Accepting the Opportunity

As Jesus is preparing to enter Jerusalem (the Triumphal entry) He stops to weep over the city and her people. Once the greatest city in the world and home to the greatest temple to the world has ever known, Jesus sees the future destruction of the Temple and the City. His statement ends with this line, "you did not accept your opportunity for salvation."

What a sad byline for so many. They did not accept their opportunity for salvation.

There are several times when you have one of those, "once-in-a-lifetime" scenarios. Where you have to act or lose the opportunity. Perhaps it's a job. A spouse. A sweet deal on a car. A rare find in someones garage. Something that you'd give almost anything to get. A deal like that only comes around... you know.

There are a couple stories Jesus tells about a guy who found a very expensive/rare pearl and another guy who found a treasure buried in a field. The end of each of those once-in-a-lifetime stories is that each guy sold everything they had to gain the thing they wanted. Salvation is supposed to be like that. In truth, God should only have to offer salvation once. You either take it or leave it right then. But He doesn't do that.

Every day you take another breath of air and begin your day is a gift. One more opportunity to accept the invitation to believe. But at some point, you will take your last breath and then your opportunities for salvation will be over. The tricky part is, we don't know when that moment will be. You have to be ready, before that time comes.

I'll be doing a funeral service for a guy this week who probably had lots of opportunities to accept the invitation to believe throughout his life but it wasn't until 13 days before he died that he finally accepted that invitation. God in His great grace and mercy extended that invitation one more time, through a friend, knowing that it would be the last opportunity he would have.

No matter what your life has been like up to this point, God desperately wants you to accept His invitation to believe in His Son, Jesus Christ. You don't have to understand it all, just believe that He was, is and will always be your savior. That's the start of a changed life.

The saddest thing in the world is that someone would say of one of your friends, "they did not accept the opportunity for salvation" before it was too late.