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Christianity
is not about good and evil, but about life and death. Jesus did not come
to make us good but to make us alive. The difference between a believer
and a non-believer is not that the believer does good things and the
non-believer does bad things. The prime difference is that the believer is
alive and the non-believer is dead. The Bible is explicit about this from
the get-go.
Adam and Eve were to
eat from the Tree of Life and abstain from the Tree of the Knowledge of
Good and Evil. God wanted them to have life, not merely an ability to
distinguish between right and wrong. Adam and Eve thought being smart
about good and evil was more important than life from God. They were wrong
then and we still make the same mistake today. Adam and Eve died the SAME
DAY they ate from the wrong tree, even though they lived physically for
many more years. Take a peek at Genesis 2:17.
Consequently, we are not bad
people in need of goodness. We are dead people in need of life. Jesus did
not come to give us an example. He came to give life. I don’t need an
example; I need life.
I have come that they may have life,
and that they may have it more abundantly. (John 10:10 NKJV)
The question is not
“what WOULD Jesus do?” The question is “What DID Jesus do?”
God didn’t make you
good when Christ came into your life. He made you alive.
And you He made alive, who were
dead in trespasses and sins,
(Ephesians 2:1 NKJV)
Your eternal life does
not start when you get to Heaven. It starts when you receive Jesus. It
then continues at a higher level when you get to Heaven.
And this is the testimony: that God
has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. (1 John
5:11 NKJV)
If you have the Son of
God you already have life. If you do not have the Son of God you do not
have life. That means you are dead.
He who has the Son has life; he
who does not have the Son of God does not have life. (1 John
5:12 NKJV)
Didn’t God write the
Bible to help us know right from wrong? Not primarily. He wrote the Bible
to help us know how we can be certain that we have eternal life.
These things I have written to you
who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that
you have eternal life, (1 John 5:13 NKJV)
That’s why the Great
White Throne judgment of Revelation 21 includes two groups of people:
those whose names are in the Book of Life and those whose names are not in
the Book of Life. Those not in the Book of Life will be judged by their
works. Hint: nobody does well before God if they have to make it to Heaven
based on doing good and avoiding evil. The secret is to get your name in
the book, not your works in the books.
And I saw the dead, small and great,
standing before God, and books were opened. And another book was opened,
which is the Book of Life. And the dead were judged according to their
works, by the things which were written in the books. (Revelation
20:12 NKJV)
How can dead people
stand? They were physically alive but spiritually dead. They were
spiritually dead because they never received Jesus. They were depending on
the good they did to earn them entrance to heaven.
And anyone not found written in the
Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire. (Revelation 20:15
NKJV)
The “I have done some
good things in my life” approach does not work out well. The reason is
because there is no life in it. The little secret is that sometimes dead
people manage to do good things and alive people manage to do bad things.
That is why it is called the “Book of Life” and not the “Book of Good
Stuff You Do for God.”
Children’s ministry is
more than presenting values that cut between right and wrong. It is about
offering, explaining, and illustrating the life that comes from faith in
what Jesus did for them through the cross and resurrection.
I am not content with
kids merely learning how to be good. I want them to be alive in God. I
want them to know they are alive in God. In simple ways as they trek
through their day, I want them to experience God’s life within them. And
the amazing thing is that when they experience the energy of being alive
in God: some goodness will burst out when least expected. |
