(Mark 8:36-37)

“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”

Folks, the pre-trib rapture is real. It is also imminent. The coming seven-year Tribulation is real, and it, too, is imminent. Not long after the RAPTURE event occurs, a covenant between the man who will be the Antichrist and the nation of Israel will be made. At that point, earth’s final seven years will commence. This fact, as well, is reality. Additionally, Heaven as an actual place is real. It is the destination where the Remnant Church, both living and the resurrected dead in Christ in New immortal bodies, will go when Jesus comes to rescue His body/bride in an event so instantaneously quick and sudden that it cannot be quantified or measured – an event that will happen any day, any moment now. You need to understand this reality.

Another thing you need to realize is that Hell, too, is just as real a place as Heaven. Hell is as real a place as the room in which you are sitting.

On a video today, I heard a man state that his legacy, that is, the body of work he has amassed and will leave behind upon his death – that all his accomplishments (and his body of work is indeed impressive and prodigious) will mean that once he dies, he will have cheated death by the sheer quantity and quality of his life’s work that he will leave behind. If I could have talked to that man face to face, I would have told him that what he was assuming was a bald-faced lie. No one cheats death, except for those believers still living whom Jesus will snatch out of this world at the rapture.

Could I have spoken to this man, I would have asked him this: “And what about eternity, sir? What then?” Just because he, or you for that matter, may not believe in eternity does not make its existence any less real. That attitude is the height of arrogant folly and prideful foolishness. The Bible tells us that “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God” (Psalm 14:1-3).

Contrary to this man’s foolish arrogance, when he dies, he will not have cheated death regardless of how much of a body of work or the amount of wealth he will have amassed or left behind, and he most certainly will not cheat eternity. Neither will you. His and your immortal soul will end up in one place or the other: Heaven or Hell, depending on what he and you do with the gospel of salvation.

Once again, I beg you – in the exceedingly short time we have left before the rapture happens, examine very carefully what you believe and in whom you have placed your trust. If your faith and trust lie in anything temporal – if your trust rests in ANYTHING or ANYONE, including your own efforts and self-righteousness – then according to God’s Word, you are lost and on your way to an eternal Hell, a real and dreadful place from which your immortal soul will never escape. These are not my opinions or words; they are God’s.

Until you repent Biblically, that is, until you change your mind from unbelief to belief and trust in Jesus Christ alone for the remission of your sins according to the scriptures, then you are not prepared for eternity. What must you do to be saved? The Bible says: ACKNOWLEDGE that you are a sinner helplessly and hopelessly lost. You have been born under the curse of sin, separated from God by your sin-infected nature. You need a perfect, sinless Savior to pay the penalty incurred by sin – a penalty that is demanded by the justice of a holy and utterly righteous God.

Sin’s penalty is the infinite penalty of spiritual death, which is eternal separation from God. It is a penalty that is incurred by all fallen, sinful humanity because we are all born under the curse of sin. It is a penalty that neither you nor any other sin-cursed, sin-infected human can ever pay (Romans 3:23; Romans 10:9-10; Romans 6:23).

ACKNOWLEDGE that you can never say, do, be, or become righteous enough on your own merits or by your own efforts to save yourself from the wages or penalty for sin that must be paid. Neither can you, by any effort on your own, keep yourself saved. This is because the very best we can offer is, in the sight of God, like filthy rags next to His glorious holiness and righteousness (Isaiah 64:6).

ACCEPT that only Jesus Christ, who is God the Son, being both fully God and fully man, has already come to earth – God incarnate, God in the flesh. He alone is qualified, able, and willing to save you, to give you eternal life, and keep you eternally saved, sealed by the Holy Spirit of God (John 6:27; 2 Corinthians 1:21-22; 2 Corinthians 5:5; Ephesians 1:13-14; Ephesians 4:30).

BELIEVE – place your faith and trust in Jesus Christ and in Him ALONE. Accept His freely offered gift of salvation for the forgiveness of ALL your sins: past, present, and future. ACCEPT that Jesus has already, once and for all time, paid in full the eternal penalty for the sins of the world and that He alone freely offers complete forgiveness and a full pardon to whosoever is willing to believe in Him.

BELIEVE – that means place your faith and trust in His deity, in His sinless life, in His substitutionary death in our place, in His burial in a borrowed tomb, in His FINISHED work on the cross that paid our sin debt. Believe in His bodily resurrection from the tomb on the third day, according to the scriptures (John 3:14-18; 1 Corinthians 15:1-4).

This is the gospel according to the scriptures. This is the only gospel that can eternally save your immortal soul. It is what must be believed and accepted for one to be eternally saved and eternally sealed in Christ. If you reject this gospel, if you add anything to it, including your own self-righteous efforts, or if you take anything from it, then doing that changes the gospel of grace alone through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone. Once changed, it then becomes a different gospel, a false gospel that God, through the Apostle Paul, says is a false “accursed” gospel that can save no one (Galatians 1:8-9).

With all my heart, I implore you — perhaps for the last time before Jesus appears in the air to deliver His Remnant Church in the rapture — believe THE gospel according to the scriptures that I have given to you yet one more time. Do it now. You cannot halt or delay the rapture by one millisecond. You cannot cheat death, and you will not cheat eternity.

Church, we need to pray like never before. From now until Jesus snatches us out, we must recognize that there is no going back to a “normal” world. The parallels between now and the 1930’s build-up to WWII are staggering. I believe Hitler and his agenda was Satan’s dress rehearsal for the Antichrist. Yet what looms on the horizon now will be far worse. Far worse.

Brethren, we no longer live in a sane world. We live in a world teetering on the brink of the Tribulation. Pray for Israel. Stand with Israel. They are not perfect. In fact, the majority of them are lost. The majority reject their true Messiah. Nevertheless, the Jews are God’s chosen people, the “apple of His eye.” God is right now preparing the Jewish nation to be refined like precious gold, but they, as an unbelieving nation, will have to go through that refining fire of the coming Tribulation. This should cause us all to tremble. What we are witnessing now is but a prelude to what is to come upon the entire world once the Restrainer is removed via the body/bride’s snatching away.

The world is in dire peril. It trembles on the very cusp of the coming Tribulation. With whatever time we, the church, has left, we need to get serious in prayer and in whatever way we can, spreading the gospel like a dying man to a dying world:

• Warn them all that Jesus is coming first for His church and then in judgment for a world that has rejected its Creator.
• Tell them Jesus saves! Tell them that Jesus IS the Ark of eternal salvation for anyone who will believe in Him.
• Tell them that time is running out.
• Prepare your left-behind boxes in whatever manner you choose.
• Make sure there are plenty of Bibles scattered all throughout your homes and in each of your vehicles.
• Write and have on display somewhere accessible your Left Behind letter explaining the rapture. List Bible passages that tell of salvation and about what’s coming. Do this now if you’ve not already done so because we, the church, could be snatched away at any time.

Israel must go through her final 70th year. Tragically, 2/3 of her will continue in rebellion against her Messiah, but God ALWAYS has a remnant. At the end of the coming great Tribulation a 1/3 remnant refined as pure gold WILL at last come to recognize Yeshua as her true Savior and Messiah. And once they do, then all Israel will be saved. Then Jesus will return to earth to rescue that remnant. Accompanied by His raptured and glorified Church, King Jesus will at last bring peace and restore this sin-ravaged earth to its Edenic splendor.

But before the day when Jesus returns to set His foot upon this earth once again, what we face now is a continued escalation of hatred, violence, and overt persecution against not only Jews but against the church also who is Christ’s body/bride. There is no “normal” anymore. We are nearing the climax of the great cosmic Conflict of the Ages. In whatever time we have left while we are still here, we must take our eyes off of our own struggles and place them firmly on our Lord, beseeching Him to show us what He wants us to be doing in whatever time we have left.

Brethren, pray for the Jewish people as a whole. Encourage and help our Jewish brethren in whatever practical ways we can. I know we are tired and weary to the bone, but we must keep our hearts and minds always in prayer and our eyes fixed on the skies. Our Deliverer is coming soon. Let’s not falter now. The spiritual battle is accelerating. The fire of end-times warfare has already been ignited. It is growing in intensity, consuming the world in its path headed toward the coming great conflagration that will be the Tribulation. We fight on the knees of our hearts. Keep going. The war has already been won!

I’d like to end this by quoting lines from a song by Mike Speck. I have sung this many times, but the verses have never been more real to the church today than they are now.

“We have won
We have won!
Through the blood of Jesus, we have won!
Let it ring out through the ages,
Endure though evil rages,
Christians stand courageous: we have won!”