Most Important Thing

I suspect a lot of people would agree with you.   

People have a lot of ideas about what it takes to have eternal life. Some people think you need to be a good person. Others would say you have got to join a church. Some believe you just have to believe God exists.   

But none of them can say they are SURE that will get them into heaven.   

If you don't know for sure what God requires to have eternal life, it isn't for lack of trying on God's part. He has done everything He can to show us the way.    

One of the great things about God is that He wants us to know Him and He is willing to go to extreme lengths to help us. In fact, human history is the story of God revealing himself to mankind.   

In the beginning, God came to the Garden of Eden in the cool of the evening to visit Adam and Eve. Later, God called Moses up on a mountaintop and gave him instructions to help the Hebrew people live like God wanted them to. For centuries, God spoke to prophets so they could pass His words on to the people.   

But Adam and Eve disobeyed God. The Hebrew people refused to follow the instructions. And the prophets were beaten and killed for relaying a message people didn't want to hear.   

But God still wanted people to know how to have eternal life. So He did the only other thing He could do: He sent Jesus to not only tell us but to show us how to live God's kind of life.   

Jesus was a man, but He was more than a man. He was God in the flesh, a living, breathing example of what it was like when one of us had a perfect relationship with our Father in heaven. When Jesus taught, it was God's very own Word. When He healed people, it was God's very own power. When He allowed himself to be tortured and killed, it was God's very own suffering to pay the price for our sin. When He raised Jesus from the grave, it was God's very own victory over the power of death.   

Then, so we wouldn't forget all those important examples, God put it all down in black and white. He gave us the Bible -- the written Word of God to teach us about the living Word of God.   

And the Bible tells us plainly what we need to do to have eternal life: Declare that Jesus really is God in the flesh and stake your life on the fact that God raised Him from the dead (Romans 10:9-10).   

You CAN be sure what God requires for you to have eternal life. He has laid it out for you in the simplest possible terms.   

The only real uncertainty is whether you want to live the kind of life Jesus lived -- or whether you'd rather stick with the lousy mess you've been living.