Think that if the good outweighs the bad, God will let you into heaven?

I did! I used to think that when I died, I would face God and a gigantic set of scales, and every good thing I had done in my lifetime would go on one side, and every bad thing I had done would go on the other side. Whichever way the scales tipped would determine the direction I would go—up or down; heaven or hell. I just hoped the good would outweigh the bad, and I would be allowed into heaven!

I thought God had some invisible dividing line between "good enough for heaven," and "bad enough for hell" and it bothered me that I didn’t know where that dividing line was. I knew very little about God, so I had to presume a lot. Mostly I presumed that His standards had changed since the Bible was written; surely sex outside of marriage couldn’t still be considered sin by God when everybody was doing it! He must change His thinking to go along with the times we live in. Or so I thought.

One day, a young mother and her little two year old daughter rang my doorbell. Her car had broken down in front of my house and she asked to use my phone to call her husband. It turned out that she lived only a mile down the road from me. We became very good friends. My friend knew God, the God of the Bible, but not the God of my imagination. Whenever we got together, she would tell me something about what the Bible said. She showed me where the Bible says that if you break God’s law in one part you are guilty of breaking the whole law! "For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all." (James 2:10). And as for my good deeds as a means of getting to heaven, she showed me that they were worthless! "For all of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment; and all of us wither like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away." (Isaiah 64:6) The Bible said that I was a guilty sinner before God and could not cover up my guilt with my own "goodness"garment.

There went my "good outweighs the bad" theory! I knew for sure that I was a sinner in desperate need of another way to heaven! All the things I had heard in my lifetime about Jesus Christ coming to "take away our sins" suddenly had real meaning for my life. Because I had not truly understood "the bad news" about my own spiritual condition I couldn’t fully understand and appreciate "the good news of Jesus Christ"! But now I realized that Jesus Christ paid my debt of sin in full on the cross so that I could go to heaven, and that if I believed on Him He would wrap me in a garment of His righteousness and make me clean and acceptable to God. I wanted that more than anything! I thanked Jesus for what He did for me, that which I could not do for myself, and I asked Him to take over my life and change me into the person He wanted me to be. The Bible says, "But as many as received Him (Christ), to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name." (John 1:12)

I was 26 years old when I became a child of God through faith in Jesus Christ. I was born of human parents in 1951. I was born "of God" in 1977. This is what it means to be "born again". The first birth was of flesh and blood, the second birth was of the Spirit of God Himself, through faith. The benefits of being a child of God are so numerous it would take pages and pages to describe them. But to me, the biggest benefit of all is that blessed promise of eternal life: "And the witness is this, that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have the life. These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, in order that you may know that you have eternal life." (1 John 5:11-13)

I am a member of the Saratoga Chapel church. If you sense that God is prompting you to open the treasure chest of His Word for the first time, or to dig deeper into His Word for "hidden" treasure, I invite you to visit our bible teaching, bible preaching church.