The Answer

“Most assuredly I say to you, he who believes in me has eternal life.”  John 6:47 




I would like you to think for a minute about what you would say if you arrived at the gates of heaven and God asked you why he should let you in.

My Pastor recently told us about a survey he read that said many more people believe in heaven than in hell.  His response was, that belief was very convenient for them!  The fact is, people, both Christians and non-Christians, have many different opinions about heaven and what gets you in and what keeps you out.  I heard a talk recently by the son of a notorious mafia mob boss.  The son had accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior and had spoken many times with his father about his faith and what it meant.  The father, who professed to be a Christian, told his son that he was not worried; because he was sure God would let him into heaven, since over his lifetime he had certainly done more good deeds than bad.  His belief consisted of a large scale with the good deeds on one side and the bad deeds on the other, and if the good side of the scale is heavier, you’re in!

The idea that heaven is the reward we receive for living a good life is the most commonly held belief in all world religions.  Outside of Christianity the reward may be called by other names, but the general idea is the same – there is a reward we receive in the afterlife that is given to us on the basis of our behavior. 

I was raised on the other side of the spectrum from the mob boss, in a church that took sin, heaven and judgment very seriously. I grew up believing it was wrong to ever assume you were saved, because, when you accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior, your past sins were forgiven, but from then on you were expected to be on your way to becoming perfect with the help of the Holy Spirit. If you did sin, every sin had to be confessed and forgiven or it remained on your record; and any sin remaining on your record when you died would mean you were not saved.

 I was born into a church-going family, but I officially made the decision to become a Christian at the age of 10.  Therefore, according to what I was taught, all of the sins I had committed from the ages of 0-10 were forgiven, but after that the burden was on me to let the Holy Spirit make me perfect. I had to be prepared to confess each sin I did commit; preferably before I went to sleep each night, in case I died in my sleep or was hit by a bus as soon as I left the house in the morning; because if I died with any unconfessed sin, I was lost.

Many churches still teach this today but most of those that do, cut their believers some slack by making a distinction between faults, mistakes and sins.  Faults and mistakes, they say, if unconfessed, won’t remain on your record and keep you out of heaven, which leaves only the big intentional sins to be confessed.  This interpretation gives the believer at least a glimmer of hope; a possibility of meeting the requirements for salvation.  My church, however, offered no such escape clause.  When I said they took sin seriously, even eating between meals was considered a sin! The list of sins was endless. There was not only the list of sins I had actually committed, there was also the list of the good things I should have done and didn’t do, which were also sins.

Needless to say, by the time I was eleven it was painfully obvious I wasn’t perfect and I was fairly certain I already had unconfessed sins on my record, since I knew I couldn’t possibly have remembered everything l had done or not done! Discouragement set in at that point.  I began answering every altar call, begging for forgiveness and mercy.  No one wanted to spend eternity with Jesus more than I did, but it appeared hopeless.  In a few minutes I will explain to you why, looking back, I am actually grateful for that!

It was, literally, only by the grace of God that I did not give up.  I hung in there, hoping against hope that God would have mercy on me.  I was in my late twenties/early thirties before someone finally told me the Good News.  In scripture the word “gospel” in the original Greek means “good news”.  I can honestly remember feeling guilty as a teen because I secretly wondered why it was called that.  I concluded that it must only be good news for good people, and I was obviously not good enough.  Consequently, when someone did finally present to me what scripture actually teaches about grace, although my heart swelled with hope, I was terribly afraid that this news was too good to be true.  I wanted with all of my heart to believe it, but I knew that if I believed it and it wasn’t true, I would be lost.  To me it was a matter of life and death!

Fortunately, two of the good things my church had taught me were that scripture was the inspired word of God and could be trusted to be true, and that every believer could count on the Holy Spirit to teach them. You didn’t have to be a preacher with a degree for the Holy Spirit to help you to understand the truth. With that assurance in my heart, I decided to “lock myself away” with only the book of Romans and the Holy Spirit until I understood what the Bible really had to say about how a person was “saved” (or how they got to heaven.) And, when I came out on the other side of that study, I believed that the good news of God’s grace was really good news and it completely transformed my life!

For the next few minutes I’d like to share with you, from the first three chapters of the book of Romans, the answers that I found to the question of what God will be waiting to hear from you when you reach the pearly gates; as well as the differences between what the Mob Boss believed, what I believed, what all other major religions believe and what scripture actually has to say about what is required to get through those gates.

The reason I turned to the Book of Romans for the answers to my life and death questions was because it is the clearest, most methodical presentation of the gospel in scripture.  Paul presents the message step by step.  The first three chapters are actually intended to bring everyone to the point of hopelessness and despair. The reason Paul begins this way is because, until we are totally convinced of the absolute desperation of our situation, we will not be interested in the remedy.  This is the reason I am actually grateful for the despair I lived in all those years.  When I finally heard the good news I was completely prepared to receive it, like a drowning man would a life preserver!

In chapter 1, the verse we are all probably most familiar with is verse 16, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile.” But the next verse is equally important, “For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: ‘The righteous will live by faith.’” 

The reason we all know verse 16 and aren’t as familiar with 17 is actually at the heart of our problem.  We human beings love to have everything be about us.  We want the focus to be on us!  We like the idea of the gospel being about God’s power, but we want it to be all about God’s power IN US.  If it’s God’s power in us, then it’s about US. The focus will be on how and what I am doing for God.  But, if you look at the verses, they actually say this gospel, this good news, is about God’s power FOR us who believe.  It is about God’s righteousness, not ours.  It’s about God’s power to, through his son, give us his own righteousness, and all we have to do is believe, or have faith in God’s power to give us that righteousness – it’s a gift we accept by faith alone, from first to last!  The focus then, is on God and God alone, which is where it should be!  The danger comes when we begin putting ourselves into the equation; thinking that we can add anything to what God has provided for our rescue.

The rest of chapter 1 tells the story of how sin has taken over the world and its thinking.  Even though God has plainly revealed himself to the unbelieving world through his creation, they rejected the truth and their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened; so, they have no excuse to offer God when they stand before him.  They can’t say ‘we had no basis to believe you were real, so we didn’t believe.’

Chapter 2 begins by focusing on anyone who might be feeling superior to those poor schmucks described in chapter 1, “You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.” (Romans 2:1) The next few verses are basically the same, stating in different ways the fact that we are all a mess. We are all aware of God’s mercy and kindness, which is meant to make us sorry for our behavior and then cause us to stop acting that way; yet, none of us stop.  We just keep messing up over and over. 

Remember the churches that let their members off the hook by making a distinction between faults, mistakes and sins?  The most common word for sin in the Greek is hamartia and it actually means “missing the mark”.  The “mark” that we are missing is the righteousness of God.  Anything less than “hitting the mark” of the perfect righteousness of God is “missing the mark”; or sin.  God sees no difference between faults, mistakes and sins to give us an easy out.  Verses 6 and 7 say, “God will repay each person according to what they have done.  To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality, he will give eternal life.”  The words “persistence in doing good”, in the Greek, are in a tense that means to continuously, on an ongoing basis, do good.  In other words, to those who continuously, always, do good, God will give eternal life. But Paul has already said in verse 5 that because of our stubbornness and unrepentant hearts we are storing up wrath against ourselves for the day of God’s wrath when his righteous judgment will be revealed.  Feeling hopeless yet?

At the end of chapter 2, going into the first part of chapter 3, Paul, who has been mainly talking to the Gentiles up ‘til now, says that if you sin without the law (like the Gentiles), you’ll be judged apart from the law; but if you have the law and you sin, you’ll be judged by the law.  Then he begins to deal with those who had been given the law; those who had been entrusted with the very words of God and had witnessed his power and glory and experienced his presence in their lives; yet all of those blessings were still not enough to enable them to obey the law God had given them.  Paul points out that they were just as guilty of sinning as the Gentiles.  Then, verse 13 sums it all up, “For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous.”  I will get back to this verse in a minute, but let’s move on to chapter 3 first.

Chapter 3 gives us a scathing description of the human condition.  It is so scathing, in fact, that everyone I know who reads it has the same reaction, “These verses aren’t talking about me. I’m certainly not this bad. This is a description of the really bad people out there.”  But in reality, what Paul has done in Romans 3:10-18 is to collect a number of verses from the Old Testament where God himself is describing mankind, and put them all in one place so that there can be no question of how God views humanity:

¹⁰ As it is written:

“There is no one righteous, not even one;
¹¹ there is no one who understands,
no one who seeks God.
¹² All have turned away,
they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
not even one.”
¹³ “Their throats are open graves;
their tongues practice deceit.”
“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
¹⁴ “Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
¹⁵ “Their feet are swift to shed blood;
¹⁶ ruin and misery mark their ways,
¹⁷ and the way of peace they do not know.”
¹⁸ “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

And then he sums it up by saying in verse 19, “Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God.”  Whether you are a Gentile, who never had the law but broke your own internal moral code, or a Jew, who had the Law of God, you stand before God with nothing to say. Then Paul lands the final crushing blow in verse 20, ^“Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin.” 

Now let’s go back to, verse 13 of Chapter 2 where Paul said, “For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous.” Yet, here in Chapter 3 verse 20 he tells us that no one will be declared righteous by keeping the law.  What is he saying?  He is saying, “Here is the criterion for salvation: perfect obedience to the law; but no one can do it!” 

Paul has brought us carefully to the point of hopelessness, and then finally shows us our only hope:

^“ But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe...for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”  (verses 21-24)  Because no one can ever be declared righteous by keeping the law, God has provided a righteousness for us that is apart from the law, and that righteousness comes only through faith in Jesus Christ, to all who believe.  None of us can earn or deserve this righteousness.  Our justification is given freely by his grace, or his totally undeserved love and mercy.

To be “justified” doesn’t simply mean to be declared not guilty.  It means so much more than that.  It means to be declared righteous, with the very righteousness of God himself, fully satisfying the requirements for salvation! What an amazing gift!

So, if you arrived at the gates of heaven and God asked you why he should let you in, the only acceptable answer will always be, “Because of my faith in Jesus Christ alone as my righteousness.”