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Why Do I Need Jesus?
Posted
by
arsindelve, Executive Director, Delve Christian Ministries
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Heaven is a perfect place and God's standards dictate that we must be perfect. Yet, every one of us are sinners and have failed to meet that standard. The only hope we have is to place our faith in Jesus Christ through whom we can be forgiven and made right with God. That is our only hope of reaching Heaven.
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"Either sin is with you, lying on your shoulders, or it is lying on Christ, the Lamb of God. Now if it is lying on your back, you are lost; but if it is resting on Christ, you are free, and you will be saved."- Martin Luther
Christians often talk about having been "saved" and speak of Jesus Christ as their "savior". To the non-Christian, it's not at all clear what problem exists and why anyone needs saving at all. Saved from what, exactly? This is a very difficult problem, perhaps one of the hardest in Christianity.
Let's begin with the fact that you and I are free to make choices. God made us this way because He loves us. He did not make us to be puppets or robots because true love can never be forced or demanded. It can never come from someone who is unable to make any other choice. Only when someone makes a decision from their own will and desire can it be said to be complete and true love. This is what God wants from us - to love Him because we freely desire to do so.
Because we are free, we sometimes make wrong decisions. Through our choices, we hurt others, we hurt ourselves and we hurt God. We sin. Each and every one of us has done this at least a few times in our lives. We have known what was right and what was wrong and we consciously, deliberately chose to do wrong. At that moment, we rebelled against God and said to Him, "What I want right now is more important than you." We know this hurts God we know it's wrong but we don't care, we're doing it anyway.
Because God loves us and wants us to be free, He permits these rebellions. He will not interfere; He will not force us to obey Him or love Him.
The Problem is Sin
Understanding Jesus Christ as our Savior begins with understanding this very important point - you are a sinner. It's painful to hear and painful to admit, but the truth is that you have broken God's laws knowingly and willfully. We all have, each and everyone of us. As Paul writes in Romans 3:23, "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."
If you can come this far and are willing to admit that at least once in your life, you have chosen to do the wrong thing when the right thing was staring you in the face, then you are very close to understanding why you need Jesus. This is the hardest step for most people. No one likes to be told they are a sinner. It's hurts our pride and offends our sense of how decent we think we are. This truth, if you will allow yourself to acknowledge it, will become the seed of real understanding about who you are and who God is.
God is perfect and has never sinned. Furthermore, heaven is a perfect place which no one can enter unless they, too, are perfect. If you imagine for just one moment, a person with sinful desires - a desire to steal or lie or cause pain - admitted into heaven and how that would alter it's perfect nature, then you will understand that it could never be the place we hope and want it to be with those desires still lingering inside our hearts.
Yet we also know that we have all sinned. We have separated ourselves from Him through our rebellion.
If this were the end of the story, it would be an inescapable truth that none of us can ever pass through the gates of Heaven and none of us can be with God when we die. With these sinful desires resting in us and no hope of ever changing our hearts, we would be forever lost.
It is at this point that most people strenuously object and cry, "Not fair! I'm a good person, I don't deliberately hurt people." I'm sure you try not to do wrong. But you have. So have I. The point is not whether you're good. For the most part, people we know and meet are "good". But by what standard? When we say this, we simply mean, "above average." We can compare them to murderers and rapists and surely, we can call them good. But is that the right standard? What if we compare them to God, who is perfect? By that standard, none of us are very good.
Perfection is the Standard
But why should that be the standard? Why can't God let the standard be something obtainable which most of us can achieve? There are several problems with this. First, whatever standard you set will make some people very unhappy. It will always be too lenient for some and too restrictive for others. Second, a standard less than perfection is like an admission of failure. We would be asking God to settle for something less than what He intended us to be before we rebelled. So, what should the standard be?
In my early twenties, I used to referee ice hockey. Almost every time I would referee the 4 and 5 years olds, the coaches implored me to be lenient when calling the play offside. "If it's close," they would say, "let it go." And in the beginning I tried this, but it was always a dismal failure. Eventually, I realized that I have to call the offside precisely, because doing anything else is actually less fair to the children.
The two problems we looked at earlier apply perfectly to this example. The first is that you can never set a standard which everyone will like. If you're too lenient, the opposing team will cry foul. ("Come on ref, he was two feet over! Are you blind?") Set it too stringently and the offending team is upset ("Come on ref, it was just a few feet! I thought you were going to go easy!"). No standard except the perfect standard can ever make everyone happy because it's the only standard we can all agree on.
There is a more subtle reason this policy doesn't work. It's demeaning to the players and it gives them no incentive to improve. What you're telling the players is, "You're not good enough to play real hockey." We give them an inferior, watered-down version of the game. They can meet the low standard but it's just a faint shadow of the real thing. It's not hockey. It's empty and ultimately unsatisfying. We make the game something less, instead of making the player something more.
The standard needs to be perfection and nothing less. Heaven should be a perfect, holy place where we live with our perfect God for all eternity without any of the sinful desires that we know on earth. Can any of us really want the "easy" version of heaven where we relax the requirements and permit occasional sin? What kind of heaven would that be? Instead of making heaven an easier place to achieve, why not make us better so that we become worthy of it?
Jesus is the Solution
So that is the problem - standing in the presence of God and living with Him in Heaven can only be obtained by someone who is without sin. No one who has ever sinned a single time in their lives can be worthy of eternal life in heaven. Our rebellion has and will forever separate us from our perfect God.
God loves us too much to allow us to be separated from him eternally, and so he has provided a plan for us to be rescued from this dilemma. Salvation comes from His Son, Jesus Christ. When we call Jesus our "savior", or when we talk about being "saved" - this is the eternal problem from which we have been saved. If we will permit Him to do so, Jesus will save us from our sinful nature so that we can be perfect in God's eyes and we can live with him eternally in heaven when we die.
Please continue on to this important article to discover why Jesus' death on the cross provides the means of your salvation and what you must do to receive it.
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Comments
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Christians say that in Heaven they are perfectly free and yet cannot sin. Why then is this explanation always given for the need for Jesus. If you're free in Heaven and cannot sin why can't you be free now and not sin. Or maybe sin is not due to free will but because of some other reason,
Roger S.
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8/7/2007 9:04:19 PM
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anonymous
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You could have also asked (and many have) how it can be that someone can be locked in hell for eternity, with no chance of getting out. Cannot someone in Hell repent and turn to God? No, they cannot any more than someone in Heaven can sin or turn from God. It's no longer about free-will, it's about our nature.
As we go through this life, we are moving in one direction or the other. We are distancing ourselves from God, becoming more self-absorbed and turning into someone who wants nothing to do with God - and Hell will be the destination. Otherwise, we are moving towards God and with His help, becoming more Holy and purified - and Heaven will be our destination. The more we move in one direction or the other, the more we become what we are moving towards. We pick up speed in that direction, and it becomes easier and easier to do good, or to do evil (thanks for Greg Boyd for this idea). We gain momentum in the direction of our decisions. Soon, goodness or evil are no longer choices - they are our nature.
Once we die, the choice to be with God or not is taken away from us in once sense, but in another sense, it is the culmination of every choice we made one earth - the sum of all choices. Why not just make it impossible to sin now? Because there is a choice to be made and we do have-free will, but those choices carry over into eternity because they shape who we will become in after death. Once we have become that being, the choice become inconsequential.
I hope this helps. Thanks for your question.
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9/29/2007 8:40:39 AM
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arsindelve, Executive Director, Delve Christian Ministries
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I love jesus and these words have turned me and my friends life around.See i'm going to tell you my life story.When I was 2 I started praying by the time i was 3 i stopped now i am 8 and just started praying again and i feel a lot better
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7/17/2008 9:32:14 AM
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anonymous
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