Today's lesson comes from the pen of a brother in Christ and fellow gospel preacher, Neal Pollard. His excellent thoughts below are worthy of your meditation.

What keeps people from salvation?

• Ignorance: They have not learned how to be saved.
• Fear: They know the potential cost of being saved.
• Pride: They do not want to admit they are not saved.
• Loyalty: They fear that they will be tacitly condemning those they care for if they are saved.
• Comfort: They do not want to do what it takes to be saved.
• Emotion: They feel they are saved.
• Guilt: They do not believe they can be saved.
• Prejudice: They cannot see the necessity of following what certain Scriptures say they must do to be saved.
• Sin: They enjoy something(s) too much to surrender in order to be saved.
• Self: They want to follow their own terms to be saved.
• Blindness: They cannot see through their religious traditions and doctrines in order to be saved.
• Responsibilities: They are too busy with life to be saved.

So many more excuses might be given by someone who refuses to do what God says to do in order to be saved. But, whatever excuse is given overlooks the fact that God allowed no excuse to keep Him from sending His Son, that Christ allowed no excuse to keep Him from going to the cross, that the Holy Spirit allowed no excuse to keep Him from revealing to us through the Bible how to be saved, that the apostles and early Christians allowed no excuse to keep them from sharing and doing God's will for salvation (even at the cost of their lives), and that so many throughout time have not allowed these same excuses to keep them from obeying the gospel to be saved. Salvation is so important, eternity is so long, the soul is so precious, sin is so destructive, the devil is so ravenous, and the world is so wrong that we must remove every barrier that might stand in our way.

If we were to write down our reason for not being saved and keep it until the day of judgment, how valid and reasonable would it sound as we conveyed it to Christ? If we would not want to tell Him then, let's not let it keep us from Him now. "Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation" (II Cor. 6:2).

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