Hannah Banana

Every day, more and more, we see the signs of the times ticking by. Jesus Christ will be returning soon, and bringing Judgement with Him. If you are not a follower of Jesus yet, I beg you to consider (or to reconsider) the Gospel, that in Jesus you will find forgiveness of sins, everlasting life, and the right to be called Children of God.

It may be that, near as the return of Jesus is, you won’t live to see it. None of us are promised tomorrow; not a single hour of life is guaranteed to any of us. Some of you will live out your lives, barring Jesus’ return, and die many years from now. Some of you may not make it into tomorrow. Some people die suddenly, with no warning; this fact makes the need to be right with God all the more urgent.

If you haven’t heard the Gospel, or have heard it before and have forgotton, please allow me to share it with you:

In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth. After creating everything else, God finally made humankind. We are unique, the only beings in the Creation made in the Image of God, specifically to be in relationship with Him; to be His inheritance; a people called by His name, meant to share in reciprocal love with God of our own free choice.

After some time in Paradise, loving and being loved by God, our first parents fell into willful sin; that is to say, they deliberately chose to do what they understood to be wrong.

God, being perfect in Justice and Righteousness, could not remain close to those first humans. He could not continue to bless them, commune with them as He had since the beginning. God, by His very nature, must judge and condemn evil. And so He judged our first parents and cast them out of the Paradise He’d made for them. He stripped them not only of their relationship with Him, but also of their immortality; He condemned them to death.

And yet, God is love; He loved humankind, and desired to save us from the fate our first parents brought down upon us (a fate that we deserve through our own willful sins). God, rather than destroying us completely, went to the very outermost edges of the possible to redeem us from our evil, to again make a way for us to be with Him and live forever.

God became a man; that man was Jesus Christ. Jesus lived a perfect life, without any sin at all (a feat none of us could accomplish), and at the appointed time, willingly offered Himself up as a sacrifice, taking upon Himself the guilt of all the sins of all humankind, from our first parents until now, and suffered a fitting punishment for that guilt.

After three days, Jesus rose from the dead by the power of God and ascended to Heaven. God accepted the sacrifice of Jesus as a fitting payment, a propitiation for the sins of humankind, and has in His abundant grace and mercy allowed anyone and everyone to receive forgiveness of sins and eternal life because of that sacrifice.

This is the scandal of God’s grace: no matter the sin, no matter how corrupt, how wicked, how evil a person has been, God stands ready to forgive them. God will relate to the most evil person who’s ever lived as if they have never sinned, on only one condition: faith.

To have faith in the Biblical sense means that we genuinely believe that the God of Israel exists, and that He cares enough to respond to anyone who seeks Him. And that we believe that Jesus Christ is exactly who and what the Bible says He is: the Son of God; God manifest in the flesh; perfect, and without sin; the Savior who, by His sacrificial death and subsequent resurrection, enables God to have mercy on all who trust in Him. Genuine faith leads to genuine repentance.

To repent means that we acknowledge our sins for what they are: willful acts of evil that deserve God’s justice. It means also to be willing to forsake those sins; every habit, every practice, every vice, every indulgence. We must at least be willing to turn away from our sins, and be willing to submit to God in obedience.

Anyone, everyone who calls on the name of the Lord Jesus in sincerity and truth will be saved. They will not come into judgement, but have, at the moment of faith, passed from death to life.

Please, I beg you, if you’re reading this and you do not believe, or you have not forsaken your sins, please, consider doing so now. Pray. Ask God to reveal Himself to you; He will answer, if you ask sincerely. In some way, and in His time, He will answer you. Don’t allow another day to pass by in your sins. Don’t risk your eternity. Don’t throw away the supreme gift of God’s grace.