The Bad News and the Good News
In discovering the way to heaven, there is some bad news. First of all, we are all sinners. That's me and you and everyone. If we are honest with ourselves, we know this to be true. Even the Bible tells us this in Romans 3:23, "For all have sinned, and fallen short of the glory of God." The word sin means to miss the mark. That means if you and I stood next to each other and each of us took a baseball and hurled it at the moon, we'd both miss. Sin is the same way. No matter how hard we try, we can never stay sinless our entire lives.
And the bad news gets worse. The Bible tells us in Romans 6:23, "The wages of sin is death." Wages are what we earn. Just like we earn a paycheck for the work we do, we earn death for the sin we do. And not just physical death, but spiritual death as well. I think you would agree that this is very bad news. The first time I heard this news, I was devastated.
But there is good news also. God loves us so much that He didn't allow us to stay in this hopeless situation. He sent Jesus, His Son, to earth to die for us. The Bible tells us in Romans 5:8, "While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." Jesus died in our place. Say, for example, that you had cancer and only had a few weeks to live. Then I came along with a surgical procedure that allowed me to take all the cancerous cells from your body and place them into my body, and place my healthy cells into your body. What would happen? Right, I would die of cancer, and you would live. That is how Jesus did it. He took all our sins and placed them upon Himself, thus dying for all our sins in our place on the cross. Then three days later, Jesus came back to life to prove that sin and death had been conquered and that His claims to be God were true.
And just as the bad news grew worse, the good news gets better! The Bible, in Ephesians 2:8,9, tells us "For by grace you have been saved, through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is a gift from God." This means that we can receive this forgiveness of sins and access to Heaven by simply trusting that Christ's death was sufficient to pay for our sins. Just as I trust a chair to hold me when I sit upon it, I am trusting Christ and His death on the cross to be all I need to gain forgiveness for my sins and to get me to heaven. You may be thinking that you're a good person and you may even go to church. These are all good, but good living, going to church, helping the poor or any other good thing you might do cannot get you to heaven. You must trust in Jesus Christ alone, and God will give you eternal life as a gift! Does this make sense to you?
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