Christ asks us to forsake all today, to lose our life for His sake today.

If we find it difficult to leave all now, let us realize it will be infinitely more difficult to drop everything at a moment's notice and go to meet Christ when He appears. The pressures of a society which in that day will be totally corrupt, having mocked all that has to do with Christ, will hinder and confuse us. Even though it appears that Christ is calling, our habits of delay and unbelief will spring up and make it impossible for us to act quickly and decisively.

Our conduct now is the portrayal of what we will do then.

Only those who today are leading a totally committed life will possess the faith and determination, the abandonment of flesh and blood existence, that will be required immediately when the trumpet of God sounds. Even they scarcely will be saved.

The Day of Christ is the great and terrible Day of the Lord of which Malachi and the other Prophets spoke. It is not a day of lightness and pleasantries. It will be the most terrifying hour in the entire history of the creation. It is the Day of God's wrath!

It will be difficult to go to Christ in the Day of the Lord because there will be a tremendous weight of spiritual oppression on mankind at that time as the result of the rule of Antichrist.

Antichrist will have spiritual, as well as material, authority and power. He will be able to make it very difficult or impossible to pray.

Some believers find it difficult to leave all and follow Christ now. It will be much more difficult in the days to come.

A certain pastor had been teaching concerning this future period of decision-making.

A young man of the church said he was questioning the concept of the difficulty of responding in the Day of Christ, until he had a dream.

In his dream the face of Christ appeared in the clouds. The young man said he could see the face of Christ but just could not bring himself to believe what he was seeing was real. Christ was there in the clouds but he could not believe it enough to act on it. When he awakened he was convinced that faith will be required for participation in the first resurrection from the dead.

We may be assuming we will have no trouble in the Day of Christ, that we can put off until the last moment a serious dedication to Christ. But if we are having trouble letting go of the world today because of our lack of faith in Christ, we will have terrible trouble in that Day because of our lack of faith in Christ.

The faith of the average Christian in our time is by no means at the level required for him or her to be able to respond to the summons of Christ in the hour of His appearing.

Are we truly ready to turn our back on everyone and everything we know and love and to march forward, without once looking back, into a change in our body? Are we spiritually, mentally, and emotionally prepared to be transformed from flesh and blood life to spiritual life such that relationships are changed from the familiar into the unfamiliar?

Could we leave at a moment's notice the natural and embrace totally the supernatural?

To be continued.