You and God 2

The Essence of the Christian Message

What is Christianity really all about? Baptists, Catholics, Methodists, Pentecostals - do they really have anything in common?

All Christian churches, if they are truly Christian, do have certain things in common. They'll use different terms or emphasize different aspects, but the essence of Christianity is this:

The Bible tells us that God created us because he wanted somebody he could love, and who would love him. But he wanted real love, not something forced or robotic. So he gave our first ancestors free will. He set them down in the Garden of Eden and told them, "You can do anything you want to do in the whole wide world, except one thing. Don't eat the fruit off this one tree. Eat anything else you want, do anything else you want, just don't eat the fruit from this one tree, and you'll be alright."

What did Adam and Eve do? Being typical human beings, they went straight to that tree and ate the fruit!

They disobeyed God. The Bible word for that is sin. Now there are a lot of problems with sin, but I want to mention three in particular.

The first problem with sin is that it separates us from God. It makes us unfit to be around him.

A lot of people think that when they die, God will take out his scales and weigh the good and the bad they have accomplished in their life. If there is more good than bad, they will go to heaven. If there is more bad than good, they won't.

It sounds reasonable. Unfortunately, that's not how the Bible says it works. The Bible says that any amount of sin, anything at all that is not exactly what God wanted, is enough to separate us from God.

It's like your life is a glass of water, and sin is sewage. Does the glass have to be more than half full of sewage before it becomes undrinkable? No! You could take a medicine dropper and put one drop of sewage in the glass, and it would pollute the whole thing.

That's what sin does with your life.

Then picture heaven as the pitcher of water. What would happen if you took that polluted glass and poured it in the pitcher? It would pollute the whole thing. It wouldn't be pure anymore. It wouldn't be heaven anymore.

Or look at it another way. God is light, and sin is darkness. Can you pick up a chunk of darkness and carry it into the light? No, the light blows it away! It destroys it! And the same thing would happen to your sin-darkened self if you tried to come into God's presence.

So the first problem with sin is that it makes us unfit to be around God.

The second problem with sin is that there's nothing we can do to fix it.

Even if you could live a perfect life from now on, it would be just like pouring more clean water into that polluted glass.

The third problem with sin is what makes the other two so important.

You see, God created us eternal. Our bodies aren't eternal, of course, but our souls and spirits are - and the Bible says we will get eternal bodies when we die. And there are only two eternal places: heaven and hell. So if we have made ourselves unfit for heaven, it doesn't leave us in a very good situation.

Please continue reading in the next column.

I tell people the good news of the gospel is that we're all going to hell and there's nothing we can do about it. The reason it’s good news is that it takes the pressure off. We don’t have to worry about messing up on a lot of rules and regulations, because we’ve all messed up already.

Actually, that’s only half of the news. The other half is that while there isn't anything wecan do about it, there was something God could do about it. And he did.

It's been said that all the other religions in the world are methods for people to try to climb up to God, to become good enough to make it into heaven. Christianity is God saying, "Forget it. It can't be done. But I'll reach down to you!"

God reached down to us when he sent his only Son, Jesus Christ, who was God himself, to become one of us. He left his throne in heaven to be born a human baby on the first Christmas, and he is the only person who ever lived without sin.

The Bible says the wages of sin is death. All of us have sinned, so all of us have to die. All of us except Jesus, that is. Jesus never sinned, so he didn't have to die. But he chose to die, for us. He allowed sinful people to nail him to a cross. Now here’s the neat part: since Jesus didn't have any sins to pay for, his death could pay for somebody else's sins. And since Jesus is God, his death was enough to pay for the sins of everyone who will accept it.

The Bible says this is a gift of grace. That means there is nothing we can do to earn it, deserve it, or pay for it. It's a gift, just because God loves you.

Now imagine I'm holding a hundred dollar bill in my hand, and I say I want to give it to you as a gift. What do you have to do to make it yours? You have to take it. You have to hold out your hands and receive it.

It's the same with God's gift of eternal life. It's a totally free gift, but you have to hold out your heart and receive it. How? Just admit you need it, believe Jesus can give it to you, and ask him to come into your life and take over.

I have a T-shirt that says, "If God is your co-pilot, switch seats!" You have to let God be the pilot. Otherwise you're going to crash.

Once you make that decision to follow Jesus, a lot of good things happen, but again there are three I want to mention.

The first is that all your sins are forgiven. Past, present and future, your sins are wiped out. You will still face judgment, but it will be to judge what reward you get based on your good deeds. The sins are all erased.

(Of course, this doesn’t mean you can go right out and commit a lot of sins and get off free. If that is your attitude, it means you weren’t really sincere when you asked God to take over your life. And you can’t fool God!)

The second good thing that happens is that you become an adopted child of God.

Before, you were a creature of God, but you weren't his child. When you give your life to follow Jesus, the Bible says God adopts you as his child. That means you inherit all the promises of the Bible, including guaranteed reservations in heaven - not because you've lived a good life, not because you belonged to a certain group, but because Jesus died for you and you put your trust in him.

In order to understand the third good thing that happens, we have to go back to Creation, where the Bible says that God created us in his own image. Now one of the main things to know about God is that he is Trinity. That means God the Father, God the Son (who is Jesus), and God the Holy Spirit are all God, but there is only one God. I don't understand it, but I figure if my puny brain could understand everything there is about God, he wouldn't be worth worshipping!

God created us in his image, so he made us three in one also. He made us with a body, a soul and a spirit. You know what your body is. Your soul is your mind, emotions, imagination, memory, and so on. Your spirit is the part that was created to communicate with God.

When Adam and Eve disobeyed God, it broke their spirit. People have been born without working spirits ever since. The Bible says that when you give your life to follow Jesus, your spirit is made new, or born again. The Holy Spirit of God comes to live in your newhuman spirit. You have a brand new godly nature!

The problem is, you still also have your old human nature.

The third good thing that happens is that your life begins a process of learning to let your new godly nature have control more and more.

I picture it like an onion with a light bulb inside. When you give your life to Jesus, the light starts shining. But to let it really shine out, you have to peel away the layers of the onion, which are your old worldly ways of saying and thinking and doing things, that get in the way of what God wants to do in you. That's where prayer and Bible reading and church come in. They provide power for the light bulb, and they help peel away the layers of the onion.

The biggest question anyone can answer in their life is this: was there ever a time you made the decision to follow Jesus as your Lord and Savior, and asked him to come into your life? If not, would you like to do it now?

It's very simple. Just pray this prayer:

"Dear God, I know I'm a sinner, and there's nothing I can do about it.

But I believe that Jesus is the Son of God, who died to pay for my sins, and rose from the dead to give me eternal life.

Come into my heart, Lord Jesus.

Forgive my sins. Help me follow you. I put you in charge.

Thank you, Lord. Amen."

If you prayed that prayer and meant it, or if you have said something similar in the past, you are a Christian, a forgiven child of God with guaranteed reservations in heaven.

It doesn't mean you're perfect. It doesn't mean you'll never have any more problems or make any more mistakes or commit any more sins.

What it means is that you have connected with God, who loves you so much he gave his only Son to die for you, and he can handle the rest of it.

What happens next?

Go on to the next page.