If God came for you right this very moment, would you be ready?
In conversations with hundreds of people, most have told me they would be, that they aren’t perfect but that they are good enough and that God would look past their sins to the good heart within. The few who say they would not be, that if they died today they would end up in hell, usually also believe at the same time that God won’t allow them to die until they are ready.
2 Peter tells us that this is God’s heart, that he “is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”
But this is no guarantee that God will indeed wait forever for us to repent and turn to Him. John the Baptist, who preached a message of r
epentance in preparation for the coming Messiah, said “His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”
And Jesus continued this theme, saying “As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil.
But what, exactly, does it take to be “ready”? At what point, if ever, can we be sure that if we died today we would be in heaven in a right relationship with our Creator, rather than receiving the just punishment for our sins?
In a conversation at a table outside our local coffeeshop, a young lady named Tamikae wasn’t sure she could ever be sure of salvation. She was one of those who doesn’t believe herself to be “ready yet”, though she has been actively seeking the Lord after a New Year’s Eve resolution a year and a half ago. She isn’t sure one could ever be sure of salvation without being arrogant or prideful about it, so I think she was surprised that I as a Christian could confidently say I am saved, and that one can indeed be assured of salvation without being hypocritical or self-righteous.
How can that be? Because it is Jesus who saves us, we can’t save ourselves. A drowning man pulled from the water has gratitude toward the one who threw the life preserver and pulled him in, not a cocky arrogance about his own accomplishments. If we think we must be “ready” to be saved we are trusting in self-righteousness, not in Christ’s righteousness. Repentance and faith is just a description of what happens when we turn to Christ and receive the gift of salvation.
Just the same, assurance of salvation is a very common struggle for seekers and new believers as they waver and transition from the old habits of trying so hard to earn salvation through self-righteous acts to just receiving it with gratitude. I pointed Tanikae to John’s first letter, written to first century Christians who struggled with the same thing. Towards the end of 1 John, he wrote “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life. This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him.”
Besides the joy of clearly sharing the Gospel with people who really haven’t heard it before, one of the greatest joys of Gospel outreach for me is to tell people like Tamikae that they can indeed be secure in their salvation, and without self righteous arrogance. John 1 tells us that “He (Jesus) came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.”
We can be ready for God to come for us at this very moment as we are adopted into God’s family through no righteousness of our own, and Jesus tells us that “All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will by no means cast out.”
Thanks for a wonderful conversation Tamikae, and for allowing me to record it. It can be seen on my YouTube channel at https://youtu.be/g2bFWDZXt-A
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