The Gift of Eternal Life

• God loves you and wants you to be with Him forever. Everyone wants to think that God is a God of love, and that He loves us, and that He wants us to enjoy eternity with Him in heaven. I have good news - this is exactly how God is! [ John 3:16 ]
  
  
• God, however, is also perfect and therefore holy. If God wasn't perfect, He couldn't be God. If God wasn't infinite, He couldn't be God. And if God wasn't morally impeccable, He couldn't be God. That all means that God, though He is loving and merciful, is compelled by His nature and character to expel all imperfection from His sight in the end. That means He can't tolerate sinfulness in His presence. [ Matthew 5:48 ]
  
  
• We are all sinners. "Sin" doesn't just mean all the ugly things you read in the newspaper. Sure, it includes murder, and rape, and adultery - but it also includes telling white lies and reading the wrong sorts of magazines. And even if we haven't, in our estimation, committed any of those crimes, "sin" merely refers to the fact of our failing to be perfect (ever use the eraser on a pencil?), not to how we fell short. And so, in agreement with the old saying, "Nobody's perfect," and therefore all of us are sinners. [ Romans 3:10-18 ]
  
  
• Because of our sin, we are unworthy of spending eternity with God. Even worse, there's no way for us to undo our sin. So we're condemned. [ Romans 6:23 ]
  
  
• Jesus Christ died to pay for the consequences of our sin. God became human (there's lots and lots of theology here!), and in the person of Jesus, died on the cross for us. I understand that in old China, a rich man condemned to death would sometimes find a poor man to die in his place in exchange for supporting the poor man's family. Jesus Christ did a similar thing, except that we're the poor men on death row and He's the (infinitely!) rich man offering to take our death for us. [ Romans 6:23 again ]
  
  
• All we have to do is put our faith in what Jesus Christ has done. Simple faith is the answer, but sometimes it's not easy because we all want to hang on to our old ways, or because our pride makes us want to contribute to receiving eternal life. Sorry - there isn't any way but to place your entire trust in Jesus. We start from an impossible position in our sin, and we can't earn even the least bit of our salvation because we've already failed before we start trying. [ John 1:12-13 ]
  
  
• But you should trust Him right now. Ideally, I'd want you to receive His gift joyfully and enthusiastically. But I'd also rather scare you into heaven than let you traipse off into the alternative (the Bible uses words such as "destruction," "hades," and "hell"). And part of my thinking is that none of us has any guarantee of how much longer we're going to live. A wise rabbi once told his temple, "Repent the day before you die." The people in his congregation protested that this was a bit silly because they didn't know what day that would be. So the rabbi said, "Then repent today." [ Hebrews 2:3 ]
  
  
• So believe on Jesus Christ today! Jesus has been waiting for you. Will you give yourself to Him?