Age and Salvation
To Day If Ye Will Hear His Voice
By Everett Wayne Baum
There is a question every one of us will answer, whether we mean to or not: what will I do with Jesus? Some answer it as children. Some answer it in the middle of life. Some put it off so long that the answer is made for them. I want to talk plainly about how age bears on that question, because I have lived long enough to see it from both ends.
What the Numbers Show
The Barna Group, a Christian research firm, once surveyed nearly a thousand born-again Christians in America about when they gave their lives to the Lord. Sixty-four percent said it was before their eighteenth birthday. Thirteen percent said it was between eighteen and twenty-one. Only twenty-three percent came to Christ after the age of twenty-one.
The Pew Research Center found something similar when it studied people who changed their faith. Most who joined a new faith did so before age thirty-six, and very few changed after age fifty.
I want to be honest about what those numbers do and do not prove. That study was done in 2004, here in the United States. It tells us when Christians were saved, not how likely an older person is to be saved, and many of those people simply heard the gospel as children. But the pattern is clear and it has held for years: most people who come to the Lord come young. The longer a person waits, the fewer ever come.
Why It Gets Harder
Anyone who has tried to break a habit at sixty knows it is not the same as breaking one at twenty. The longer we walk a road, the deeper the ruts. A way of thinking that was a choice at twenty-five has become who we are by sixty-five.
The Word said this long before any survey did: "Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil" (Jeremiah 13:23).
Notice the word accustomed. The problem is not only the sin. It is the custom, the years of practice. And Hebrews warns us what that practice does to a heart: "But exhort one another daily, while it is called To day; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin" (Hebrews 3:13).
A hardened heart does not happen in a day. It happens one no at a time. Every time a person hears the call of God and pushes it off until later, the next call is a little easier to ignore. That is why Solomon wrote: "Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them" (Ecclesiastes 12:1).
I know something about drifting. For twenty-five years I did not seriously open my Bible. I am not proud of that. When I came back to the Word after I retired, I found how much ground I had let go, and how much easier it would have been to never have left. If you are young and reading this, do not spend twenty-five years finding that out.
Tomorrow Is Not Promised
Most people who put God off are not saying never. They are saying later. But the Bible never promises later: "Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away" (James 4:14). And again, "Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation" (2 Corinthians 6:2).
The older we get, the plainer this becomes. I am closer to eighty than seventy-five, and I know my own time is shorter than it has ever been.
What Waits for Those Who Wait Too Long
I would not be honest with you if I left this part out: "And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment" (Hebrews 9:27).
There is no second chance after death. Jesus told of a rich man who died and lifted up his eyes in torment, begging for one drop of water, and begging that someone warn his brothers (Luke 16:19–31). He was told there was a great gulf fixed, and no one could cross it. Jesus also said, "He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him" (John 3:36). And John saw that "whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire" (Revelation 20:15).
I take no pleasure in writing those words. I write them because they are true, and because a warning given in love is better than a silence that lets a person walk off a cliff.
Where We Are on God's Clock
People ask me if I believe we are living in the last days. I believe the signs Paul described are all around us: "This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy" (2 Timothy 3:1–2).
But I will also be honest. Believers in nearly every generation have thought they were the last one, and Jesus said plainly, "But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only" (Matthew 24:36). I will not set a date.
Here is what I am sure of. Whether the Lord returns in our lifetime or not, every one of us will meet Him, and for an older person that meeting is closer than it has ever been. The time is short either way. And the only reason it has not run out already is mercy: "The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9).
It Is Not Too Late, Yet
If you are older and you have never given your life to the Lord, I do not want you to read this and think the door is shut. It is not. A thief hanging on a cross beside Jesus, in the last hours of his life, said, "Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom." And Jesus answered, "To day shalt thou be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:42–43). In the parable of the vineyard, the workers hired at the eleventh hour received the same wage as those who came at dawn (Matthew 20:1–16).
The door is open. But it is open today. The thief did not get a tomorrow, and neither is any of us promised one.
If you are young, do not wait until your habits have hardened and your heart has grown deaf. If you are older, do not let pride or embarrassment keep you from what you know you need. Whatever your age, the call is the same: "To day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts" (Hebrews 3:15).
If you want to know how a person is saved, start with How and When a Person Is Saved.
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To the Lord Jesus Christ be all the glory.