“And this is His commandment: that we should believe on the name of His Son Jesus Christ and love one another, as He gave us commandment.”
(1 John 3:23 – NKJV)
I have a message from God for everyone in the world.
Believe in His Son Jesus Christ. Trust Him as Your Lord and Saviour. Repent of your sin and follow Him, living according to love.
You see you are a sinner – we are all sinners. Sin is evil. It steals, kills, and destroys. If you took sin out of the world you would have a beautiful place, full love, joy, and peace. Sin destroys worlds that are full love, joy, and peace. As a result there is a penalty for sin, and it is death. If you bring sin into a world full love, joy, and peace and subsequently destroy that world, which sin always does, the penalty for it is death. This death takes the form of physical death, spiritual death (separation from God), and eternal death (eternal separation from God, which is called hell).
This world originally was created by God to be a paradise, without any evil or suffering or death, a world full of love, joy, and peace. We have destroyed the world by bringing sin into the world, a crime for which we are all guilty and condemned to death before God for.
This is a very serious, very heavy situation that we find ourselves in. This is a very serious, very heavy situation that you yourself are in.
I have good news!
God loves you – He loves the world!
He doesn’t want any of us to be separated from Him and He doesn’t want us to suffer eternal death in hell. He wants us to have life, even abundant life. God is a great God and He wants the best for us and He is willing to go completely out of His way to save us.
Let me share what He has done for us.
The penalty of death that we have over us due to sin must be paid. God is a righteous judge who judges according to truth and He judges that if we sin we must die. Therefore this judgement is the truth and it must be carried out. For Him to deny this He would have to deny truth, which is something He cannot do because He cannot lie.
So we must die for our sin and God must execute that judgement.
The only thing is however, there is a way around this. If God can find a sacrifice for sin, if He can find someone who doesn’t deserve to die, to take our place in judgement, we can be saved from this judgement. The judgement of death will than fall on the sacrifice rather than us, freeing us from this judgement.
This is God’s plan of salvation for us. He has come up with a sacrifice to take our judgement of sin upon Himself and to die in our place. This sacrifice is His Son Jesus Christ. Two-thousand years ago God sent Jesus into the world as a Man and He lived among us and He was without sin. He ministered for three years when He turned thirty, His story is told in the Bible. At the end of the three years He was executed by means of crucifixion for a crime He didn’t commit, the crime of blaspheme. This death He suffered was our sacrifice for sin. This death satisfies justice’s requirement that we die for our sin. Through this death He took the judgement of the sin of the world upon Himself.
As a result of this the way of salvation has been made for us. All that God requires of us is that we believe in His Son, the one who provided our salvation. That’s all we need to do if we want to be saved. Do this and God will account Christ’s death as the sacrifice for our sin.
Now when you believe in Jesus you need to believe in the Bible’s Jesus, Lord and Saviour.
Through His sacrificial death He is our Saviour. If you want to be saved you need trust that His death on the cross paid your penalty for sin.
He is also Lord.
You see three days after Jesus died He rose from the dead and lived on the earth another forty days. After those forty days He ascended up to heaven to the right hand of the Father where He is to this very day. At the right hand of God He is Lord of all. He is Lord of all because God made Him Lord of all. A Lord is a master. If you want to be saved you also must trust Him as your master and obey Him.
What Jesus wants you to do is repent of your sin and follow Him. You need to turn from rebellion and immorality and sexual immorality and lying and pride and crime and worshipping other gods and a life of denying Him, and you need to turn and follow Him, living according to His word, the Bible, and His Spirit, the Holy Spirit who will dwell within you when you believe in Him. Ultimately you need to live according to love since love is what all of His commands are based on.
This is what believing in Jesus means. Trust Him as Your Lord and Saviour and repent of your sin and follow Him, living according to love. Do this and you will be saved.
This is what God wants you to do.
Why should you do this?
I will give you three reasons.
The first reason you should believe in Jesus is because heaven is going to be awesome.
You see God created us in His image. God is eternal, which makes us immortal. We are all going to live forever whether we like it or not. The only choice we have is where we are going to live forever. We can choose to live with God forever or choose to live apart from God forever. Living with God is called heaven, living apart from Him is called hell.
Heaven is going to be awesome – the best life gets.
The Bible says that the presence of God is the fullness of joy. Joy is the greatest feeling you can feel, it is better than any drug going, and in heaven we are going to have the fullness of joy.
It is truly going to be the best time you could ever imagine. Think of the best party you were ever at, the best holiday you were ever on, the best holiday you could ever imagine going on. Eternity with God is going to be better than that, and it is going to be like that all of the time. It is going to be so good that you will find yourself thinking “I wish this would never end” only to realise that it will never end! And you won’t even have to worry about something bad happening to ruin it because there will be no evil, suffering, or death.
What we are going to have is a world full of great friends, friends who are family, fellow children of God. There is going to be great surroundings. Just look around at the beauty of this world, it is an example of the surroundings God creates. And there is going to be great things to do.
What things?
Look at it this way. Human beings are very active and creative and we come up with a lot of great things to do. We get this from God, we are created in His image. He is a very busy God and He is a lot more creative than we are. Rest assured that eternity will be eventful and fun.
The best part of all will be God Himself. He is the most amazing person imaginable. He is love, He is truth, He is perfect, He is eternal, He knows everything, has all power – and this is just the beginning.
Exactly what is God like? He’s just like Jesus – that’s what Jesus said. If you saw Him you saw the Father. This means He is very much like us – so much so that if you put Him in a human body you would think He was just an ordinary human. This is because we are created in His image, which means at a foundational level that we are like Him and He is like us.
This means, above everything else, that like us He is big into relationships: friendship and family. In fact He wants us all to be His friends and family.
Heaven is going to be awesome and the star attraction is going to be God.
If you have a choice where to spend eternity, which you do, choose heaven. It will be the best decision you ever made.
The second reason you should believe in Jesus is because hell is going to be hell.
You see God created hell for the devil and the demons, it wasn’t meant for us. However when we follow their path of rebellion towards God, when we reject Him and His ways, when through our sin we bring death and destruction into the world, we become like them in God’s eyes. In fact sinners are called children of the devil in the Bible including by Jesus Himself.
Consequently God will send unrepentant sinners, people who reject His salvation, to hell. This is not a nice message, but it is the truth and if the truth be told, the primary messenger of this message is Jesus Christ. Jesus spoke more on hell than anyone else in the Bible.
The picture the Bible paints of hell is not pretty. It will not be a fun place where all of the world’s rebels will get together and have a big party that never ends.
The Bible teaches that it will be a place of torment. It is a place where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, in other words a place of great anguish. It is a place of shame and contempt. It is a place that is worse than sickness and death. It is a place where a person will have no rest.
Ultimately it is a place that lasts forever in which you are never allowed be with God – you are forever destroyed from His presence. This is what makes hell, hell. It is knowing for eternity that you can never be in the greatest place imaginable with the absolute greatest Person possible. It is something that will eat you like worms eating at you, and it will burn you like fire burning you. And it will never, ever, end.
Make no mistake, hell will be hell, and it is not a place that anyone in their right mind would choose to go to.
The third reason you should believe in Jesus is because God will work in your life in this world.
You don’t have to wait to die and go to heaven to have a relationship with God and reap the benefits of believing in Jesus. Your relationship with Him starts right away as do the benefits.
When you believe in Jesus He sends the Holy Spirit to dwell with you all the days of your life and He works in your life in many numerous ways. Most significantly He guides you through life and sustains you in life’s toughest times.
Christ will also bring deliverance and healing into your life, especially healing of the heart. He also meets our needs, taking care of us all the days of our lives here on earth.
Ultimately He promises us abundant life, which is the best life you can have, the fullness of life, full of things money can’t buy including peace and joy in your heart.
Those who know the difference between living in this world with Christ and without Him, know there is no comparison. When you have Him, you cannot live without Him.
These are real reasons to listen to God and believe in His Son Jesus.
If you have not made the decision to believe in Jesus, today is the day. The Bible says that today is the day of salvation. After you die is the day of judgement and you won’t have a choice. Today is the day of salvation and you do have a choice. Make the right choice.
The right choice is choosing to believe in Jesus, to trust Him as your Lord and Saviour, and to repent, turning from your sin and following Him, living according to love. This is what God wants you to do, this choice will bring you eternal life.
Make this choice and live.
This is my message to the world.