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What If You Died Today?...
Suppose that you were to die today and stand before God and He were
to ask you, “Why should I let you into My Heaven?” What would you say?
For most of my life I thought Heaven was something I had to
earn; something I had to merit by keeping the commandments and following
rules. But then I discovered
that the Bible says God’s children can’t do anything to earn their way into
Heaven. It’s a free gift. Scripture says, “The gift of God is
eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Rom 6:23)
We sort of think there’s nothing free in this life. We always look for the price tag.
The Bible says, “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of
yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should
boast.” (Eph2: 8-9). No
amount of personal effort, good works or religious deeds can earn anyone a
place in heaven.
Even if we tried to put a price on eternal life, there’s not
enough money in the entire world to buy it. But the really amazing thing is that God gives this
incredible gift to His children with no price tag.
This fact raises many questions in people’s mind. “How can this be? How can God do this and still be
just? And who gets this gift –
everybody? How do they get it?
And how do they know when they’ve received it?
The first thing I came to understand was
what God says about man in the Bible. God says, “All have sinned and fall short of the
glory of God.” (Rom 3: 23).
This is the incurable, fatal malignancy infecting the soul of the
entire human race.
We often just think that big things like robberies, murders
& adulteries cross the threshold into sin. And that’s very true. But
the Bible goes far deeper than that.
It tells us that sin is anything that doesn’t please God or is a
transgression of His law.
Anything we do that we shouldn’t do – like losing our temper,
stealing – these are sins of commission. Anything we should do but
don’t do – like reading the Bible, failing to pray, or truly loving our
neighbor – these are sins of omission. Anything we say or think that
we shouldn’t – like lying, cursing, lusting, hating – these are sins in
word and thought. God tells us that all of these are sins.
According to the Bible, even the most righteous, moral person
is a sinner who has repeatedly broken God’s law. This is the terrible
predicament that all of us find ourselves in. Because we are, by our nature, sinners, we can’t save
ourselves. We can’t do
anything at all to earn our way into heaven.
Have you ever wondered how good you’d have to be to make it
into heaven? Jesus said,
“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your heavenly Father which is in heaven
is perfect” (Matt 5: 48). God
says “Be perfect”
And, of course, we know that no one is perfect. We all fall short of this. So, trusting in our own efforts to
be good will not get us to heaven.
But many, many people today say that they plan to enter into heaven
on the basis of their own good works.
The Bible says about this, “There is a way which seemeth right unto
a man but the end thereof are the ways of death” (Prov 14:12).
One of the most amazing and most difficult things to learn
about God is that He loves His children in spite of what they are. He loves them, not because of what
they are, but because of what He is.
For the Bible tells us “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). He loves His children more than any
father or mother loves his or her child, more than nay husband loves his
wife.
But the Bible also tells us that because God is infinitely
just and righteous, He must punish sin. It is because He is a just judge
that He must punish our sins.
His own law declares that our sins must be punished and that He
“will by no means clear the guilty.” (Ex 34:7). There is absolutely no doubt about this!
God is loving, but how would you view a judge who was overly
lenient with offenders? If one
were to slap the wrist of his friend who was guilty of a heinous crime, how
would you view him? With
contempt, no doubt. We’d all
cry, “Impeach him!”
The teachings God emphasized about Himself are that he is holy
and just and must punish sin, but He is also loving and merciful and does
not rejoice over punishing us.
This creates a problem, which He has solved in Jesus Christ.
God in His infinite wisdom devised a marvelous solution to
this problem. Jesus Christ is
God’s answer to man’s predicament.
.
God
teaches that Jesus Christ was and is God! He is the Creator of the world! He is the One who created the whole
universe! Jesus is God
Himself! In fact, the Bible
says “In the beginning was the Word [Jesus Christ], and the Word was with
God, and the Word was God. And
the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, (and we beheld His glory, the
glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth.” (Jn
1:1, 14).
Many
people don’t realize that He is God the Son – that God is Father, Son and
Holy Spirit, and that the Trinity is one God.
He suffered
and died on the cross and rose from the dead to pay the penalty for the
sins of His people. He lived a
perfect and spotless life.
Imagine yourself for a minute covered in filthy grime and
dirt. The dirt is caked
on. Imagine this dirt and
grime represents all your dirty rotten sins. And there are a lot of them! You try to get
rid of them by shaking them off – but they won’t come off. You try to get rid of them by
wiping it on your other arm or by hiding them underneath some clothes, but
you're still covered by the dirt – your sins still cover you. Nothing you do can get rid of
it. You need to be cleansed.
Here’s a perfectly white, sparkling clean towel. It’s spotless. Imagine this towel to be Jesus
Christ – the sinless God-Man.
What happens when He takes upon Himself all your dirty, rotten
sins? It’s like taking this
perfectly clean towel and wiping all your grimy dirt on it. What’s happened? Your dirt is no longer on you;
you're clean. But look at the
towel…what’s happened to it?
Look how it’s now covered with your dirt. Because Christ has taken all of your sins upon
Himself, you can now stand perfectly clean before the righteous Judge
– not because of anything you've done. You didn’t get rid of your sins. Christ did all the work. He cleansed you. He washed you. You're now robed with His perfect
righteousness. By taking on
all your horrible sins Christ received the punishment rightly due you. He took your place before the
Judge. The punishment that was
due you was meted out – but it was meted out on Christ as your substitute
and not upon you. Heaven has
been opened to you because the penalty for your sin has been fully paid by
Christ, and because you now stand clothed in Christ’s perfect righteousness
with no sin. Salvation has
been granted to you from the Lord.
The Bible tells us that this salvation is to be preached to
every creature that is under heaven.
But the Bible also tells us that dirty, rotten, sinful man wants
nothing at all to do with it.
They love their sin. They’re
perfectly content to go on caked in their sins. In fact, they’re slaves to their sin. Whether they realize it or not, it’s
their master and it rules over their lives. As a result, they reject God’s salvation, along with the
One bringing it.
And yet…sprinkled here and there, there are some who do
respond to Christ’s call and heaven’s door is opened to them. How can this be?
Some people believe in Jesus Christ the same way they believe
in Napoleon or George Washington.
They believe He actually lived and that He was a real Person in
history. You believe in God,
don’t you? But this type of
belief isn’t what the Bible means by saving faith. Did you know the Bible says Satan
believes in God? “Thou
believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe,
and tremble.” Even the devil
believes in the divinity of Christ!
But he isn’t saved!
That’s one thing people mistake for saving faith – an intellectual
belief in the reality of Christ.
But that’s not what God means by saving faith.
Let me give you another thing people
mistake for saving faith.
We’ve all prayed to God many times, haven’t we? You’ve had problems you’ve
committed to the Lord, right? You’ve trusted Him for some things. You had more than merely an
intellectual understanding.
You actually trusted Him for things, right? Sick children, financial troubles,
business problems, traveling mercies on the highway or in an airplane. Maybe you or a family member had an
operation and you prayed for God to bring them through the operation
safely. Things like that. All of those things are well and
good, but even this isn’t saving faith. We might say when I trusted in the Lord for my financial
troubles, I had a financial-faith.
When you trusted in Him for your family concerns, you had a
family-faith. When we trusted
in Him for our travels, we had a traveling-faith. There’s one element all these things have in
common. They’re all the things
of this life, aren’t they?
Many people trust the Lord for these temporal matters, but saving faith
is different.
For myself, I trusted the Lord for
this, that and the other. But when you get right down to the nitty gritty,
what I was trusting in for my salvation was myself. I tried to live a good life. I
tried to keep the 10 Commandments.
I tried to live by the Golden Rule. I, I, I.
You see, it was all “I”!
Saving faith is the ability to trust
Jesus Christ alone for salvation. It means resting upon Christ alone and
what He’s done instead of upon what I’ve done. As the Scripture says, “Believe
[trust] on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.”
Here’s an illustration of what I’m talking about. Suppose you’re at Niagara Falls and
a tightrope walker is there to walk across the falls. You watch as he walks out over the
falls with nothing but a balance pole in his hand where the slightest
misstep means certain death. Yet he goes through the most daring routine
out on that wire. He is so
skilled, so intelligent and so knowledgeable that it seems impossible for
him to fall. Finally he comes
back to the shore and asks you:
"What do you think of my act?" You answer him very sincerely, "I think you’re
terrific! I’ve never seen
anyone with such ability -- to
balance so easily in a dangerous situation." Then he asks you: "Do
you think I could do that same act with someone on my shoulders?" Right away you answer, "You
bet! Without any problem at all. You’re the best tightrope walker I’ve ever
seen." Seeing your
confidence in him, he says: "Look. See the crowd that’s gathered:
let's give ‘em something they’ll never forget. Climb up on my shoulders and let's show them that I’m
able to do this."
Now the moment of truth has come
because you’ve just assured him you believe he could do his act with a man
on his shoulders. You were
totally convinced that he could do it, but now he’s asked you to commit your
life to him. If he fails, both
of you are going to fall to your deaths. Suddenly you realize your life is more important than
risking it with this man. The
emotional trust you’d placed in him because of your excitement and
enthusiasm in seeing his act has vanished. The trust you’d had in him where you believed he was
unbeatable in his abilities has quickly disappeared. You now realize that
you weren’t ready to believe in him to the point of entrusting your whole
life into his care.
This illustration shows the
character of believing that’s so prevalent in the world today. So many are emotionally carried
away with a trust in Christ because of some spiritual excitement. So many are intellectually ready to
acknowledge all kinds of wonderful things about Christ. So many are convinced they’re saved
because they believe these things emotionally or intellectually, but
they’ve never come to the point where they’ve entrusted their lives to Him,
where they’ve hung their whole lives on Christ. There’s more to believing than just having a knowledge
that Christ is the Savior, that He came to earth in the flesh as the
God-man, that He paid for the sins of His people, and that He rose again
having become completely victorious over death. As we said, Satan knows all these things, and yet he is
unsaved. Unfortunately, many
today know these things and are still unsaved themselves.
There’s a vast difference in
believing with our minds or even with our emotions and in believing with
our whole personality. To
believe with a saving faith means that you’ve hung your whole life on
Christ; you’ve committed your whole being to Him. You’ve surrendered your
will to Him. This kind of
saving faith is the gift of God!
We can’t take any credit for it
Some might wonder why we try to live
a good life? Can’t I engage in
all my worldly, sinful activities and still be saved? Once we understand what salvation
really is, then we’ll understand why this doesn’t make sense. You see, when a person is truly
born again, they’re a new creation -- their old sinful nature is passed
away. A person is made of a
body and a soul. The soul existence is just as real a part of somebody as
is their body. And it’s the
soul (or spirit) part of the person that makes them the individual they are
– that’s their real essence.
We know this, because when someone dies there body is still there –
flesh, blood and bones – but the life has left them. Their soul or spirit has departed. When we become born again, in our
soul or spirit essence, we’ve been given a brand new resurrected soul from
God. Our old nature that loved
sin and the things of this world has been put to death. As a new creation in our spirit
(notice how nothing’s changed about our outward appearance – the change is
internal) we never want to sin again.
We have an ongoing desire to be obedient to God, to serve Him, to
read the Bible. Living a godly
life becomes a natural part of who and what we are. We’re not living a godly life to
try to earn some kind of favor from God; rather, our godly life is a result
of the fact that God has saved us.
The question
before you is this: are you
ready to respond to Christ’s call to follow and trust completely in Him?
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