Stacking the Jury

Do you think in the shower? I do. I find myself talking to myself about things a lot. Much like when I am trying to go to sleep. Speaking of sleep, did you read my last post about the little things God says to us in the dark? Go here and read it. And while you read it, click an ad or two and share it. Thanks :) Anyways, today, but not the day when you are reading this, I was talking to myself in the shower trying to think of what God is wanting me to write about today, I was thinking about salvation.

See for some reason, and I cannot retrace the steps it took to get me here, I went on thinking about our sins and what happens when we accept Jesus. Well we have been taught, at least I have, that when we are saved God erases our sins, wipes our slates clean, and we are new. God is a god of new. He loves new things. He told the Israelites He is doing a new thing.  In Isaiah God said "Now I am announcing new things to you..." And again God said "See how the former things have come true; and now new things do I declare." God loves new things. And again, God said "I create new heavens and a new earth." God loves new

So when we say yes to Jesus we are made clean, and we are, as Paul wrote, a new creation. So now that we are clean, holy, and finally able to be with God, I stopped to think, if we are clean, that means the taint of sin is no longer there. I was told by someone at sometime, God forgets our sins, they are put from his mind and are no more. So if our sins are no more, then what are we being judged for?

I have been taught that we have one life, death, then Judgement. We come before the throne of God and our judged. As Christians, we know that no matter how much good we do, it cannot make us good enough. Then I was thinking, what is it that we will be judged for. Not every man, but what are Christians judged for. If we are clean and have no sin now, then we cannot be judged for it. So what are we judged for.

What came to mind was that maybe we are not judged by our lives before salvation, but by the lives we live after salvation. Not the wrong that we do, but by the good we do not do. Even Paul struggled with this. In Romans 7:15 and 19 Paul wrote, "For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do." So I think we will be judged for the good we do not do.

I like to picture it like this; we will be sitting at a small table, the kind in coffee shops that can only sit one person, or two if they have nothing with them. It will be just you and Jesus. There might be a world of tables, but you will not see a single thing outside of Jesus. You will be crying. Jesus will ask you, "Why didn't you do this that I asked you?" Which he will show you, then he will show you what could have happened if you did this. And you will cry some more. Then He will show you the good you did do, and the greatness that followed it through the ages. You will cry some more. Then Jesus will say, "Hey, bring it in." And give you a hug that will instantly stop the crying, he will pull away just enough to take the hem of his sleeve and wipe the last of the tears from your face. You will now be home.

The judgement is going to be so personal, and it is going to hurt so much, but even though it does, God will take care of us still. I don't think God will even look at the stuff we did before we accepted Jesus because it simply does not exist to him anymore. But that might be one of the worst parts of it all. For the Christians who only accepted Jesus at the last moment, and truly meant it, They have nothing to be judged, yet they will also have nothing to be rewarded with either. For those who have been Christians their whole lives, we have our whole lives to be judged for. In this case, it is a matter of the first shall be last, and the last, first. We will have so much to go over, so many tears, it will hurt, and it will be filled with joy.

Good news there though, you are reading this and you have time still. God probably is not coming back tomorrow, but just in case, you have time to fix it. You can make it so that this point on there will be less and less things not done to go over and more things to cry tears of joy over. We have time.