Feeling Foolish!

Right now, I’m feeling very foolish. I’m writing this Seed of the Kingdom in Manchester Airport. We were half-way to the airport, when Fiona and I suddenly realised that we had left our passports at home! It was too late to go back and out of nowhere we were suddenly in a major crisis. The others in the taxi would need to check-in for the flight and we would have to wait at the check-in desk, praying that our son Paul would be able to go to our house immediately, find the passports and make it to the airport in time for the flight!

We both felt incredibly foolish. This had never happened in our thirty years of travelling for Ellel Ministries! Neither of us could understand how we missed that vital ‘passport check’ in our, usually smooth, packing procedure.

But, as we sat castigating ourselves for our stupidity, I was suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of how people must feel who have left home (died) and then realised that they were about to face the God, whom they’d ignored all their lives, without a ‘spiritual passport’. At that moment, they would be feeling more than foolish - utterly bereft, stupid and totally heart-broken for having put off, or ignored, the call of God to respond to His love and accept His salvation, all the years of their life. There could be no possibility of sending a message back home for somebody to bring your ‘passport’ – just the awful, indeed dreadful, realisation of how foolish you had been.

When the psalmist wrote the words of our text for today, he was no doubt aware of the gulf that lies between time and eternity – a gulf which Jesus referred to when He told the parable of the man who had died, discovered the awful truth, and wanted to go back and warn his friends. But it was too late. And when Jesus told of the successful man who wanted to build bigger barns to store his wealth, he warned that at any moment his soul could be summoned from time to eternity to meet his Maker.

These are awesome, yes dreadful, passages of Scripture – but they are there for a reason. I pray that as you read these words today you will be challenged to consider your own position before God and, warn those you know and love before they stand at the departure gate from life, spiritually naked, and without a passport!!

Prayer: Thank You, Lord, that You loved us so much that You sent Your Son to pay the price for our sin and show us the way of salvation – and provide a ‘passport’ for each one of us from time to eternity. Forgive me, Lord, if I have turned my back on You and Your call on my life. Help me, Lord, to do business with You now and always be alert to the fact that there will come a day when we strand at the departure gate from time to eternity. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.