Continuing from the last post, Pastor Giglio points out that that the third distinctive in Jesus’
offer states (3) His offer is grace - the free unmerited love and favor of God,
the spring and source of all the benefits men receive from Him.” Ephesians
2:8 says, “For by grace you
have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the
gift of God.” Grace is simply God doing what we cannot do. All these roads
(supposed ways) going to the same
destination do have a similarity in them, in that (right or wrong) they
are all about what we have to do to affect the “best” outcome in our future.
But in Jesus’ offer, there is a word that you do not find in any other
religious stream, and that is the word “grace”. Theologically speaking, it is a
gospel word, a Jesus word, a Christian word, and what the word is all about is
that God knows that we cannot do it, so loving and merciful God is going to do
it for us. In our state of sin, we cannot make a way to Heaven, so God made a
way to Heaven for us in sending His Son incarnate as “The Way”. God knows that
we cannot be “good enough”, so God sent Jesus to be “good enough” in our place.
John
3:16-18 tells us, For God so
loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever
believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did
not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world
through Him might be saved. He who believes in Him is not condemned; but
he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in
the name of the only begotten Son of God.”
The fourth distinctive in Jesus’
offer states (4) He is giving you a personal relationship with God Almighty,
the Creator of the heavens and the earth. Jesus didn’t say that there was some
place of higher awareness, consciousness, understanding or being; neither that
He was going up to nirvana, then coming back to help us get to a place of
greater enlightenment. No, Jesus said that the kingdom of Heaven is a place,
and that place is His Father’s house (a dwelling place). That means something
to us because woven into our being is the sense of belonging and we desire to
be in a “place”. Jesus says that there is a dwelling place in Heaven. There is
our Father God there. God is noble and we can have a relationship with Him.
The fifth distinctive in
Jesus’ offer is (5) that He is giving you the power of the Resurrection; the
single greatest event on earth. Some would argue that the single greatest event
would be the Cross (Christ dying for our sins), but the Cross is empty without
the Resurrection. The Resurrection put the power into the work of the Cross. The Cross was powerful to cancel sin, but it
took the Resurrection to bring the power to raise us up to life; to celebrate it, to breathe it
and to live it. And the only person offering you a Resurrection today (not an
incarnation or a multiple-time journey to where I do not know for sure, but a
one-time event that radically changes the stake in this life and forever in
eternity) is Jesus Christ. So that we can stand at the grave and we know that
this grave will not be my final resting place, because Jesus has put
Resurrection life on the table.
The sixth distinctive in
Jesus’ offer is that He is giving you the Holy Spirit. In John 14:15-17, Jesus
tells us, “If you love Me, keep My commandments. And I will pray
the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide
with you forever — the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot
receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He
dwells with you and will be in you.” No religion is giving you a
God-source inside of you; the Spirit of the living God indwelling us, to enable
us to live out the life that God is dreaming about for us. Only Jesus gives the
Holy Spirit.
Let's conclude this message on "Jesus Christ - the Way to Heaven" in the next post.
In Christ, Brian
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