Time to Think...

Sunday morning we were getting ready to leave for Valencia and celebrate Memorial Day with my grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. As I was taking out the trash and putting away the beach chairs and umbrella in my garage I saw a young man working on his motorcycle right across the street. Now earlier that morning I was at Church on the Beach and had brought some gospel tracts along just in case. As I was removing these tracts from my beach chair and heading back upstairs, I knew God wanted me to share the gospel with that young man working on his bike. So, I went over to talk with him.

As I began talking with him I learned that his name was Billy and he was prepping his bike for a ride from Redondo Beach to Boston sometime this week. We chatted for about 10 minutes about motorcycles, college, and road trips, and he told me he was looking forward to having lots of "time to think" while driving across the country. Speaking of thinking...I asked him what he thought happenned to us when we die. He told me he was raised a Christian, a pastor's son, and he thought he had a pretty good chance of going to heaven when he passed away, but wasn't completely sure.

John writes to us in 1 John 5:13 that we may know we have eternal life. "I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life." If he didn't know that, there is a chance he is not saved and I wanted to talk to him further to find out where he was at with his faith. As a pastor's son, he had seen hypocrisy between what his father taught and how he acted, he saw how people who call themselves Christians can be hypocritical, and this had made him question his faith and he was not sure of his salvation. My encouragement to him was not to let hypocrites keep him from the God of this universe who is crazy about him. Hypocrites are everywhere, they are at the malls we go to, the restaurants we eat at, the movies we go see, our workplaces, etc. If we don't let hypocrites keep us from going to malls, restaurants, and movie theaters, why would we ever let them keep us from the God of this universe, who loves us enough to send his only Son to die so that we may have eternal life! I left him with a gospel tract along with a tract for him to order a free book that deals thoroughly with the question of eternity.

My prayer is that he takes the time to read the gospel tract and really takes time to think as he travels across the country this week.

"Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent." John 17:3