The Last Call to Get on Board

“Jesus said unto her, I Am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.  Believest thou this?”  John 11:25-26

The brother of Martha and Mary, close friends of Jesus, had died.  Jesus came, knowing that He would raise Lazarus back to an earthly life again, but Martha and Mary didn’t know that.  They knew that Jesus was the Son of God, and Martha believed that if Jesus would have come before Lazarus died, her brother’s death would have been prevented.  There were other occasions when Jesus brought people back to life: Jairus’ daughter (Mark 5:38-43) and the widow’s son (Luke 7:11-18), but Martha, in her grief, was not thinking about those events, even though surely she had heard about them, assuming that they had occurred prior to the death of Lazarus.  When we are in a period of deep grief, we tend to forget about everything else while in the emotional state of confusion, questioning, and mourning.

Jesus told Martha that Lazarus would rise again, but she was only thinking about the great resurrection that would occur in the future.  Jesus responded to Martha by stating that “whosoever lives and believes in Me shall never die”.  My pastor has made the statement that everyone who has ever lived is still alive somewhere.  These earthly bodies will go back to the dust of the ground from which they were created–“…for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:17b), but the soul, the thinking, feeling, and knowing of a person, his or her personality, who one is, will never die.  No one is born without a soul.  The soul is the essence of a person given by God–“(God) breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7b).  Thus the soul of every man and woman is accountable to God.

Within the soul is a spirit which is either empty and void of life, that is, dead, or it is “…dead indeed to sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:11).  All those folks who are “in Christ” will go to be with Him forever in a place of perfect peace and joy.  Upon their physical death, the Holy Spirit, which resided within them, will bring their souls into an eternal state of perfection.  One cannot get to heaven without the Holy Spirit.  He is not only our guide and helper here on earth, He is our transportation to heaven.  The old song about getting on board the train to glory is an analogous representation of a vital truth:  the “train” is the Holy Spirit and the “ticket” is our relationship with Christ.  When the conductor calls “All aboard”, there will be no time to check our luggage to see if we forgot anything.

Without the Holy spirit’s indwelling of one’s soul which can only be received when one is born again through repentance of sin and faith in Jesus Christ, he or she will not be able to ride the “glory train” because they failed to receive a ticket.  As the Chinese laundryman said, “no tickee, no washee”.  (And that’s not meant to offend anyone, but to illustrate an absolute truth.)  The statistics do not lie–one out of every one will pass from this life into eternity.  And that’s the truth whether one believes it or not.