Listen while you can (The rich man and Lazarus Luke 16:19-31)

Listen while you can (The rich man and Lazarus Luke 16:19-31)

One of the good and bad parts of working in the mining industry is the amount of training that is required for you to keep you mining card active. It is good that you must have refreshers and training on advancements in the industry but sometimes redundance of certain information can be boring and men become disengaged and zone out. Instead of being actively involved and attentive in the training going on they spend their time napping, playing on their cell phone, or having side conversations that have nothing to do with the reason they are there. The individuals giving the training know the seriousness of their material because most of them have had to deal with an incident where someone was seriously hurt or fatally wounded do to simply not following standard operating safety procedures for the industry. The sad part is that when you find yourself in a situation and you need to know the information you should have been learning during training it is too late to then to ask someone to repeat what they had said. In the story of the Rich man and Lazarus, we see that the rich man finds himself in one such situation when he asks Abraham to send someone from the dead to warn his family. Abraham reminds him that Moses and the prophets had been warning the house of Israel for years, but they refused to repent of their ways. So, the rich man had been told his whole life how to escape the situation he currently found himself in (Hell) but his whole life he refused to listen.

There have been several incidents of miners who lose their life because they cannot properly dawn their self-rescuer when needed despite the law requires them to be trained on dawning it multiple times a year. They did not take the training seriously; they didn’t think they would ever need it, and they thought the training they was receiving was a waste of time. This is probably how the rich man responded to the warning of the prophets and it may be how you have responded to the gospel message of Jesus Christ in the past. I am sure the rich man wished with everything in him that he could go back and listen a little more carefully, to heed the warnings given to him, and to set his heart on following the ways of God. I would say that every waking moment of eternity he will be reminded of the fact that he was warned, and he ignored every warning that he received. He will know that if he listened carefully and applied the words of God to his life that is eternal fate would be much different as he could see Lazarus in paradise while he was in torment. Listen while you can, do not shut out the word of God and His loving correction from your life. If you ignore it long enough, then you may find yourself in a situation where you would give anything to go back and hear the words that would give you eternal freedom just one more time