"You Can Know For Sure If You Are Going To Heaven"

A lot of you have asked "How do I live like a Christian"? Well in order to live a spirit filled Christian life you first of all need to be saved. Evangelism Explosion is a great course that explains the gospel in a 13 week study. Roughly 17 years ago I took the course and it helped me not only have the tools to share the gospel of Jesus but it helped me understand by own faith.

The bible was written so that we may know how to inherit eternal life.

1 John 5:13 "I write these things to you who believe in the name of the son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life."

"If you were to die today and God were to ask you, "Why should I let you into my heaven?" what would you say?" Over the years I would have to say that 85% of the answers I get are "I have tried to be a good person, I have tried to be a good parent, I have tried to go to church and teach Sunday school and I have tried to give money to the poor." The key words in all these answer are I HAVE TRIED. Instead of me telling you that answer is wrong I am going to tell you that I have good news for you and that is

"Heaven is a free gift." Romans 3:23 says that "For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." Now if someone were to give you a gift and you tried to pay even a penny for it then it would not be a gift anymore, would it? Of course not. But in this world we associate all good things with something that we either have to work hard for or sacrifice a lot to get. It is hard to wrap our minds around heaven as free. Well it is free to us but cost Someone His life.

A lot of people in this life try to do THINGS that would put them into a favorable position with Jesus. If I do _________ then Jesus should love me. Plus my life has had so many trials that God will take pity on me.

Ephesians 2:8,9 "For it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith, and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast."

Here we see that God's grace is what gets us into heaven but look at what Gods grace is. God says that no amount of works, not even ONE will get us into heaven. God does not want anyone to boast because of his works. So now you may be thinking "If I have done ALL these things over the years then how do I get in to heaven?"

First of all we need to realize that everyone on this earth is a sinner. Sin is any word, thought, deed or attitude that falls short of the glory of God.

Romans 3:23 "For all have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God."

So if we all fall short and no sin is allowed in heaven then we are starting to see that we are in deep trouble.

Exodus 37b "Yet He does not leave the guilty unpunished."

Since God is a Holy and just God, God MUST punish sin. So here we have a huge dilemma. Heaven and God are perfect. Since we now know the definition of sin let's say that you only committed 5 sins a day. Since sin is any thought or deed by the time you get to work in the morning you may have already committed 10 sins, maybe even more. By the end of the day you may have 100 sins accountable to you. But for numbers sake lets just use 5 a day. Five sins a day times a year is over 1,800 sins a year. Over and average lifetime we would be well over 70,000 sins. If we stand before God and NOT ONE SIN is allowed into heaven then YIKES. God would look at not one page but a book and we would be finished.

So God saw a need that you and I are dead in our sins with the need of a Savior. There is NO WAY that we can get to heaven in what we do or who we are. Now in order to save mankind God needed a perfect sacrifice, one without sin to pay for all those of us with sin. Jesus was born of a virgin and Jesus was God in the flesh.

John 1:1,14 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.