You say, ‘But I will be genuine when I finally turn to the Lord. I will then seek him with all my heart.’ It is dangerous in the extreme to play games like this because sincerity with God is not something that you can turn off and on when you please. If you are convinced that it is right to seek the Lord at the end of life, then why is it not also right to seek him at the beginning? What you are really saying is, ‘I want God plus my sin.’ But if you have not yet seen that sin is utterly unprofitable; that it is deceitful, that it leads to death, that it is hateful to God, you do not really know what sin is. Don’t you see that you are currently convinced that sin is the best thing you could have? How are you going to change your mind about it later? By definition, it is impossible to predict that we will change our minds about something in the future.
Besides, sin is a tyrant and does not let go of those who serve it. You dream that a day will come when you will say, ‘I am satisfied; I have had enough of sinful indulgence’, but that is a delusion. Sin is an addiction and the addict is not cured by feeding his addiction; that only strengthens it. The best time to break the power of sin’s addiction over us is as early as possible; that is when it is at its weakest. But even then we cannot do it, for if we have offered ourselves to sin we have become the slaves of sin and only Christ can set us free. Therefore don’t delay to come to God: cry out to him now to pardon you and set you free from the bondage of evil.
True, a day is coming when you will no longer be able to enjoy the lusts of the flesh, but that will not set you free from them. A new craving will replace the old – a craving to have your youth back again and to have back all your capacities to please the flesh. That is not the same thing as learning to hate sin, as seeing through its deceit and asking God to make you able to live without it. The only way to be free from sin is to be willing to leave it behind in its entirety for ever. Conversion is not a small change; it is not a minor adjustment to our attitudes to temptation. Rather it is the death of sin and the death of our sinful nature; it is being able to let go permanently of the pleasures that sin offers us. It is being able to say, ‘I choose Christ for ever and I reject sin for ever’. It is to turn our back on the world and to cross from death to life. It is to step out on a pilgrimage from which there is no return. Sin will indeed try to reassert itself in the life of the believer, but the victory that he has over sin comes from that initial decisive change which took place at conversion when he died to sin and was made willing to repudiate it once and for all. There is no going back on that Spirit empowered choice.
Old age is not optional. The misery of the course of unbelief is that as the aging process proceeds, we lose the ability to enjoy the very things that we have sold our souls for. The deterioration of the body and our sensual faculties means that sin’s pleasures wear out on us. That is the ultimate tragedy for the worldling; he loses the ability to enjoy the only reward he has. By contrast, the way of the Lord is so much better for the believer has pleasures of a completely different nature. While the outward man perishes, the inward man is renewed day by day and becomes ever more capable of appreciating the Lord and all the good things that he gives to his children. Old age is not a time of sorrow to the believer, for while he loses the faculties of the body, he is not left with nothing. He continues to possess that which is of lasting value and which he will be able to take with him into the world to come.