16 November 2015
Friends, how good is God’s Good News!
To me, God’s rescue plan for humanity is the best thing ever. In Jesus, we receive far more than Adam and Eve ever lost!
Here are some highlights for me…
- God’s plan in Jesus rescues me from what I deserve. On my own, I’m fit only to be picked up by the scruff of my neck and tossed onto the fire like the broken thing I am. With Jesus, God’s anger at me has been poured onto Jesus instead.
- It saves me for God’s love. I have an intimate, loving relationship with the God of the universe. I am not left to fend for myself and make up life as best I can. God guides me and grows me, and holds my hand through thick and thin. He listens to me whenever I want to talk to him. He lives in me by his Spirit, changing my heart from the inside out, so I start to want what God wants.
- By trusting what Jesus did on the cross 2,000 years ago, I am saved as God’s child – adopted as family. No longer merely a (broken) made item, now I’m a child of the Maker. I still look the same for now, but when Jesus returns, he will be seen in all his glory, and I will be glorious too, with the glory that belongs to a child of God.
- God didn’t whisk me up to heaven the moment I trusted Jesus, since then I’d be of no use to him. He gives me the privilege of being part of the thing closest to his own heart – seeking and saving the lost. I have a great purpose.
- As God’s child, I will inherit from him. He made everything, so owns everything. That means I will inherit everything, as a co-heir with Jesus. I am the richest person in the world, whatever it looks like now.
- And all this will be forever. After a few decades here in this broken world, where life is at best mixed, and often terrible, I will have hundreds and thousands of years with God pouring his generosity over me in abundance. After 10,000 years, I will say “Wow! Every day God has given me lovely things. There can’t be any more – I must have received all there is.” And the next day God will surprise me with new delights. It will never end.
I now know there is so much more to life than what I see around me. The worst of it can’t compare to the good to come. (Romans 8:18, 2 Corinthians 4:17)
This is all too good to be true … but it is true and real and very trustworthy.
What a rescue plan! What a God!
Warmly in Christ
Joe Radkovic, Evangelism Minister
