Dear Friends,
Some people’s favorite word is “later”! About some thing that is fine but it is foolish to say that to God when He says “Now is the accepted time.” Today’s devotional illustrates the folly of keeping God waiting. God bless you.

Because of Calvary,
John Janney

• John 6:64-65 (ESV)

  64 But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.) 65 And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.”

• Isaiah 55:6 (ESV)

  “Seek the Lord while he may be found;
  call upon him while he is near;

• II Corinthians 6:2 (ESV)

  For he says,

  “In a favorable time I listened to you,
  and in a day of salvation I have helped you.”
  Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.

“Once a member of my church, an aged woman who was dying, sent for me. She was very old, but her husband was still older than she, and at that time little short of ninety years of age. I had been very much troubled in mind about him, and had offered prayer with him; and she knew that I was very anxious about him, and sent for me, and from her own dying bed said to me, very solemnly, ‘Pastor, I am afraid that my husband sold himself to the devil forty years ago.’ And then she told me one of the saddest stories I ever heard. She said that at that time he was a member of the State legislature, and was very much moved about his own soul; that his pastor and many others came to him and begged him to give himself up to Christ and accept him as a Savior; and that she herself pleaded and prayed with him. He said to her, one night, ‘Wife, I have a scheme to carry through the legislature. It would not do for me to carry that scheme through if I were a Christian man. I am going to see that through, and then I will repent and accept Christ as a Savior.’ He carried the scheme through; but, as she said to me, from that day he had never apparently had any desire to be a child of God. That was the end of all penitence and longing for Christ and readiness to accept Christ on his part. He deliberately chose, in the crisis of his history, to carry an iniquitous and dishonest scheme through the legislature, and purposed afterwards to turn from his iniquity and become a Christian. But he grieved the Spirit of God, and hardened himself against God.” [A. T. Pierson, The Heart of the Gospel, (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1892-1896), p. 207-208]