If you were to die tonight, where do you think you would go, and why?

I remember talking to an elderly person who knew that her time on earth was drawing to a close. I mentioned to her how she could have the assurance of eternal life with God through faith in Jesus Christ. The woman replied, “well, I hope I’ll get there.” To which another person piped up and said, “of course you will, you’ve lived a good life!” People have this assumption that they will go to heaven/experience a blissful afterlife simply because they were a ‘good person’. They helped others, volunteered in the community, and they were law-abiding citizens who didn’t commit any crimes. These are, of course, all great things for us to aspire to. 

Notice, however, that such a viewpoint does not produce any kind of certainty or assurance. The elderly person I spoke to could only ‘hope’ that she would end up in a good place.  

But the wonderful thing is that we can have complete certainty and assurance. How? It is not by living a ‘good’ life. We fall hopelessly short of God’s standards, and we could never be sure that we had done enough. True confidence in the face of death comes from knowing that there is someone who has paid the price for our failures, someone who lived the perfect life, whose goodness is credited to our account. Romans 3:22-24 says, “…righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe…all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” It is the death and resurrection of Christ for our sake that brings us into right standing with God. A Christian therefore says, “After death, I will be with the Lord in peace forever, because of His grace and mercy to me. I have accepted His free gift of forgiveness and eternal life through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.”