The Night is Coming

 Greetings to  you all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ,

     Acts 16:30-32 says, “And brought them out, and said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved?  And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.  And they spake unto him the word of the Lord, and to all that were in his house.”

     The assisted living facility where we now reside is small, with around fifty residents at present.  I understand that they need sixty residents to show any profit, so the company is losing money each month.  To compound matters, it is difficult to find a staff that will work for any length of time, even in the six or so management positions.  Recently, the activity director quit which was surprise as she was doing well and was a good “corporate” person.  I had a lot of conversations with her.  Our backgrounds were quite different, but I asked her one day if she accepted the fact of the above passage of Scripture on how to be saved and she said “yes” that was sufficient for her.  While our different church backgrounds do not agree on many issues, I still found that she might be saved and it was comforting to know that perhaps one person was saved in the group of corporate staff that we have here.  The list of former employees grows longer each week as the new generation doesn’t last too long and is easily tempted to move on.

     The above passage is vitally important to me and is the bottom line you might say, as to how to be saved.  At my age, I don’t have a lot of time left to lay a stable groundwork in their life in order to come to this question.  The question asked by the jailor was and is one of the most import ant questions that anyone can ask.  “What mus tI do to be saved?”   The answer is equal important.  “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.”  The people that cross my path each day may be gone, one way or another, by tomorrow.  The turnover of staff of the facility and the age of the residents and my own age, leaves me to conclude that the time is short in which we have to share the gospel message.  I am just as sure t hat it is the same in your own lives also.  We have a song we sing, “Standing on the Promises” and some have remarked about this song, “it  doesn’t say, ‘sitting on the premises.’”  When we are young, we seem to think we have all the time in the world to establish a friendship with someone in order to share the message with them.  When, however, we get older, we see that we don’t have a lot of time and that if you are going to say something spiritual to someone, you better say it today as you may not have a chance tomorrow.  Praise God for the simplicity of the Gospel.  Share it with someone today.  As another song says,”Work for the night is coming.”