Heaven won’t be for those who have earned it by their own success in being good people; it will be for those who have been rescued by the Great Redeemer. Will we accept this rescue or reject it? Answering that question is our most crucial challenge.
For all Job knew, he was going to die from his afflictions, but if so, he was unconcerned: “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth” (Job 19:25,26). Job knew God would be waiting for him on the other side.
Confronting the awfulness of our sin, without self-pity or evasion of responsibility, we should grieve how we’ve rebelled against God’s love. And we should yearn to be with Him in eternity, whatever we may have lost by our sins in this life.
We tend to see people only through the lens of their past. And unfortunately, if a person’s past is so sinful that we deem them unfit candidates for God’s grace, then we probably won’t “waste the time” it takes to present the gospel to them.
Human beings have always faced an ultimate choice. Do we lay aside our self-sufficiency and trust in our Creator, or do we double down on our self-sufficiency and trust in human effort and ingenuity? This is the basic choice that we must make.
Rather than dismissing the distinction between godliness and ungodliness by saying, “Only God knows who His people are,” we need to be growing in our ability to make this distinction rightly. Yes, we must be humble. But we must also be honest.
Let’s avoid thinking that “eternal life” is different only in that it lasts longer than our earthly life. It is indeed “eternal” because it is unending, but more than that, it is of a different quality. It is not only longer, but it is better.
The fact that, as Joseph knew, sin is always against God should weigh more heavily in our thinking than any social consideration. Social consequences are serious, no doubt, but separation from God is the worst of the worst things that can happen.
It was surely God who chose whom He would save, but what He chose was a class of people defined by a criterion: the “obedience of faith” (Romans 1:5). This ...
To say, as Calvinism does, that even as infants we are guilty of Adam’s sin — and are in a lost spiritual condition because of what Adam did — is ...
Naaman’s obedience certainly did not “earn” him the cleansing of his leprosy. It had no “merit” that would cure him. Nevertheless, if he had not been humble enough to accept ...
The hope of the gospel is that in eternity we will be with God. Having lived all our lives in this broken world, frustrated by our inability to have direct, ...
Our “personhood” can’t be explained from below itself — its origin can only be from above itself. The non-personal could not have produced the personal, no matter how many trillions ...
The Scriptures are no ordinary documents. To disregard the authority with which God speaks to us in the Scriptures is to do a very foolish thing. In all the great ...
In the Parable of the Sower, Jesus used the analogy of four kinds of soil to teach that hearers have different hearts — just as the seed sown by a ...
Who’s to say what is “impossible”? It’s a strange world, is it not? Let us, then, be open-minded enough to admit the possibility that the resurrection COULD have happened — ...
In addition to being our High Priest and King, Christ is our Judge (John 5:26,27). For those who have accepted the gospel faithfully, the coming judgment holds no fear, only ...
Either we should accept that the resurrection occurred and obey the gospel that is based upon it — or deny the resurrection and dispense with the gospel as nothing more ...
Thomas declared that he would need to see Jesus for himself in order to believe He had been raised from the dead. But later, when Jesus appeared and Thomas was ...
The apostle John wrote to his brethren urging them to ground themselves in what they had been taught by the apostles (1 John 1:1-4; 2:24; 4:1,6). If they left this ...