Do You Know the Way to God? A Spiritual Check-Up

We’re continuing our annual spiritual exam, in which we’re evaluating our walk with God. How are you doing spiritually? 

In the previous post, we looked at the spiritual checklist Paul gives us in Galatians, the “fruit of the Spirit.” Today we turn to a different topic, salvation, because a growing, maturing Christian not only understands salvation but also shares the way to salvation with others. 

By salvation, I’m talking about the change from being estranged from God to being made right with God. When it comes to self-evaluation, keep in mind that claiming to be a believer, or even thinking we’re believers, doesn’t make us believers. Only by receiving God’s gracious gift, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who died to take our punishment and who lives to offer us forgiveness, can we become believers. We receive a relationship with God the Creator by trusting in the way he created. 

For you are saved by grace through faith, and this is not from yourselves; it is God’s gift—not from works, so that no one can boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9)

Being made right with God is not something we can earn by being good. There’s nothing you or I could do that’s good enough to deserve a right standing with God. You can’t work your way to God, and you can never earn it. We’ve sinned. Period. End of story. 

But God intervened. He said, “Your sin has to be punished; it has a penalty. But I’ll pay the penalty that you can’t pay.” We can’t earn God; we can hope all we want that our good will somehow outweigh our bad, but our good will never outweigh our bad. All we can do is receive salvation as a gift from God. The only way we can be made right with God is by having faith in the grace he’s shown us. Salvation is by our faith in God’s grace, or as Paul says, “by grace through faith.” 

Each of us has sinned, and that sin has separated us from God for all eternity. There is nothing we can do to overcome our sin. Jesus, though, died to pay our penalty, and when we trust in that truth, we’re made right with God. 

Have you done that? Was there a time when you admitted your sins to God and asked for his forgiveness, believing that Jesus died for your sins, and committing to serve him as Lord of your life?

If not, you can talk to God right now, admit your sins to him, ask for his forgiveness, and commit your life to him. 

If you’ve done that, you’re a child of God forever! 

Now that you’re a Christian, our spiritual exam continues with the question: “Do I share this way of salvation with other people?”

I had a good friend in a church where I once served, and one day he said to me, “I’m a Christian, but I think that’s a private matter between God and me. I don’t make people uncomfortable by talking about it.” 

But that isn’t what God calls us to do. He calls us to be his messengers of the good news of salvation. That doesn’t mean we should be getting in everyone’s face about it constantly. We’d do more damage than good that way. It does mean asking God to show you people who need Jesus, and to give you the courage and wisdom to talk to them about spiritual things and, when God says it’s time, to share with them the way of salvation.

Does that characterize you?

And do you know the way of salvation so well that, at the drop of a hat, you can share it with someone else?

If not, maybe this will help: it’s something I learned many years ago, and it’s so simple to learn and share. It’s called the “bridge illustration,” and here’s how it goes:

1. God created us for relationship with him.
2. We rebelled, sinned, and that separated us from God. So now there’s a huge gap between God and us. It’s as if we’re on one side of the Grand Canyon and God’s on the other, and there’s no way for us to cross the canyon to him. We need a bridge across the gap.
3. We may try to build a bridge to get to God. We do good things, help others, give to worthy causes, go to church, read the Bible, get baptized, and so on. In the end, none of this works, because we can’t do enough good things to pay for our sins. We can’t build the bridge.
4. Jesus did for us what we could never do. He lived a sinless life and died to take our punishment. He became the bridge between God and us. 
5. All we have to do is cross the bridge, and we do that by asking God for his forgiveness and committing our lives to him. 

So where are you on that bridge? If you haven’t crossed yet, is there any reason why you wouldn’t want to do that today? If you have crossed that bridge, could you, at a moment’s notice, explain to someone how to cross?