The First Thing that You Need to Know: You are a Bad person!
Wow! That was not a nice thing to say. “The truth hurts” as some have said and the truth is that everyone is bad at heart.
NOW WAIT JUST A MINUTE! That offended me. I’m not THAT bad. You might be a dad or mom, big sister or little brother. You may be a grand mother or uncle. Or you might be just you. Whatever the case the Bible says that you are bad deep down. You might be thinking, That is why I hate the Bible. It has nothing that really relates to me.
The Bible is God’s Word and is thus different from any other book ever written. Without getting too technical let me put it this way:
- God is perfect,
- He can never lie nor do anything wrong.
- He inspired many to write his Word the Bible.
- So, as God is complete, perfect and true.
- The Bible is complete, perfect and true
The Bible says this about all mankind, “for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” Those words are found in Romans chapter 3 and verse 23. The Apostle Paul wrote those Holy Spirit inspired words. A few chapters later in Romans 6.23 he added, “The wages of sin is death….” What did he mean by that?
The Second Thing that You Need to Know: Your sin is costly.
When you work you get paid. You get the money agreed to in your contract. You receive your Wage.
Each of us is earning a spiritual wage whether we know it or not. It is not like Jacob Marley’s chains and seemingly endless earth-walking. If you’ve seen The Christmas Carol you will remember Marley telling Ebenezer Scrooge about his pending eternal chain-dragging unless he changed his ways.
That picture was deceiving. There will be none of that for you. Your destination after death is decided by the decisions that you make here and now but not in the same way Ebenezer’s decisions affected his life. The Bible says, …it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: Heb 9:27
Simply put this means that just after you are officially pronounced dead you will appear before God to be judged. Did you notice that there was no “chain-dragging” nor purgatory mentioned? Simply, you die and appear before God to receive your judgement.
As mentioned above, God is perfect. Thus he doesn’t allow any imperfection into his presence. All who enter have to be as perfect as He is. The only way to get to heaven is by being perfect! Or by having a perfect substitute. “What was that?”
The Third Thing that You Need to Know: God requires a perfect payment for our Sin debt
A sinner like you would have to spend eternity in Hell trying to pay for your sin debt. Sin is costly and can never be fully paid by a sinner. It is like a baseball player trying to maintain a 1.000 batting average. If that player gets a hit in every at-bat all season long except for his first one he can never quite reach a 1.000. Have you calculated that out? It is interesting but true.
You can’t even come as close as that player. Why? Because you’ve sinned a lot more than once or twice. You may have heard this illustration but it has helped me to see the futility of trying to justify my sin debt. It goes like this.
Let’s imagine that you sin only one time a day. I seriously doubt that you do. Actually I think that you sin a lot more than once a day but let’s imagine. One sin per day would equal:
- 7 per week
- 30 per month
- 365 per year (discounting Leap Year to keep the math simpler)
- At 10 you have sinned approximately 3,650 times at one per day
- At 20 it would be 7300 times
- If you live to be 70 and died you would enter God’s presence with a mere 25550 sins!
You sin more than once a day so you can double or quadruple that number. Can you imagine standing before a perfect God and asking him to open Heaven’s gate to let you in with a mere 100,000 sins under your belt? So, what’s the punch line here?
The Fourth Thing that You Need to Know: God has made a way!
Forget what many people say about God’s Simple Plan of Salvation. It doesn’t exist. God’s plan is complicated. Some things are very difficult to justify in our mind. We get bogged down in some areas. We can’t seem to put all of the pieces of the puzzle together. However, let’s do the following, let’s forget the hard things and concentrate on the easier part.
God Loves You. He hates your sin and so has provided a way for you to be forgiven. That Way was very costly. God sent his Son Jesus Christ to be the Way and your substitute.
Jesus was born of a virgin and lived a perfect life. When he was put to death it was for a purpose. His perfect life paid the price that God was asking. God asked for a perfect substitute and it was Jesus, God’s Son that became the substitute.
Jesus died in your place. The apostle Peter said it this way, Who his own self (Jesus) bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live… (1Peter 2:24). Jesus not only died he rose from the dead and won a victory over death. That victory allows us too to win.
So, what does all of this mean to me? When I allow Jesus Christ to become my substitute by placing my faith and trust on what he did on the cross, when I recognize that I can’t pay my way to heaven by being good, going to church or giving money, I am on the right Way to salvation.
I must come to God by faith in Jesus. I must:
- Recognize that only faith in what Jesus did can save me from Hell
- Ask God to forgive my many sins
- Turn from those sins in what the Bible calls repentance. That simply means that I turn from sin and to God.
- Ask Jesus to be my Savior.
Paul said this, “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” Ephesians 2:8
