You think of some of these powerful leaders, and then comes their funeral day. What a short little spell they had! All that muscling, pushing upwards, all that was required to push themselves above other people, and they get their little reign, and then health fails and down they go. What a short little gain it is! If you could have the whole world with all its misery and its heartache and its headaches, and just for such a short time, would that be worth the forfeit of your eternal soul? Of course not. And you and I are not on tracks for getting the whole world. What use is it?
‘What are you doing,’ says the Lord Jesus, ‘clinging on to your present life, desperate not to lose it.’ What will happen to you if you cling on to your life? You will lose your real self-determination anyway. You say, ‘I'm going to hang on to my self-determination.’ What a foolish thing to do. Within a few years you will discover you never had it anyway. You lost the possibility of salvation. You turned your back on the Lord, and life has just picked you up and driven you along. Most of the decisions you made, you were forced to make. Most of the things that fell out for you, just happened that way. Tragedies, difficulties, heartache, and so you will go through life driven by the wind. You reject the Saviour, and you lose your self-determination anyway. What have you got left? You lose your character, such as you had. You lose your way, and you become just a dupe and a puppet to your environment and to this wicked world around you. The world will dictate your fashions, your lifestyle, your sins, your everything. There is nothing more foolish for us than this: to say, ‘I will not have Christ; I will have my own way’, and you don't even get that. What a terrible outcome! What a tragic decision! The Bible is not giving us a message which is bullying us; it's giving us a message which is pleading with us for the sake of our souls. This is God's kindness reasoning with us.