What We Cannot Do

Some things I can do well; I can re-fold a road map. Some things I’m okay at; I’m about a 70% free-throw shooter. Some things I cannot do at all – like earn my way to heaven.

Do you realize that there is nothing you can do to save yourself? Save from what, you may ask? From the wages of sin, the Bible answers, which is death. Not annihilation, as some false teachers claim, but an eternal state of anguish and torment in hell. You might think your life is a living hell right now, and to some degree it may be.

In hell you are separated forever from the presence of God. Right now you may have distanced yourself from the presence of God by rejecting Him, rejecting Jesus as Savior and Lord, or by simply ignoring the reality of who He truly is and denying His activity in the world all around you. If hell is the absence of God, then maybe you are living in a sort of hell today.

But I’ll be honest with you from God’s own word – you ain’t seen nothing yet. “Then He will also say to those on His left, ‘Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels’” (Matt. 25:41). “These,” says the King, the Son of Man to those do not respond in faith to the gospel of Christ Jesus, “will go away into eternal punishment” (Matt. 25:46). If you think you have it bad now, just wait until the Lord unleashes the fury of His holy wrath against sin.

Whether you realize it or not, God is pouring out His unfathomable compassion and mercy upon you even as you breathe. If He even began to take away His hand from this world for one moment, this universe as we know it would crumble into ruin. No, contrary to what evolution and big bang theorists would have us believe, “by Him (Jesus, the image of the invisible God) all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible…all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Col. 1:16-17).

And so God, in displaying His glory in His creation, in providing you air to breathe and a heart to beat and ears to hear and a mind to receive His message, gives you this moment the opportunity to be saved from death and hell. The Bible says even though God will certainly bring judgment and destruction upon the ungodly, that He is also demonstrating His patience toward us now, “not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance” (2 Pet. 3:9).

The message is this: Repent from sin and believe in Jesus! Turn to Jesus and be saved! God loves you so much that He willingly gave His one and only Son to die on the cross for your sins. He doesn’t want you to die. He came to bring you life – eternal life! The Bible says that “whosoever” believes in Jesus will not perish, but have everlasting life. God demonstrated His wondrous love for you in that while you were still a sinner, Christ died for you (Rom. 5:8). You can be saved right now by confessing your sin before God and believing in Jesus as your Savior and Lord.

"Yeah, but you don’t know what I’ve done,” you may say. “You don’t know how many terrible things I’ve said, how many people I’ve hurt, how much hatred is in my heart and the anger in my soul. I could never be good enough to be saved.”

If that’s what you’re thinking, then I say to you that you are on the right track. You can never, ever, be good enough to be saved. There is no amount of good deeds that can possibly earn salvation. In fact the Bible declares that there is “no one righteous, not even one” (Rom. 3:10). “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve gone to church, how many religious deeds you have done, how good a worker you are, how good a parent you’ve been or how much money you’ve donated to charity. You can do absolutely nothing to save yourself.

“But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved)” (Eph. 2:4-5). Friend, the only way to be saved is on the basis of God’s grace, which we receive through faith. Come to Jesus today – He’s the only Way to heaven.