In recent month’s articles we have seen how Jesus is coming back for His Church and the uncertainty of His arrival time so that we need to be ready for His coming. However it has been laid upon my heart recently that many may be unwittingly, totally unprepared for this event. We may have been to church regularly for many years and be fully in the belief that we are all set. It may not be so. You can believe with all your heart that a bus goes’ to the next town, but unless you get on it and go, you will never get there. We might believe that Jesus was a real person and that He performed all those wonderful miracles, but unless you know Him and ask His forgiveness it is not sufficient.
Nicodemus came to Jesus one night. He was a Pharisee a ruler of the Jews, he knew the Scriptures intimately, he went to the Temple and knew all about a Messiah coming one day to free the Jewish Nation and reign as King. But he was not a follower of Jesus. He started talking enquiringly about Jesus and what people were saying. Jesus interrupted Nicodemus. Jesus answered, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God”. [John 3:5 NKJV]. What did Jesus mean? At that time John the Baptist was baptising people who were repenting of their sins and their neglect of God, and by total immersion Baptism they were signifying that they had repented and changed their lives to worship God, being truly sorry for their sins and turning their lives around. What about the Spirit? When a person repents and turns to Jesus for Salvation, the Holy Spirit comes and lives within them to motivate and guide that individual in the correct way. Summing up; if a person ever wanted to see the Kingdom of God, and be with Jesus for Eternity, they must repent of their past life, and their sin and accept what Jesus has done at the Cross, and the Spirit of God will come and live inside them. Yes I know Jesus died for the sins of the world, but have we asked His forgiveness. If someone forgives you, you have to accept that forgiveness to make it effective.
The Bible says: “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned”, [Rom 5:12 KJV]. “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” [Rom 3:23 KJV]. We all have a disease of the soul called sin, and unless it is cleansed we are left with it living within us. Heaven is sinless so unless our sin is cleansed we can never go to Heaven. Jesus went to Calvary for us all. After Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden all mankind was contaminated with sin. The first man born into the world, Cain, was a murderer. If one man Adam had brought upon the whole human race condemnation and the death penalty. Only by the death of an innocent man, who knew no sin could mankind be redeemed. So Jesus died for us at Calvary the innocent man dying in our place to redeem the guilty. By rising from the dead on that first Easter Sunday, He showed that He had conquered death once and for all, so that one day if we believe in Him and ask His forgiveness we too will have eternal life.
A personal word of testimony. I was brought up in a very Christian home. One Grandfather was converted at a street corner evangelistic meeting and instilled into his children the fervour of the Gospel being preached outside the church as well as inside. The other Grandfather had a family going back four generations protestant church. I had the best of both. When I started Sunday school at three years old. My mother was my Sunday school teacher and my father the Superintendent. If anyone had asked me when I was a young lad if I was a Christian I would have said yes. However I was very nervous of doing anything in front of anybody. If asked a question in Sunday school I nearly died by being singled out. However I used to go to meetings and one day a man came to speak and he spoke on Baptism. The thought of doing such an act in front of people terrified me. However the Holy Spirit would not let up. I had planned to be baptised when I grew up, a sort of thing to do in my environment. But I could not get away with that and God wanted me then not later. After a day or two I gave up and ask to be baptised. However the conviction of the Holy Spirit would not let up and I wondered why I still was being pressured by the Holy Spirit. It then dawned on me that I had never in all my 14 years repented of my sin and sought God’s forgiveness. There in my bedroom I fell on my knees and asked Jesus into my life. The weight fell off my back and I was born again by the Holy Spirit of God. Two years later you could have found me preaching from the platform of our Evangelistic Mobile Unit, on a local housing estate. How so easily could I have been an unsaved baptised church member? I would have been left behind when Jesus came for his Church. Or without His Spirit within me could have drifted away without a Saviour.
Please if you have never been born again ask your minister or elder to explain it all to you, so you will not be left behind. So you will know the joy of sins forgiven and being right with God.
As the old hymn says: “When Jesus comes the tempters power is broken. When Jesus comes our sins are wiped away. He takes our souls and fills our life with glory and all is changed when Jesus comes to stay” Remember He may come today. God does not promise tomorrow only today.
Brian Papworth