Transcription
What do you believe are the requirements for salvation? It's got nothing to do with my beliefs. We can look, go to the scriptures, and we can find out what, what, what is required.
When the attorney, when the lawyer, current lawyer at the time, came up to Christ and said, you know, "What must I do to be saved?" or "What must we be, what must we do to be saved?" Or was it the rich young man? I forget. One of the two. Christ summed up all of the gospel in one succinct verse. "To love God with all your heart, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself." Which are essentially, what that is, it boils down the Ten Commandments. Of the Ten Commandments, the first four, is it, or the first three are about your relationship with God. And the, I forget, and then the last ones, the fourth is the Sabbath. Fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh through the tenth is about how you interact and what your relationship should be with man. And that is all of the law and the prophets.
Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ with all your heart, with all your strength, with all your mind, and by your belief you will be saved. It's got nothing to do with works. It's not going to church. It's not eating the right food. It's not keeping the perfect, perfectly keeping the Ten Commandments. You cannot save yourself on your own initiative. Scripture tells us you can't even come to God on your own if you choose to. But only those come to him who He calls.
Now, when He calls and when you respond, no man knows. Some people are called earlier than others. Some people are called on their deathbed. There is a deathbed confession. We have the story of the thief on the cross. Now, I think it more likely that God calls us throughout our entire life. But we have to get to a certain point where we're finally ready to listen.
But when that call comes, how do you know it's going to, how, how do you know it comes? When you start to see yourself for who you are. When you stop buying into the, the, that, "Well, I'm a pretty good person because there's always someone that's worse than me." When you really start to see your nature, when you look yourself in the mirror as a man and really come to grips with, "Yeah, I'm probably not that good of a guy overall. I'm selfish. I'm arrogant. I'm prideful. I'm quick to wrath. I'm impatient. I have much, many, many deficits. I lack in a lot." When you start to become aware of that and feel that way, that is, in my opinion, I think in most people's opinion, that's when the call of God is coming to you.
And when you start to read and to start to see the character of God and the character of Christ and how He conducted Himself in His short ministry of three and a half years here, and you contrast the way that you behave and how you would have handled the situations that He found Himself in, you start to see that there is a wide gulf between Him and me. And that's when you start reaching the point where you're able to, to, to, to receive salvation.
We are made perfect and we will be in the kingdom not because we've been good people or we went to church or we kept the Sabbath. We will be there because we trusted in Him and who He was and His divinity and His life. His righteousness will be given to us. It's like this. This is an imperfect explanation, but this helps me to understand it. We will all stand at the judgment before a righteous God. Now, you will choose either I will stand in front of God with all my sin and with the record of my life to be judged according to His righteousness, and I will try to defend myself and I will try to make a case with the short life that I lived on this earth, which will fall woefully flat. Or I will humble myself, acknowledge and admit that I am a sinner, that I have done a lot of bad things, that I've not lived up to the righteousness of God, and I will own that. And who will be standing next to me? But an advocate. An advocate will be Christ. And when God turns His frightful stare upon you to see your filthiness, your sin, those of us who accept Christ will be clothed and wrapped in a clean garment of righteousness of Christ. His life that He lived, His perfect, sinless life that He lived, He is giving to you. It's called grace.
So imagine it like this. God is in the judgment seat, like in a court, a courtroom. You're standing in the dock. You stand accused. You are guilty of everything that you stand accused of. The punishment, the wages of sin are death, separation from God. And yet, because you claimed to be a Christian, you were baptized, and you accepted the gift of salvation. When God fastens His stare upon you, it's as if Christ, your advocate, your attorney, has taken off His sinless, spotless garment and He's covered you up. All of your black, stained, filthy garment that you have earned. And when God looks upon you, He does not see your sin. Although it's there, He sees the righteousness of Christ. Christ gives it to you for free. It's a gift. That's what salvation is.
So, everyone will stand at the judgment seat. Everyone will give an account for their life and their actions. Those in the kingdom were not perfect people. Those in the kingdom were the ones that accepted the free robe of righteousness that God offers you. That's why it's so difficult for those of us who understand what an incredible, unspeakable gift this is when we see people taking it lightly or not accepting it or choosing what the world has to offer over eternal life and reunification with the Father. That's how I look at it.