You can receive the free gift of an eternal life both on this earth and after you die. How does that sound? Heaven is a free gift!¹ The Word of God says that “Heaven is a free gift…! It cannot be earned or deserved, so that no one can boast about it. ”²

I guess to understand why the free gift is a necessity we have to look at “man”: all men. Let’s face it; all of us are a long way from being perfect. We are sinners! But Jesus said that the only way to get to Heaven was to “be perfect as (God) is perfect.” ³ Since we “all have sinned…”⁴ none of us deserve to go to heaven.

I know, you are a pretty good person, but look at it this way. Your life is like an omelet you are fixing to serve to a special person. You get out the eggs and begin to crack them into a bowl. One egg, two eggs, three eggs…on up to the sixth egg and all is good. Then you crack that 6th egg and it is horribly rotten. But you need 6 eggs. You quickly mix in the other ingredients and hope that your special guest will not notice. Do you really think that the omelet you are serving is going to please your guest? No, you would never serve such an omelet to anyone let alone someone special. Yet many people expect God to accept the “omelet” of our lives even with the rotten parts mixed in. Our thinking is that if we try our best and do enough good things that they will mask the not so good things. We try to do good deeds for others; we try to do our best at our jobs; we even try to keep the 10 commandments. We just can’t do it all. Somehow that doesn’t seem like perfection no matter how hard we try.

After all what is sin? The word sin comes from a root word that means to “miss the mark” as when shooting an arrow. Sin is missing the mark of God’s perfection.

I think we can both understand this better when we begin to understand a little more about God. The Bible tells us that God is perfect love.⁵ He does not wont to punish us for our sins. But that same God is also perfect in other ways and one of those ways is that He is perfectly just. “He will in no way clear the guilty”⁶ God cannot be the perfect judge if he just ignores our sins.

For example, if I robbed a bank and, not being a very good bank robber, my picture was clear on all of the surveillance cameras. I soon get caught and I’m very sorry that I got caught. When I come to trial, I smile sweetly at the judge and remind him that the bank got all of its money back and no one was hurt. He should just forgive me and let me go. After all no one was hurt. Do you want earthly judges to accept that kind of defense and let me go? I doubt it. Especially if the next place I rob is your home.

In the same way, Heaven will not be very Heavenly if God just smiles, pats us on the head and says, “Oh, I guess you tried.” God’s word says that He will “punish transgression with the rod and iniquity with stripes.”⁷ God loves us but He will not ignore our sins. The punishment for sin must be paid.

So if all of us are sinners and can’t get rid of our sins by what we do right and if God though He loves us must still punish our sins, we have a problem. God’s love solved that problem in the person of Jesus, The Christ.

Who is Jesus? I’ve asked quite a lot of people this question and gotten many answers: a good teacher, a good man who lived a long time ago, the Son of God. All of these are true but not the main truth. At the very beginning of the Gospel of John, we get the answer. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God”⁸ (Now so there won’t be any confusion, when John says “Word” with a capital letter he is referring to Jesus because in the book he wrote called Revelations, he says that the Word is Jesus.⁹) If you drop down a couple of verses and it says, “ and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us; we beheld His glory…”¹⁰ Jesus is God, incarnate or born in the form of a man. He was fully man and yet fully God. When Thomas finally sees Jesus after Jesus’ resurrection, he says, “My Lord and My God”.¹¹ Jesus does not correct Thomas. He has been telling them all the time that He is God and now accepts Thomas admission of it.

So why did Jesus come to earth as a human being? Was it just to teach us or just to show us what God was like? These were of course part of the reason. But His greatest reason was to die on the cross. The Bible tells us “the wages (or payment) of sin is death...”¹² Jesus, we are told, never sinned, so He had no sin to die for. He willingly took upon Himself the sins of the world. That is your sins and my sins. The prophet Isaiah some 700 years before the birth of Jesus said it this way, “All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned everyone to his own way, [In other words “I Did It My Way”] but the Lord has laid on Him, the iniquities (sins) of us all.”¹³ We chose to sin but Jesus took the punishment for our sins when He died. Just as God said that He would “punish transgressions with a rod and iniquity with stripes.” Well He did when Jesus was beaten with a rod and with a cat-of-nine-tails, which produced the stripes. He then took the final punishment for sin by dying the most painful death that man has ever devised.

Remember I said earlier that Heaven or eternal life here and after we die, is a “gift”. I think you will agree that there are 2 special things that denote a gift. One, a gift must be paid for you someone else. If you pay for something yourself, it is not truly a gift. Jesus paid for our “free gift” by taking the punishment we deserve. One of the last things that the Bible record Jesus as saying from the cross is in Greek, “Tetelestai”.¹⁴ I’m no Greek scholar but I’m told that this is a shipping term that was marked on bills just like we mark them with a “Paid in full” stamp. Jesus said, “It is paid in full”. We often translate it as “It is finished” but they both tell us that gift that Jesus purchased is completely taken care of.

Now the second fact about a gift that must be true is that someone who did not pay for it must receive a gift. Jesus offers the gift of eternal life to all who are willing to receive it. It is truly a free gift offered by Jesus.

How can anyone receive this gift? We receive it by faith, but what is faith. First, faith is not just an intellectual knowledge about something. For instance, I know that Alexander the Great once lived but I don’t trust him to do anything for me now. Second, faith is not just trusting Jesus to heal you when you’re sick or keep you safe when you travel. True faith is trusting Jesus Christ alone for all of your future. Let me illustrate what I mean by faith. Suppose you walk into my living room and I invite you to sit down. You look at my living room chair and decide that it looks sturdy. It has 4 legs firmly planted on the carpet and seems to be well built. Then you stand there and talk to me. No mater how much intellectual faith you have in that chair, it is not helping you to rest your feet as long as you are standing. So maybe you put what ever you are carrying on the chair. Well that relieves you somewhat, but you are still depending on your own legs to hold you up. Maybe you sit on the edge of the chair. That’s better but you are still keeping a lot of your weight on your own legs just in case. You do not really have faith in that chair until you sit back, push the footrest up and lounge back fully in the chair. That is true faith that trusts your whole being to the chair. The same is true about accepting the free gift that Jesus is offering you. Unless you put your full trust in Jesus and what He has already done for you on the cross, you have not really accepted the gift He paid for.

Does this make sense to you? If so and if you have never asked Jesus for this greatest of all gifts, I challenge you to do it right now. Just say:

Jesus, I know that I’m a sinner and even though I try to do better, I can never be perfect and deserve heaven. I’m going to quit trying to save myself, and accept the gift that You paid for on the cross. I fully trust You to save me from the ultimate punishment for my sins. I ask You to come into my life today and guide me to the “abundant life”¹⁵ that You have promised here and eternal life with you in heaven. Thank You for your love for me and for paying for my sins on the cross.