Receiving Eternal Life

If The Lord came back this very minute, would you go to heaven? If He looked you in the face and asked you, "Why should I let you in?" what would your answer be at that moment? John wrote to the congregations of Christ's church in Asia and said that assurance is the purpose of the plan. It was the reason he wrote what he wrote.

First John 5:13 says, "These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life and that you may continue to believe in the name of the Son of God." (NKJV)

The plan of God was given because of man's ruin. The first truth we must understand is that heaven is a free gift. I cannot earn it, deserve it, or buy it. Romans 6:23 says, "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." (NKJV)

Some will come closer than others, but nobody is going to get to heaven through their own effort. If The Lord told us the only way to get to heaven was to jump over a one hundred foot wide, one hundred foot deep canyon, all of us might try it, but none would make it. I may get six feet and you may get twelve feet, and an Olympic athlete may get eighteen feet, but we would all wind up at the bottom on the canyon floor.

God's standard is perfection, but man is always a sinner, imperfect. Romans 3:10 & 23 says, ""There is none righteous, no, not one;...for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God," (NKJV). You might at this point say, "Well I am not so bad, preacher." That may be true. But if we are going to weigh ourselves in the balance of goodness, we are in deep trouble. Including our anger, our selfishness, the evil we think, all the good things we should have done and did not, and all the things we did that we should not, most of us sin many times a week.

Suppose, though, that you were the most righteous person on earth. You do not sin hundreds or even dozens of times a day. You have whittled your ungodliness down to three sins a day. That is a thousand times a year, twenty thousand times over the next twenty years. Could you then stand before The Judge and tell Him you are innocent and deserve to be acquitted because you only sin a thousand times a year?

We cannot change the basic truth that we are all sinners. We can improve, however. With God as our helper, we must continue daily to fight that battle, but we are never going to change that basic truth. If I had a lemon tree in my yard and wanted it to be an orange tree, I could go out and take off all the lemons and scotch tape oranges to that tree. Do you know what I would have? I would have a lemon tree with oranges taped to it. I can white-wash me and put up a great looking facade. But do you know what I would be? Nothing more than a white-washed sinner with a great facade. We are all sinners in need of what only a perfect God can give.

We will continue this study in our next time together...May God bless!