PREPARING A MANSION

Red Deer Advocate, September 8, 2007. This house seems to have it all, even “a 103-seat movie theatre,” the article says. Don’t you wish you had the money to create your own mansion? Are you worried you might never be able to pull it off? Don’t worry about it. There is coming a day when the earth will pass away “and the works that are therein shall be burned up” (2 Peter 3.10.) Maybe you’d like to live in your mansion until then. Never mind that, too. Your life span is only about 70 to 80 years—if you’re lucky. And how many years have you already used up? “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away” ( Psalm 90.10.)

We are soon cut off from the earth, the Bible says. Then we fly away. What’s the point of a mansion, then? Listen, Jesus is now preparing mansions that will last forever for ever lasting souls to live in. “In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, ye may be also” (John 14.2, 3.) That’s Jesus speaking. But is Jesus preparing a place for you? That depends. Are you his disciple? I mean, are you trusting him to save you from hellfire? And have you quit the sins people go to hellfire for? Are you clean? Are you sleeping around? Are you being lazy? Are you using the soup kitchen just so you can spend your money on your sins? I want you to get a mansion from Jesus, not hell for your sins. Ask Jesus to save you. You don’t like being called a sinner? But “Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1.15.) I am come to call “sinners to repentance,” he said (Matthew 9.13.)