THE VALUE OF YOUR SOUL
	THE VALUE OF YOUR SOUL “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Mark 8: 35 The saying of our Lord Jesus Christ, which stands at the head of this page, ought to ring in our ears like a trumpet-blast. It concerns our highest and best interests. It concerns OUR SOULS. What a solemn question these words of Scripture contain! What a mighty sum of profit and loss they propound to us for calculation! Where is the accountant who could reckon it up? Where is the clever arithmetician who would not be baffled by that sum? “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” It is the first step toward heaven to find out the true worth of our souls. We live in an age when there is a false glare on the things of time, and a great mist over the things of eternity. The life that we now live in the flesh is not the only life. There is a life to come. We have souls. All is not over when the last breath is drawn, and the doctor’s last visit has been paid - when the coffin is screwed down, and the funeral preparations are made - when “ashes to ashes and dust to dust” has been pronounced over the grave. The spirit of man still lives on. Every one has within him an undying soul. There shall be a time when the sun shall cease to shine, and the moon no more give her light. But the soul of the humblest labourer is of far more enduring stuff. It shall survive the crash of an expiring universe, and live on to all eternity. Realize, I say once more, the responsibility and dignity of having a never-dying soul. Read your Bible, and become acquainted with its contents. Seek the Lord in prayer, and pour out your heart before Him. Go to a place of worship regularly, and hear the Gospel preached. Keep the Sabbath holy, and give God His day. And if any ask you the reason why: if wife, or child, or companion say, “What are you about?” - answer them boldly, like a man, and say, “I do these things because I have a soul.” The second remark I have to make is this. ANY ONE MAY LOSE HIS OWN SOUL. You cannot save that soul of your’s, my brother: remember that! You cannot make your own peace with God. You cannot wipe away a single sin. You cannot blot out one of the black records which stand in the book of God against you. You cannot change your own heart. But there is one thing you can do, you can lose your own soul. But where does the soul go to when lost? There is only one solemn answer to that question. There is but one place to which it can go, and that is hell. There is no such thing as annihilation. The lost soul goes to that place where the worm dies not, and the fire is not quenched - where there is blackness and darkness, wretchedness and despair for ever. It goes to hell - the only place for which it is suitable - since it is not suitable for heaven. “The wicked shall be turned into hell, with all nations that forget God.” The end of those things is death! Tell me not what a man thinks about the soul when he is in the fulness of health; tell me rather what he thinks when the world is sinking beneath him, and death, judgment, and eternity loom in sight. Does anyone wish to have a clearer idea of the soul’s value? Then go and measure it by the opinions of the dead. Read in the sixteenth chapter of St. Luke the world to come, and it gives us a glimpse of what dead men think of the value of the soul. The last remark I have to make is this. ANY MAN’S SOUL MAY BE SAVED. I could not bear the awful responsibility of telling men that everyone has a soul - that anyone may lose his soul - that the loss of the soul is a loss for which nothing can make up - if I could not also proclaim that any man’s soul may be saved. I proclaim with a confidence, that any one’s soul may be saved because Christ has once died. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has died upon the cross to make atonement for men’s sins. “Christ has once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God.” (I Peter 3: 18). Christ has borne our sins in His own body on the tree, and allowed the curse we all deserved to fall on His head. Christ by His death has made satisfaction to the holy law of God which we have broken. By Dr. J.C. Ryle