I’m not trying to sell you anything. Genuinely I’m not.
When’s the last time you received a free gift? Maybe your birthday? Christmas? Could be someone handed you this card and you’re gracious enough to count that as a gift.
The Bible says that God offers every man and woman on earth a gift, and if you didn’t grow up going to church, this will probably sound stranger than what you’re expecting.
God created you because he wants to have a relationship with you. This is a good thing, and simultaneously a difficult thing.
A relationship with God is the closest friendship you could ever have. He knows you in a way that nobody else can. He can see inside your brain. He knows your thoughts. He understands your feelings and dreams that you don’t even have the words to express (and when you try, people don’t really seem like they get it). God gets it.
But it’s also a relationship with God, the Master of creation, the Lord of Hosts, the infinite, almighty, majestic one who has existed before anything existed. You are extremely precious to him. But you are not the center of his world.
God cares more deeply about you than anyone in the world can even possibly come close to. And it’s not a Machiavellian kind of care. He doesn’t just care about you and love you so he can get what he wants. He is the only one who actually is able to discern with right wisdom what is the best way for you to go. He wants you to follow him and to trust him. He wants to be the one leading your life.
Every single person on earth, given the choice, chooses to do what they think is right instead of following God.
Why? Think about it for a second. In your own life — why?
For me it was because I knew that his name “the Lord” means he’s the boss. He gets to call the shots. But…I want to call the shots.
And this is sin. Sin can be a trigger word for people. We feel judged. We feel like “who is someone else to tell me what I’m doing is wrong, or to give me a set of arbitrary rules to follow?”
But hold on…what is sin?
In the Bible, sin is not primarily a list of bad behaviors. It is a condition. The word most often translated “sin” in the New Testament literally means to miss the mark — to fall short of what you were designed to be.
This is not how God created us. Something went wrong at the very beginning of the human story, and every generation since has inherited the fallout.
No one has to teach a child to lie, to take what isn’t theirs, or to put themselves first. It comes naturally. The things we do wrong are symptoms. The disease is deeper. We are, by nature, bent away from God and toward ourselves.
So it’s not just that we’ve done bad things. It’s that we can’t stop. And do you know that even if we wanted to come to God and were willing to sacrifice everything for him, it wouldn’t matter? The damage has already been done. If you stole your neighbor’s wallet, would a judge let you off the hook just because you also sometimes donate money to a good cause? We’ve all broken God’s law, and he can’t let us off the hook just because we try to treat other people kindly.
God is a Father, but he is also the Judge of the whole world. A good judge cannot look at evil and pretend it didn’t happen, and a father who lets his children hurt other people and get away with it is considered negligent even by human standards.
“Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?”The punishment is go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Except it’s not jail. It’s hell.
So what can you do?
Nothing. You owe a debt you cannot pay.
Game over. Bro is cooked.
Around 30 AD in Roman-occupied Judea, Jesus of Nazareth was crucified on a Roman cross under the authority of the governor Pontius Pilate — although Pilate himself wanted to let him go. This is one of the most historically attested events of the ancient world.
The Bible itself contains four separate accounts of Jesus’ life and death, written by different authors within the lifetimes of eyewitnesses. One of them, Luke, was a physician and historian who opens his account by explaining that he carefully investigated everything from the beginning, interviewing eyewitnesses so that his reader could have certainty about what happened. To put that in perspective: most of what we know about Alexander the Great was written over three hundred years after he died. The four Gospels were written within twenty-five to sixty-five years of the events they describe.
Outside the Bible, the Roman historian Tacitus recorded Christ’s execution under Pontius Pilate in his Annals (c. 116 AD). The Jewish historian Josephus referenced Jesus and his crucifixion in his Antiquities (c. 93 AD). Even the Jewish Talmud, which is hostile to Christianity, acknowledges that Jesus existed and was executed.
In 1961, archaeologists in Caesarea discovered a limestone inscription bearing Pontius Pilate’s name and title — physical confirmation of the man the Gospels name as the one who authorized the crucifixion.
Three days later, the tomb where Jesus was buried — sealed and guarded by ruthless Roman soldiers — was found empty. Jesus appeared alive, in a new body, to his followers on multiple occasions over forty days. The apostle Paul, writing within twenty-five years of the event, records that Jesus appeared to more than five hundred people at once — and Paul adds that most of them were still alive at the time of his writing, as if to say: go ask them yourself. These people were willing to die standing by that claim, and many of them did.
Why does any of this matter to you?
Because the man on that cross is the center of God’s world. His name is Jesus. He is God’s son — God himself in human form, the King of Heaven. And Jesus is the one person in all of history who never sinned. The only one who didn’t owe the debt. God sent him to pay yours.
Right before Jesus died on the cross, he said “It is finished!”
Awesome…so what does that mean? As Jesus was giving up his life, the full payment for the sins of the world was completed. He had finished being punished for what you and I have done. Jesus took what we deserved so we could receive what he deserved. There is nothing left for you to add. You can’t add to it. It’s done.
And then he rose up outta that grave!
If Jesus stayed dead, the debt wasn’t paid. It would mean sin won. Jesus is victorious because death could not hold him — because he has no sin. The resurrection is God’s receipt. It’s the proof that the payment went through. It’s the proof that it actually worked.
“And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.”It means that the God who made you and knows everything about you has entered into your world. He doesn’t loom over you, lofty and otherworldly, waiting for you to just get it right. He left his world and entered yours. He took on a weak body like yours. He gave up everything he had in heaven to come to earth to suffer and die for you, because he loves you. He came all this way to get you.
The question for you is...
This is a free gift. It cost God everything. You cannot earn it or work for it, but you can receive it.
“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”If you are willing to trust in Christ alone to be your salvation, you can do it right now. You can pray this prayer or your own prayer. It doesn’t have to sound pretty, but it will require humility:
This prayer, prayed genuinely (even with some doubts) is a request to which God will always say yes. “Whoever comes to me I will never cast out.” (John 6:37)
This is God’s offer, and this is God’s warning.
Christ came into the world to save sinners. But there is a day coming when God will judge the works of every man and woman.
Do not put off this decision until a better time. Do not wait until you’re clean enough or good enough to be ready for God. You will never get there. Anyway, why would you try to clean yourself off with wet wipes before getting in the shower? Get into the shower of Christ. He will clean you, he will purify you, he will begin to put new desires for right things in you.
Christ took the judgment that you deserve so you don’t have to suffer it. If you refuse this mercy, you’ll bear it yourself.
I am imploring you: be reconciled to God.
“But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.”“After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne.”
Revelation 7:9