Last night on one of our favorite shows, they “killed
off” one of the main characters. The
daughter of the woman who was in love with the deceased said, “Mom, he’s in
heaven.” The mother (who is an atheist)
replied, “How do you know?” To which the
girl replied: “He was a good person.” This seems to be the consensus among those
who really don’t know Scripture, because NOTHING says we will “get into heaven”
just because we are “good people.” By
whose “measuring stick” do we know we’re “good”? What “good” means to me, doesn’t necessarily
mean the same thing to someone else….
Anyway, a similar scenario caught my attention on the
day I “got saved” in a little town in Missouri on a cold January day in 1995. God
had just assigned a handsome farmer named Ellis to “lead me to the Lord” and
this was our first date. (In a CHURCH of
all places! Who’da thunk it, LOL! Me, at the ripe ol’ age of 44, sitting in a
church on a DATE! I truly thought all Christians were hypocrites
and pretenders, and it upset me to know that this new man in my life was a “Bible
thumper.” But I had high hopes that I
would eventually get him over his “Jesus” kick….)
Well, the joke was on me because the pastor at First
Baptist happened to say just the “right” things that day, starting with
this: “Let’s suppose for a moment you died today and
stood before the Lord God, and He asked you, ‘Why should I let you into My
heaven?’…What would your answer be?”
Peering at Ellis, I grinned and shrugged. Until that moment, I had never really thought
about it. God had never asked me that
question, LOL! Yes, I had had several “divine
experiences” during the course of my life, and I definitely “believed” in God –
but I had never heard that you could “have a personal relationship” with Him
until Ellis told me. (I had had some
truly mysterious experiences in my life.
To name just a couple, I met Jesus when I was in a three-week coma just
before I turned 21; and nobody was hurt when I was involved in a high speed
auto accident on a freeway outside of Houston, when some pregnant woman with
two kids in the car cut me off, and I broadsided her. We should all have died that day, or at
least, been seriously hurt….)
Regardlesss, far as I knew, I would automatically end
up in heaven. After all, I was a good
person who just happened to have lived through many misfortunes and been forced
to endure hell on Earth.
An uneasy silence hung in the air before Pastor Wil spoke
again. “Would your response be something like, ‘I am a religious person trying
to live a Christian life the best I can’?” he asked. “Or, ‘I go to church, give to the poor, help
people in need, and have always tried to be a good person’?”
“Of
course that’s what I’d say,” I thought. “What
else can you say when you’re standing in front of your Maker?”
But the pastor’s next
comment knocked me for a loop: “If your answer to any of these questions was ‘yes’
then you’d be wrong because none of those things would get you
into heaven! The only thing that gets you into
heaven is your belief on the shed blood of Jesus Christ – by your faith
in Jesus Christ who was our Sin Sacrifice and died on the cross to pay the
penalty for our sins….”
Sin Sacrifice! The words resounded in my mind. Jesus was our Sin Sacrifice? What on Earth did that mean?
As if in answer to my question, Wil’s sermon went on to
explain why and how Jesus was the divine Being sent by God to forever abolish
the need for the animal sin sacrifices required of God’s people since the day
Adam and Eve were evicted from the Garden.
If you believed in Christ with all your heart, Wil explained (and of
course, I am paraphrasing quite a bit here, but I’m doing my best to get the
gist down), then you were “a brand new creature” who would be assured a place
in heaven.
I couldn’t believe my ears! Here was the answer to the
question I had posed once while looking at this dead Jesus hanging on a cross
in a Methodist church (whose threshold I crossed ONLY to join my singles group
on Sundays). I had asked him in my mind
as I stood staring at his lifeless body: “WHO
are you?” And the reason I had
asked that question was because he seemed to crop up all the time, when least
expected. Throughout my life I never
managed to get completely away from Christians hounding me about “getting
saved.” It had been truly irritation
sometimes….
But Pastor Wil’s simple explanation had explained
everything for me: Jesus was our SIN
Sacrifice; THAT’s who he was!
WOW! Why had no one ever told me
this before?
As if guided by some unseen force that was telling Wil
exactly what I needed to hear, he went on to explain that God, in His wisdom,
grace and mercy, had provided the world an easier way to atone for sins and
that was why, in the modern world, the priests and rabbis and whatnot, weren’t
required to kill innocent animals anymore….
A faint memory emerged from the archives of my mind
about some book I’d read, or some movie I had seen that had included the idea
of the Old Testament God demanding blood sacrifices for man’s every little
infraction. One thing that had remained
with me was the idea that God had killed an animal to cover the nakedness of Adam
and Eve who suddenly knew “shame” because of their blatant disobedience to keep
away from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. I remembered thinking how awful it must have
been for Adam and Eve to have an animal they had loved and named, being killed
in their presence.
As disgusting as the animal sacrifice thing was to me,
it made sense in a way because God Himself had provided a “covering” for us,
just as He had for Adam and Eve. Jesus,
from what I had just learned, was the covering for those who actually believed
in God and all those fairy tale-like stories in the Bible….They WERE just fairy
tales….right?
Somehow, I found it incomprehensible that a good and
perfect person like Jesus – whom I had actually had the privilege of seeing
while in my coma – had died in my place.
After all, I was the one who had sinned; not him! On the other hand, as Wil was in the process
of explaining, God always demanded a perfect, blemish-free, clean sacrifice –
which meant I wasn’t qualified to atone for my own sins. Ohhh…this was just too weird. I truly wanted to get up and dash out of
there!
A thousand thoughts crashed through my mind at
once. My rapist adoptive father always
proclaimed to be a Christian – so was he in heaven? (He had died a few years
back, and I had always hoped he was in hell!) If he was in heaven, I didn’t
want to go! On the other hand, it wasn’t
up to me who did and didn’t get to enter Heaven, was it?....
“Nobody,” Pastor Wil was saying, “is good enough to
enter Heaven on their own. Nobody. Our works are like filthy rags to God. He is holy; He is perfect. Nothing imperfect can come into His presence. That is why Jesus took the sin of the entire
world upon His shoulders. He chose
to do it; He didn’t have to. Thanks to Him,
and Him only, we have a chance at eternal life. The moment He died, we were all
forgiven, every one of us. When He died,
He rose again and as a result, we have the Holy Spirit to remind us to BE like
Him. All we have to do in order to ‘be
saved’ is to repent and ask the Holy Spirit into our hearts, confess with our
mouths that we know we are sinners, and then ask Him to guide our lives from
now on. That is what will
get you into Heaven. That is the only
thing that will get you into Heaven.”
“YES!” I thought.
“YES!!!” Inside my head, something – like raising the blinds on a
window, or opening a door and seeing what was on the other side – happened, and
I felt strangely...liberated. I “knew” the things Pastor Wil said to be true;
just like I had “known” that my foster grandmother was telling me the truth
about God once, back in Germany when I was just five. It was a feeling like the first time I
figured out how to read or ride a bicycle:
I just “knew”…. (You would have had to be there to understand the
picture I’m trying to paint here.)
“...He is the Potter and you are the clay,” Wil was
saying. “He loves you and desperately
wants to have a relationship with you.
Realizing this, repenting, and getting down on your knees in complete
surrender to your Maker is the only way you will ever be able to
live your life to the full.”
My throat ached as the urge to cry became overwhelming.
I knew that I knew that I knew that the things Wil was espousing were
absolutely true.
Peering over the rim of his glasses, Wil slowly scanned
the congregation and said – and I couldn’t help but think he was addressing me
– “Won’t you give your life to Jesus today?”
I wanted desperately to go up to the altar to publicly
accept Christ, but found I just couldn’t do it.
While I felt something special had just taken place inside my soul, the
fact remained I was a stranger at First Baptist; I didn’t know these people,
and didn’t know how they would react if they were to discover I was now one of “them.” Just because I now believed, I didn’t want to
come across like some Bible thumper, even though I was sitting in a nest of
them. Plus, I didn’t want to make a fool
out of myself by bursting into tears in front of all these strangers....
In the back of my mind I realized that the sermon had
come to an end, and I suddenly felt tired and worn out. With the apprehension gone – along with some
of the resentment towards Christians, I felt good and yet guilty at the same
time, knowing that somebody else had died on my behalf. The thought was almost too much to bear. A
million questions crashed through my mind, but they would have to wait until I
had a chance to speak with Wil, one-on-one.
Ellis smiled and took my hand as we stood to
leave. I believe he could tell there was
a change in me; that something was different! I wasn’t sure exactly what had
happened, but something had changed inside my mind, my heart, my very being. It
was as if a light bulb had been turned on and I could now “see” what God had
been trying to tell me all my life.
I was a new person that day when I left that little white
church in Seymour, Missouri. And I now knew,
beyond a shadow of a doubt, that meeting Ellis had been no coincidence. We were
never meant to be a couple, because YHWH had other plans for me. But it’s amazing how HE leads you to exactly
where you need to be to hear that “just right” message that finally gets
through all the muck of your life, so you can begin to learn about God and the
Bible and accept the salvation He offers through belief in His Divine Son,
Yeshua haMashiyach.
Halleluyah!
Thank YOU, Abba, for never giving up on this unworthy woman who once was
blind, but now had 20/20 vision!
And that was only the beginning!
