The greatest story ever told is a true story, recorded and preserved in the Old and New Testaments, a story which climaxes in Jesus of Nazareth. This story informs everything in your life with significance and meaning.

The Creator God

The story opens: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” By His powerful and creative word, God spoke into existence the Universe and everything in it. This truth defines everything, and its implications are massive.

Your life is not an accident, a mere product of chance. Because God is your Creator, you belong to him. Just as a sculptor is the master of her clay, and an inventor retains the ownership “rights” of his invention, God is the supreme owner of the Universe and everything in it. He created and sustains your life.

Made for His Glory

You were made for God’s purposes and pleasure, and were intended to live for His glory and fame, to display the worth and value of the One who designed you. Like a mirror, you were made to reflect another’s beauty: God’s.

God has revealed to us how we are to reflect His glory. Jesus summarized this in two great commands:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

A life fully defined by love—for God and others—is a God-glorifying life.

Shattered by Sin

But, we have not loved God supremely or loved our neighbors as ourselves. We have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory. We’ve loved and worshiped idols of self, sex, money, power, prestige, and pleasure more than the Creator.

Our problem isn’t merely sinful actions, but sinful hearts:

What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person.  For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person.

We may have lived respectable and moral lives by human standards, but often this is driven by self-serving motives and tainted with sinful desires. The Scriptures remind us that “Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it.” It only takes one drop of cyanide to poison a glass of water, and just one sin leaves us guilty before a holy God.

We have committed mutiny and treason against the Creator-God. We are dead in transgressions and sins; blinded by Satan, the god of this world; and slaves of our passions and desires. Although man is a mirror made to reflect the radiance of God’s beauty and glory, sin has shattered the mirror.

The Covenant God

But the Creator God is also a Covenant God, One who makes promises and keeps them. Even before man sinned, God had formed a plan of rescue. He revealed his plan to a man named Abraham, and promised that through Abraham, all the peoples of the earth would be blessed. Abraham’s descendants became known as the nation of Israel.

God chose Israel to be his special people. He later made another covenant with King David, promising him a son who would be forever enthroned over God’s people. The story of the Old Testament is the outworking of these two promises: the story of God’s glory returning to earth through His chosen people.

This story climaxes in Jesus, who was descended from David and Abraham. Jesus was born of a virgin in fulfillment of God’s promises. He was the ultimate revelation of God’s glory, the true Image-bearer of God on earth:

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Jesus was God himself in human flesh.

The Crucified and Risen Messiah

For thirty years, Jesus lived a quiet life. Then He burst on the public scene, proclaiming the gospel (good news) of the kingdom, the fulfillment of God’s promises to his people. During his ministry, Jesus gathered followers and demonstrated both compassion and great power through many miracles. He taught with authority, appealing to the common people and raising suspicion among the religious and political leaders. He came with a message of hope, offering forgiveness and rest to those burdened and wearied with sin. He claimed divinity and oneness with God, and modeled a life of perfect love to God and man, always honoring his Father and extending mercy and compassion to broken people.

But his claim to be one with God led to his death. Jesus of Nazareth was sentenced to death by crucifixion—the most degrading and agonizing form of capital punishment at that time. A Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, sanctioned Jesus’s execution. He died outside of Jerusalem around 30 A.D., and was buried in the borrowed tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. His disciples were disillusioned and discouraged, and many of them denied and forsook him during the last hours of his life.

But three days later, mourners discovered that his tomb was empty. Jesus had come back to life and risen from the dead! For forty days, he appeared again and again to his disciples and closest friends, comforting them, commissioning them, and promising them the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit. Then he ascended into the heavens, with the promise that one day he would return again.

The Good News

The apostles and followers of Jesus emphasize in Scripture not only the fact of Jesus’ death, but also the reason. He died for our sins. The apostles realized that the death of Jesus resulted not just from the insidious plot of wicked men, but from the eternal plan of God to rescue men from their sins. Jesus himself said that he came to give his life as a ransom for many.

The death and resurrection of Jesus was the divine remedy to the problem of sin. God treated his sinless Son, Jesus, as if he had lived a sinful life, so that he could treat sinners as if they had lived the sinless life of Jesus. Through his crucifixion, Jesus absorbed the wrath of God against sin, so that God could be just in forgiving sin and declaring sinners righteous in his sight. By becoming a curse for us, Jesus delivered us from the curse of the law we had broken. The righteous one (Jesus) died for the unrighteous (us), so that we could be restored to a right relationship with God.

Jesus’ resurrection was proof that he had conquered sin and death once and for all. Death could not hold him in its grasp. Jesus destroyed Satan, who had the power of death, delivering those who through fear of death had been subject to lifelong slavery in sin.

Responding to the Good News

Someone once said that there are two kinds of people who go to hell: the unrighteous and the self-righteous. Living a moral life will not rescue you from sin, nor will baptism, confirmation, giving to the poor, or attending church. Religion is simply a more respectable pathway to eternal destruction. The only candidate for salvation is the person who realizes his utter helplessness to save himself. Self-salvation is utterly impossible.

But what is impossible with man is possible with God. The God-man, Jesus of Nazareth, has done for sinners what we cannot do for ourselves. When a jail-keeper asked Paul and his companions, “What must I do to be saved?” they answered, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.”

Believing in Jesus includes more than acknowledging the fact of his existence or the truthfulness of his claims. Believing in Jesus is trusting in him. Someone once defined faith this way: F.A.I.T.H. Forsaking All, I Trust Him. In the Apostle Paul’s words:

I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.

Trusting in Jesus is the pledge of allegiance to a person. Jesus said:

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.

The life of faith is a life of repentance. Trusting in Jesus involves turning–turning from sin and self-righteousness to Jesus as Savior and Lord.

If you are to be rescued from God’s just judgment of your sin and rebellion, you must ask the Lord Jesus to save you. Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved. This is God’s promise:

If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Repenting of your sins and trusting in Jesus is both God’s invitation and His command: “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.”

Will you obey his command?

From Reviving Our Hearts