woke him, and then he must have locked up his brakes after the impact.

That night two people instantaneously found out that God is real and that physical life is not the end. I hope they had prepared for the day when they would meet their Maker. Two other people involved in the accident suddenly found their lives changed in ways they never expected. All of them had friends and relatives for whom life will never be the same. I’m sure none of these four planned to have life turn out the way it did for them that night.

We all need to recognize that physical life can end suddenly. Thankfully we’re not told when it will be, but we are told to be ready. In this life, we prepare for medical problems with medical insurance. We buy life insurance to take care of loved ones when we are gone. We buy auto insurance to cover the costs of accidents like this one. We buy long-term care insurance in case we end up in a nursing home. But do we prepare our souls (the eternal part of us) for the day of our death?

The Lord does not offer physical life insurance, but He does offer eternal life assurance. He makes it quite clear that we are all going to die. One hundred years from now, nobody reading this meditation will still be living. The Bible says that “death spread to all because all sinned” (Rom. 5:12). Some people have told me they haven’t sinned, but I know differently. I know there are times when we all do things we should not have done, and there are times when we don’t do things we should have done. That we sin is self-evident. That all men die is self-evident. And the Bible tells us that sin is the cause of death.

A prepared person agrees with God that he sins. He agrees with God that sin separates him from God. He understands the need to be saved (Acts 4:12). A prepared person will not trust in something he does to save him; he will trust in what Christ did to save him. First Peter 3:18 says, “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God.” A prepared person knows he has eternal life (1 Jn. 5:13).

We don’t need to experience an unexpected “thud and squeal” without knowing that our sins are forgiven. We can all have eternal life assurance. We can all know we’re going to a better place when we die, because we depend on this promise: “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8).

Are you prepared to meet God? We can explain how to be.

By Bruce Collins