Never confuse the gospel being free for you, and how expensive it was for God.
We ended our last talk with the question, “Have you?” Have you—what? Have you just simply taken God at His word? Though they may be well-meaning, unfortunately many religious leaders complicate the Bible’s gospel. They want you to attend services regularly and contribute financially to the church. They say you must be baptised, and confess your sins, and do good works, etc., etc., in order to be sure of heaven. These are good things in their place, but, as Dr. John Lennox suggests, that’s like a man who is interested in a woman approaching her with a big book. “This is the rule book,” he says. Well, really it’s a cookbook! “If you will cook me a perfect supper from this book every night for, say, 50 years, I will consider marrying you.” Do you see the point? When religious leaders tell us that God wants us to keep all of His rules for our whole life, and that then He’ll decide whether He will receive us into His home in heaven, they’re offering the same kind of arrangement. But Jesus is the DOOR. He offers us a relationship on the front end. He invites us to come “as is,” with our inflamed conscience and broken heart and wasted years. If we will just take God at His word, as Abram did, He will account to us His own righteousness. What has He told us? The two important factors are repentance and faith. First, we must agree that we are not just sinners before Him, but hopeless sinners. The longer we live trying to keep His rule book, the more sins we commit. That will never do. But second, we need to accept God’s solution, Christ’s death for us at Calvary. Listen to this explained in Romans 6 and verse 23: “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Will you receive Him now?