The expansion of the universe is speeding up, say scientists. I know for me, time is flying.

When I talk to friends about this triple-speed effect of days turning into weeks and weeks into months, they either agree they’re experiencing something similar or they reason I’m just getting older and that’s what happens with age.

The other week I was down in the Wall Street area for lunch when I walked by Trinity Church, an old Episcopalian church on Wall and Broadway only a block from where the World Trade Center stood, and decided to make a quick perusal of its cemetery lawn.

Inside the wrought-iron gate, I was struck by a large restored tombstone for British pioneer printer William Bradford. According to the marker, he was born in 1660, came to America in 1682 and died at the age of 92. The stone read:

“Born in Leicestershire, England, Mr. William Bradford printer before the City of Philadelphia was laid out: He was printer to this Government for upwards of 50 years and being quite worn out with Old Age and labour he left his Mortal State in the lively Hopes of a blessed immortality. Reader, reflect how soon you’ll quit this Stage. You’ll find but few attain to such an Age. Life’s full of Pain. Lo here’s a Place of Rest. Prepare to meet your GOD then you are blessed.”

Bradford's family clearly wanted to warn future generations that life goes by a lot faster than you realize and if you’re wise you’ll focus now on your relationship with God for the betterment of your soul--in this life as well as the next.

“You are foolish if you think to live long, since you are not certain to live one day through to the end,” says Thomas a Kempis in “The Imitation of Christ,” a devotional classic from the 1400s that has been translated into 50 languages and represents one of the most widely-read Christian books of all time. “If you are not busy now for yourself and for your own soul’s health, who will be busy for you after your death?”

About our life, James 4:14 reminds us, “It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.”

In helping clean out my childhood home after my dad’s death, I saved an old plaque from the kitchen wall that reads, “Only one life, Twill soon be past, Only what’s done for Christ will last. ‘To me to live is Christ.’ ”

I now have the plaque hanging above my desk beside my computer.

The sentiment in it is taken, in part, from the Apostle Paul, who writes in Philippians 1:21: “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”

Paul, the only Bible writer to receive revelation from the resurrected Jesus Christ, encourages Believers in limitless ways to try and fully comprehend that their citizenship is in heaven and that their role on earth is as “ambassadors for Christ.”

“Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth,” advises Paul in Col. 3. “For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.”

Of course, Satan’s opposing objective is to have everyone focused on the here-and-now and sucking up earthly pleasures with gusto. Contemplation of the soul or its final landing spot is to be avoided and, if the subject does come up, sinners are to console themselves with the notion that any loving God will surely not condemn them.

“Hell is not the grave,” assures my pastor, Richard Jordan of Shorewood Bible Church in Chicago (www.graceimpact.org), in a sermon I have on tape. “God has made men a spirit, a soul and a body and that soul is going to live and exist somewhere for eternity, either in a paradise prepared by God or in a hell prepared by God for Satan and those participating in his program.”

As the passage in Luke 16 about the rich man and Lazarus makes clear, a man can die and have his body be buried and his soul go to hell.

“You aren’t your body,” says Jordan. “If I was the devil, though, I’d try to convince you you were so you’d pamper it and you’d bathe it and you’d clothe it and you’d educate it and you’d make investments for it and you’d live for it and you’d die and your soul wouldn’t be prepared for eternity and you’d go to hell. That’s what I’d do if I was the devil. I’d teach you you are your body.

“Do you know that’s what 99% of Americans believe tonight--that they are their body? The average church member lives that way. All his thinking, all his activity, everything he does is to take care of his body. That doesn’t do much for your soul.”

The sobering reality is that any unsaved person is “alienated from the life of God,” as Paul puts it in Eph. 4:18, and their spirit has no communication with God.

It’s not God’s spirit, but Satan’s spirit that communicates with the unsaved person’s spirit. (“Wherein time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.” Eph. 2:2)

“You see the spirit of the lost man is working—it’s functioning—but it doesn’t have connection with the truth and the light of God,” explains Jordan. “The thing that lights it is evil. Evil and error lights it and so there’s no divine light and understanding in the person…You know what’s inside of a lost person? Darkness, because the light isn’t there. When that person gets saved, the light comes on. The influx of God’s Word brings light.”