HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, May 25, 2025 – A false prophet will assure you that there’s always time to turn back to God. If you don’t feel like turning back to God today, that’s OK, you can think about it for a while. No rush. Look after yourself and your needs. Relax. Maybe do some yoga or watch a movie. If not today, then perhaps tomorrow you’ll feel like turning back.

But the truth is that a time will come when it’s too late to turn back to God, when the gate to salvation is shut, never to open again. Never is not a word that you want to hear in relation to salvation. If you die unrepentant, you’ll never have salvation. If you don’t turn back to God before the gate closes, you’ll never have salvation. Tomorrow is not a guarantee. Even the rest of today is not a guarantee. That fact—that the rest of today is not a guarantee—should be sobering enough, should be motivation enough to turn back to God not tomorrow and not even later today, but right now.

Even born-again believers need to constantly monitor where they are in their relationship with God. Even we need to keep ourselves clean on the inside, which means constantly gauging our need for repentance, like checking motor oil. God is with us 24/7 through his Holy Spirit. We are God’s temple. We are the Church established by Jesus. We have been entrusted by God to be his hands and his feet and his mouth and his arms, to be his heart; to be his brain. We haven’t been forced to be these things; we’ve agreed to be them and, in most cases, have begged to be them. We want to do God’s will. We want to help, and so God permits us to help. But how much help can we be if our witness is indistinguishable from the world’s?

I spend time on occasion with unbelievers. What they all have in common is that they hate it when I talk about God. You can’t force-feed the love of God to those who have resolutely shut their hearts and minds to him. I don’t see these people very often (they’re only acquaintances, really, from my pre-reborn days), but when I do meet up with them, I can sense how death has eaten away at them that much more since our last meeting. They’re not dying, these unbelievers; they’re already dead. The actual stopping of their heart and ceasing of their brain activity, when they do occur, will just be formalities among the other formalities of death certificates and funeral rites. But these people are already dead. I mourn them now, even as they sleepwalk through the rest of their days. It’s a heavy burden for us born-again believers to mourn so many who are walking around thinking they’re alive.

And then there are those who insist they love God and want to be born again. They come at me with all spiritual guns blazing, but when I tell them they need to take their prayers to God, not to me, they visibly deflate. This wasn’t what they had in mind. This wasn’t at all what they had in mind. They’d wanted to feel some Holy Spirit ju-jus, which they thought I could make them feel. They wanted me to inspire them. They wanted me to lift them up. They wanted me to do it all for them, like the five foolish virgins who demanded oil from the five wise ones. But I can’t do for them what they need to do for themselves, and I can’t do for anyone what only God can do.

This is what I can do. A nun once said to me that her job was to be a signpost pointing to Jesus. I immediately thought of a scarecrow with an arrow sign around its neck and the name “Jesus” printed on the arrow, and it made me laugh. But I am that scarecrow. These are my hands; this is my heart; this is my brain. God gave them to me, and because I begged him (and he agreed), I now give them to you.

If you haven’t yet repented, don’t wait. If you haven’t yet turned back to God, do it now, because tomorrow is not guaranteed. Even later today is not guaranteed.

You can tell false prophets by how they’ll always say there’ll be lots of time later to turn back to God, just as you can tell real prophets by how they’ll always say the time to turn back is now.