I had a dream the other night that I was in an old dilapidated building that I’d rented for an office. The place was dusty, dark, dank, and cluttered with junk and dilapidated furniture. My desk was an old wooden rollup and above it was a cabinet that was full of junk. I decided to clean it out and spied two very old leather briefcase satchels in it.
When I opened them they were crammed full of very old looking money. Wads and wads of cash with rubber bands around each wad of 100’s. I assumed from their age that they had to be gold or silver certificates and had to literally be worth a fortune. I estimated it to have a value of over a million dollars.
Hmmm…Should I tell the owner of the building and hand over the cash to him? Or should I keep it for myself? I mulled it over for less than a second; the decision was an easy one; I needed that money and I was going to keep it.
When I came to that conclusion I immediately woke up in a sweat. I reflected upon it for a moment and then tried to force myself back to sleep; I was hopeful that I could resume my dream where I left off. I wanted to know how much money was in there and I was thinking of ways to sell the bills to currency collectors, or cash it in for bullion.
I couldn’t go back to sleep and my conscience was now tearing me apart. What kind of Christian am I? That wasn’t my money; it belonged to the owners of the building. I assumed it was stowed away there by the man who owned that business; the current owner’s grandfather. He probably didn’t trust banks and that was his life’s savings.
Whatever…It didn’t belong to me and I should have come to a different decision.
I was telling my wife about this dream and I told her that I thought it came directly from God. I’ve never found any money, but I would hope that if I did I would seek out the rightful owner and return it, but this dream was too real for comfort and sadly I had no intention of returning it. The real me wasn’t much of a Christian.
I cannot get this off my mind and I don’t think God sent me this dream by accident. I don’t need some venerable old prophet to interpret its meaning for me. The Bible teaches that no one is righteous, no, not even one. Just when we think we are making some progress in our Christian walk God reminds us of how far we have to go to be like Him.
We had a discussion in Sunday school last week about the lack of fairness of “good” people who die without having heard the Gospel going to hell. We of course don’t know for sure that God didn’t appear to these people and give them that opportunity, but assuming He did not and they did not accept Jesus as their Savior, the Bible states they will go to hell.
I mentioned that “good” to us is not the same as “good” to a holy and righteous God who is perfect. We think of Mother Teresa as being a saint; the Bible states her works are as filthy rags in the sight of a pure and holy God. Isaiah 6:46 But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags;
Ouch!
So since we cannot get into heaven by being righteous and “good”, must guilty mankind remain under wrath? Is the wound too deep and forever incurable? No, there is another way laid open for us. It is grace and it comes freely to us, but Christ bought it, and paid the price and we must put our faith in Him in order to take advantage.
It is plain that God hates sin, when nothing less than the blood of Christ would satisfy as punishment for sinning against God, but the good news is that He has accepted that payment in full satisfaction. We don’t like to hear that our righteousness is like filthy rags, (which more literally means like excrement or dung), but when one thinks about it, God would have never sent His only Son to die a horrific death on the cross if we could be good enough to get into heaven on our own. God states there must be punishment and atonement for sin and though we might not think of our little sins as all that bad, they are anathema to God.
As loving children of God we should obey our Father as best we know how and work as though we “could” get into heaven by doing the right thing by obeying God’s laws to the letter, but all of the time realize that the only way to get there is through the atoning blood sacrifice of Jesus Christ whereby He took our punishment for our sins on that cross.
“All have sinned” -Though men differ greatly in the nature and extent of their sinfulness, there is absolutely no difference between the best and the worst of men, in the fact that “all have sinned,” and come up short. All means all…
Romans 3:23
For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard.