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"My understanding then was that I had to be a “good” person so that I could please God and get into heaven when I died....
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In Mark 2:7 Jesus said to the Pharisees, “I have come to call sinners, not those who think they are already good enough.” (New Living Translation). Until I was 16 years old I fell into the category of those who thought they were “already good enough.” Looking back now with the benefit of hindsight I can see so clearly the definite spiritual blindness that my so-called “self-righteousness” brought to my life, preventing me from seeing my sin and my need for repentance and forgiveness from the Lord Jesus.
I was brought up in a large Catholic family, fourth in a family of five boys and two girls. I’m so grateful to God for a happy childhood and for parents who taught us to respect the things of God, giving me a foundation for the work that God would later do in my life.
As a teenager, thanks to the wisdom of my parents (for which I am now so grateful, maybe not so grateful at the time!) I wasn’t allowed to get involved with the teen scene and all it entailed; another evidence of God’s hand on my life, keeping me for Himself.
I never went through the stage of not wanting to go to Mass, on the contrary, even then my heart was hungry for God and I wanted to find Him, to discover what relevance He had in my life, if any. My understanding then was that I had to be a “good” person so that I could please God and get into heaven when I died. In a nutshell, I thought I was “already good enough.” My reasoning ran along the lines of, “I don’t drink, do drugs, sleep around, go to Mass every Sunday…of course God will let me into heaven…right?” Wrong!
In January 1987 I met some people who had moved into a house just two fields away from us. My Dad and I were doing some work at their house and they began to talk to us about Jesus, about being saved, about being sure of heaven. At first I thought this was arrogant and presumptuous of them. However, I began to go to their Friday night Bible studies and for the first time I heart the message of God’s plan of salvation for mankind. That I was not, in fact, “good enough already.” I was a sinner and had fallen short of God’s standard (Romans 3:23). Reading my Bible in bed one night I came to the verses in Ephesians 2:8-9 and it was as if a light of spiritual understanding had suddenly been switched on. “For by grace are you saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works lest any man should boast.” Suddenly I knew that even if I was the very best behaved person in the world I would still fall short of God’s standard of perfect righteousness - because perfect righteousness is only found in His Son, Jesus Christ. My salvation is through faith in, not my works, but through faith in Him.
A short time after God enlightened me through these verses I asked my neighbour how I could be saved. He told me to pray to God, to confess my sins, repent of them and believe that Jesus took the punishment for my sins when He died on the cross so that I would not have to be punished for them. I prayed right there and then in my neighbour’s milking parlour (we’d been milking the cows!) and I was born again by faith in Jesus Christ on 23rd September 1987. It was a work of faith which I accepted by faith and God gave me a deep-seated assurance in my heart that now I was His, my sins were forgiven and I could meet God’s perfect standard because Jesus had taken my sin and given me His righteousness. What an amazing transaction! II Corinthians 5:21 - “God made [Christ] to be sin for us, Who knew know sin, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”
You may think, as I did of my neighbours, that this is a great presumption on my part, that I know I am forgiven and going to heaven. But my salvation is not because I am “good” or better than anyone else; it is a free gift from God which I accepted by faith and which is available for anyone who will accept it. John 3:16 says “For God so loved the world (you can put your name in here as I did mine) that He gave His one and only Son so that whoever believes in Him will not die but have everlasting life.” The Lord Jesus extends His invitation to everyone…its up to you to accept the free gift He is offering. Matt 11:28 - Jesus says, “Come to Me….”
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