Are You Good Enough?
Good News – February 2010 – Grace & Truth Magazine
Are You Good Enough?
“You have to be very, very good to go to heaven,” a young girl told her older friend.
“Are you that good?” her friend asked.
“No, I guess I’m not,” she replied honestly.
Over 2000 years ago, the apostle Paul said, “Nothing good lives in me” (Rom. 7:18 NIV). Could the one who wrote 13 books of the Bible have been that bad?
What about you? Are you good enough to go to heaven? Have you ever told a lie, stolen anything, disobeyed your parents or said bad things about someone? If you have, then you're not very good either.
In fact, according to the Bible no one is good enough to get to heaven based on good works. It says, “There is no one who does good, not even one ... for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:12,23).
God is not saying that we cannot do some good things. But He does say that we all do bad things called sins, and they will keep us out of heaven.
Some people think that when they do something good, that erases the bad things they did. But sin doesn’t go away that easily. God describes sin as a dirty spot in a piece of cloth – like paint on our clothes – that won’t go away, no matter how many times we wash it.
When the young girl in our story realized she was not good enough, she asked her older friend a very important question: “Then how can we ever get to heaven?”
Her older friend said the Bible has the answer. It says that “the blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, purifies us from all sin” (1 Jn. 1:7). Jesus shed His blood and died for our sins so that they could be washed away. That was the hardest thing anyone ever did.
Would you be willing to suffer for the bad things someone else did? Like me, you’d probably say, “No way! Let them suffer for their own sins. They deserve what they get.”
Want some good news? God never says that about us! Instead, the Bible tells us that “God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). It also tells us that “God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life” (Jn. 3:16).
When the young girl heard about God’s love and how to get to heaven, she confessed her sins to God and asked Jesus to be her Savior.
How about you? The Bible warns us that if we don’t trust Jesus as our Lord and Savior, we will die in our sins and end up in hell. What a terrible way to die! What a terrible place to go!
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Why not do what this young girl did? And why not do it now? If you’d like more informa tion on how to get to heaven, we can tell you more.
Available as a gospel tract.