March 21, 2009 FB
God is so infinitely beautiful and majestic that just being in his presence is enough to satisfy and thrill everyone for all eternity. Everything about him is totally pure. His love, his joy, his mercy, his kindness, etc, are all completely free from impurity and unimaginably intense. The Bible says that the Almighty Creator of our universe and everything in it “loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the lovingkindness of the LORD” (Psalm 33:5). God wants you to experience wonderful things you can’t even imagine with him. The Bible says this about God: “In Thy presence is fullness of joy; In Thy right hand there are pleasures forever” (Psalm 16:11). "The Lord is righteous in all his ways and loving toward all he has made" (Psalm 145:17).
God is so infinitely beautiful and majestic that just being in his presence is enough to satisfy and thrill everyone for all eternity. Everything about him is totally pure. His love, his joy, his mercy, his kindness, etc, are all completely free from impurity and unimaginably intense. The Bible says that the Almighty Creator of our universe and everything in it “loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the lovingkindness of the LORD” (Psalm 33:5). God wants you to experience wonderful things you can’t even imagine with him. The Bible says this about God: “In Thy presence is fullness of joy; In Thy right hand there are pleasures forever” (Psalm 16:11). "The Lord is righteous in all his ways and loving toward all he has made" (Psalm 145:17).
God is holy and pure, he created you to be in a holy and pure love relationship with him, and all he really wants is for you to love him with your whole heart. He says “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut. 6:5).
But there is a problem with us. We cannot love God with all our heart because our hearts are not pure. God says “I, the Lord, search the heart, I test the mind, even to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings” (Jer. 17:10). “Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders. These are the things which defile the man” (Matt. 15:19-20).
All of the rotten things in our hearts come from sin. Sin is putting our will above God’s will and going our own way. The Bible says “God has looked down from heaven upon the sons of men, to see if there is anyone who understands, who seeks after God. Every one of them has turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one” (Psalm 53:2-3). And “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8).
Worse yet, by making your will most important, you are rebelling against God, rejecting him, and you actually make yourself his enemy. This is seen in Job’s question to God “How many are my iniquities and sins? Make known to me my rebellion and my sin. Why dost Thou hide Thy face, and consider me Thine enemy?” (Job 13:23-24).
So our hearts cannot truly love God because we are full of sin, and this makes us the enemy of God. But what about trying as hard as we can to do good? Well, because our hearts are soaked in sin, everything we do will be tainted by it. And because God is completely pure and holy, he cannot and will not accept anything that is unclean or tainted. The Bible says that anything good and righteous we do to earn salvation is unclean in the eyes of God because we are unclean: “For all of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment” (Isaiah 64:6).
We are hopeless to be with God because we are “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1) and anything we try to do to get to God is tainted by our sin. But it gets even worse; there is an eternal penalty for sin. Because your sin has separated you from God now, when you die physically you will be separated from God for all eternity. The Bible says “For the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23) and "The soul who sins shall die" (Ezek. 18:4). This is the final death; if you die physically with your sins, you are finalized to be dead without God and alive in"the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels" (Matt. 25:41).
Now, even though you are an enemy of God, he still loves you and wants you to be with him. The Bible says that God is “not willing that any should perish” (2 Pet. 3:9). God also says “I have no pleasure in the death of anyone who dies” (Ezek. 18:32). And not only does God hate death, he doesn’t even like it when the most wicked people die: “’As I live!’ declares the Lord God, ‘I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked’” (Ezek. 33:11). God has to condemn sin because he is holy, but he doesn’t want to. He wants to forgive you, but he has to punish your sins. And as long as your sins are in you, you are dead to God and already condemned for punishment.
Because you are dead and dying in sins right now and since you can't save yourself, you need something outside of you that can take away your sins so God can forgive you and give you eternal life with him in love and joy.
Now, because God loves you and does not want to condemn you to be without him and his love and his joy and his holiness, he made a way for your sins to be completely forgiven and taken away. Jesus Christ said “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). So let’s see why Jesus is the one way to God and the only one who can be a Savior from sins.
The Bible says that “God so loved the world, that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him [the Son] should not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world should be saved through Him” (John 3:16-17).
Jesus is the Son of God and this means that he is equal with God and he is 100% God. Jesus came out from eternity into space and time and was born a human being. He lived a perfectly holy human life, and it was possible for him to be holy because he was also God, and God cannot sin. The disciples who learned from Jesus told him “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life. And we have believed and have come to know that You are the Holy One of God” (John 6:68-69).
So Jesus Christ is the perfect Son of God and he died on a cross. But how does that connect to us and our sins?
The Bible says “that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3-4).
Now, let’s see how this connects to you and me because Jesus’ teaching and example does no good for getting rid of our sins. Only a person who has no sin of their own can take someone else’s sin upon them. And the one and only person who ever lived without sin was Jesus. He did not have to die because he was without sin. His accusers had to lie about him to get him convicted. Even Judas, the one who betrayed him, said that Jesus had "innocent blood" (Matt. 27:4).
When Jesus was nailed to the cross he was pure, holy, and free from all sin,…until darkness fell. The Bible says when Jesus was dying on the cross that “from the sixth hour darkness fell upon all the land until the ninth hour” (Matt. 27:45). It was during these three hours of darkness that your sin was actually put into the body of Jesus. 1 Peter 2:24 says that Jesus “bore our sins in His body on the cross, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness; for by His wounds you were healed.” Your sin was in Jesus when he died on the cross. Now since death is the penalty for sin, this means that Jesus actually took your sins and paid your penalty in your place. So now your sins are completely paid for! This is the most wonderful and loving thing that God could do for you: “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).
But what about the rest of the Gospel; that he was raised? Jesus went through the most shameful, humiliating, and excruciating execution ever invented because of your sin. He shed his innocent blood for you, and his corpse lay cold and lifeless in a tomb for three days. But after three days God raised Jesus from the dead back to life, never to taste death again!
There are three main reasons why Jesus is raised from the dead. First, is because Jesus had to be made clean from your sins and mine. God could not let his only Son, whom he loved, be forever apart from him in hell with our sins, so he raised Jesus to newness of life. The second reason is because a dead person cannot save anyone. A dead body cannot get up and pull someone out of the path of an oncoming truck. So Jesus has to be alive to be able to save you.
The third and final reason Jesus is raised from the dead is so that everyone who puts their trust in him for salvation will be united with him in his eternal resurrection life. Let me explain this a little more for us: The Bible says that “if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection” (Rom. 6:5). First of all, when you put your trust in Jesus for eternal life you are united with him in his death. This means that your sins are taken away in his bloody death. And second of all, when you put your trust in Jesus for eternal life you are united with him in his resurrection. This means that, because Jesus was raised from the dead to eternal immortal life, you will be too! It means that all the holiness, love, purity, and joy of being with God are yours because you are united with Jesus when you put your trust in him!
Now the last question to answer is this: What does it mean to trust in Jesus?
To put your trust in something is not just to have a mere head knowledge about something. To put your trust in something is to know what it does and then put it to use. Look at it this way: If you fall off a ship into the ocean and you are drowning, then it does you no good just to look at a life-preserver and know what it does. You need to grab onto one so you can be saved. In the same way, you are dying in your sins and Jesus throws you the life-preserver of his death in your place and his resurrection to save you out of death, and he will pull you into eternal life if you grab onto his life-preserver.
Right now, Jesus is alive with salvation and eternal life waiting for you. He can hear you, so if you want to be saved, just pray and tell Jesus that you know you’re a sinner who needs to be saved, that you are putting your trust only in him to save you from eternal death because of his death and resurrection, and ask him to give you eternal life with God in forgiveness and love and joy.
This is the promise of eternal life that Jesus gave to all who trust in him “I give eternal life to them, and they shall never perish; and no one shall snatch them out of My hand” (John 10:28). “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me shall live even if he dies” (John 11:25).
Nehemiah Ryan © 2009
But there is a problem with us. We cannot love God with all our heart because our hearts are not pure. God says “I, the Lord, search the heart, I test the mind, even to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings” (Jer. 17:10). “Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders. These are the things which defile the man” (Matt. 15:19-20).
All of the rotten things in our hearts come from sin. Sin is putting our will above God’s will and going our own way. The Bible says “God has looked down from heaven upon the sons of men, to see if there is anyone who understands, who seeks after God. Every one of them has turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one” (Psalm 53:2-3). And “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8).
Worse yet, by making your will most important, you are rebelling against God, rejecting him, and you actually make yourself his enemy. This is seen in Job’s question to God “How many are my iniquities and sins? Make known to me my rebellion and my sin. Why dost Thou hide Thy face, and consider me Thine enemy?” (Job 13:23-24).
So our hearts cannot truly love God because we are full of sin, and this makes us the enemy of God. But what about trying as hard as we can to do good? Well, because our hearts are soaked in sin, everything we do will be tainted by it. And because God is completely pure and holy, he cannot and will not accept anything that is unclean or tainted. The Bible says that anything good and righteous we do to earn salvation is unclean in the eyes of God because we are unclean: “For all of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment” (Isaiah 64:6).
We are hopeless to be with God because we are “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1) and anything we try to do to get to God is tainted by our sin. But it gets even worse; there is an eternal penalty for sin. Because your sin has separated you from God now, when you die physically you will be separated from God for all eternity. The Bible says “For the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23) and "The soul who sins shall die" (Ezek. 18:4). This is the final death; if you die physically with your sins, you are finalized to be dead without God and alive in"the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels" (Matt. 25:41).
Now, even though you are an enemy of God, he still loves you and wants you to be with him. The Bible says that God is “not willing that any should perish” (2 Pet. 3:9). God also says “I have no pleasure in the death of anyone who dies” (Ezek. 18:32). And not only does God hate death, he doesn’t even like it when the most wicked people die: “’As I live!’ declares the Lord God, ‘I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked’” (Ezek. 33:11). God has to condemn sin because he is holy, but he doesn’t want to. He wants to forgive you, but he has to punish your sins. And as long as your sins are in you, you are dead to God and already condemned for punishment.
Because you are dead and dying in sins right now and since you can't save yourself, you need something outside of you that can take away your sins so God can forgive you and give you eternal life with him in love and joy.
Now, because God loves you and does not want to condemn you to be without him and his love and his joy and his holiness, he made a way for your sins to be completely forgiven and taken away. Jesus Christ said “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). So let’s see why Jesus is the one way to God and the only one who can be a Savior from sins.
The Bible says that “God so loved the world, that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him [the Son] should not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world should be saved through Him” (John 3:16-17).
Jesus is the Son of God and this means that he is equal with God and he is 100% God. Jesus came out from eternity into space and time and was born a human being. He lived a perfectly holy human life, and it was possible for him to be holy because he was also God, and God cannot sin. The disciples who learned from Jesus told him “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life. And we have believed and have come to know that You are the Holy One of God” (John 6:68-69).
So Jesus Christ is the perfect Son of God and he died on a cross. But how does that connect to us and our sins?
The Bible says “that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3-4).
Now, let’s see how this connects to you and me because Jesus’ teaching and example does no good for getting rid of our sins. Only a person who has no sin of their own can take someone else’s sin upon them. And the one and only person who ever lived without sin was Jesus. He did not have to die because he was without sin. His accusers had to lie about him to get him convicted. Even Judas, the one who betrayed him, said that Jesus had "innocent blood" (Matt. 27:4).
When Jesus was nailed to the cross he was pure, holy, and free from all sin,…until darkness fell. The Bible says when Jesus was dying on the cross that “from the sixth hour darkness fell upon all the land until the ninth hour” (Matt. 27:45). It was during these three hours of darkness that your sin was actually put into the body of Jesus. 1 Peter 2:24 says that Jesus “bore our sins in His body on the cross, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness; for by His wounds you were healed.” Your sin was in Jesus when he died on the cross. Now since death is the penalty for sin, this means that Jesus actually took your sins and paid your penalty in your place. So now your sins are completely paid for! This is the most wonderful and loving thing that God could do for you: “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).
But what about the rest of the Gospel; that he was raised? Jesus went through the most shameful, humiliating, and excruciating execution ever invented because of your sin. He shed his innocent blood for you, and his corpse lay cold and lifeless in a tomb for three days. But after three days God raised Jesus from the dead back to life, never to taste death again!
There are three main reasons why Jesus is raised from the dead. First, is because Jesus had to be made clean from your sins and mine. God could not let his only Son, whom he loved, be forever apart from him in hell with our sins, so he raised Jesus to newness of life. The second reason is because a dead person cannot save anyone. A dead body cannot get up and pull someone out of the path of an oncoming truck. So Jesus has to be alive to be able to save you.
The third and final reason Jesus is raised from the dead is so that everyone who puts their trust in him for salvation will be united with him in his eternal resurrection life. Let me explain this a little more for us: The Bible says that “if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection” (Rom. 6:5). First of all, when you put your trust in Jesus for eternal life you are united with him in his death. This means that your sins are taken away in his bloody death. And second of all, when you put your trust in Jesus for eternal life you are united with him in his resurrection. This means that, because Jesus was raised from the dead to eternal immortal life, you will be too! It means that all the holiness, love, purity, and joy of being with God are yours because you are united with Jesus when you put your trust in him!
Now the last question to answer is this: What does it mean to trust in Jesus?
To put your trust in something is not just to have a mere head knowledge about something. To put your trust in something is to know what it does and then put it to use. Look at it this way: If you fall off a ship into the ocean and you are drowning, then it does you no good just to look at a life-preserver and know what it does. You need to grab onto one so you can be saved. In the same way, you are dying in your sins and Jesus throws you the life-preserver of his death in your place and his resurrection to save you out of death, and he will pull you into eternal life if you grab onto his life-preserver.
Right now, Jesus is alive with salvation and eternal life waiting for you. He can hear you, so if you want to be saved, just pray and tell Jesus that you know you’re a sinner who needs to be saved, that you are putting your trust only in him to save you from eternal death because of his death and resurrection, and ask him to give you eternal life with God in forgiveness and love and joy.
This is the promise of eternal life that Jesus gave to all who trust in him “I give eternal life to them, and they shall never perish; and no one shall snatch them out of My hand” (John 10:28). “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me shall live even if he dies” (John 11:25).
Nehemiah Ryan © 2009
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