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Amazing Facts

Joe Crews

Three Steps to Heaven

A planet in space has been selected for a carefully planned approach and touchdown in the space age future.

Stay tuned for a preview of the amazing plans now being laid by Earthlings to make this flight.

Hello, this is Joe Cruz in the Amazing Facts broadcast, facts which affect you.

Say if you want to really humble yourself, let me make a suggestion.

Go outside some clear night and look up at the gigantic star fields overhead.

You know, a few years ago astronomers at UCLA discovered a great galaxy of stars, 8000000000 light years from the earth, 3000000000 light years beyond any stars previously known to exist.

And the light from this vast galaxy, traveling at the rate of about 6000000000000 miles per year, has just now reached planet earth.

According to astronomers, the new galaxy contains thousands of billions of stars and is at least 5 times larger than our own illustrious Milky Way galaxy.

Now in spite of these new discoveries, astronomers admit that they have not found an end to space.

They surmise that thousands of galaxies probably exist beyond even this farthest of galaxies.

And yet far beyond this most distant galaxy lies the pearly gates of God's great heavenly sky city.

Nobody knows how far it is in miles, of course, to that city of the New Jerusalem, the place where Christ has prepared a place for us.

But this I know, no matter how far it is, every soul in this listening audience today can get there in just 3 steps if he wants to take them.

Do you ever feel that salvation is too complicated to really understand?

I am afraid that millions of sincere people have actually stumbled over the amazing simplicity of the gospel.

Listen, only 1 thing is absolutely necessary for justification.

Only 1 thing will keep you out of heaven, and that is sin.

Get rid of sin in your life, and the only problem is immediately solved.

You say, well, that is easier said than done.

Yes, maybe, but on the other hand, it may be easier done than you ever realized.

God has made it so simple that even little children can come into His kingdom.

It is only the imagination and, I am afraid, the unbelief of misguided adults that makes this road to heaven seem so heavy and unhappy.

Listen to this text in Revelation 21, 27.

This is speaking about heaven now and those who will go there.

"...and there shall in no wise enter into it anything that defile it." Now listen, the only thing that defiles is sin in God's sight.

Therefore, all sin must be removed before we can gain entry into the presence of God.

The greatest problem facing the world today is how to get rid of sin.

There's not a living individual today who has not been guilty of transgression.

But if we can just learn how to get rid of this guilt, of this sin, we will have taken the first great giant step from earth to heaven.

Thousands of course would like to be Christian, but they just don't know how.

And today we want to try to make it so simple that even the children who are listening can understand it.

The strange thing about salvation is its utter simplicity.

Many people stumble because they don't believe it's really that simple.

You know, The duty of the doctor is not merely to tell the patient he is sick.

He must also give a medicine to cure the sickness.

And we can't tell a man, look, you are a sinner, you are lost, you need to be saved.

We can't just tell him that without showing the way to get rid of that sin.

So many people are like the little girl who was lost and crying bitterly as she walked along the street.

A kind man met her and asked what she wanted, and she sobbed out, Oh, I want to be found, I want to be found.

Now maybe you are 1 of those discouraged, miserable people, groping in the darkness also and wondering how to be found.

If so, just remember that God wants to save you in the simple way that we are going to tell you about right now.

I have marked down 3 conditions to having our sins forgiven.

The first is a long theological word, repentance.

We are going to try to break it down into some very easily understood phrases.

Romans 3.23 says, "...for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." Now that doesn't leave out a single soul living in the world today.

Even the tiny baby is born with a tendency to disobey.

And it will be the most natural thing in the world for that child to sin as it grows older.

All right, what are the wages of sin then?

Romans 6, 23 says, "...for the wages of sin is death." Now that means we are all under the penalty of death and none of us have any power to deliver ourselves from it.

No amount of effort can satisfy the claims of that broken law.

We fall into the same state as the Apostle Paul, who had a desire to do right, but always found that law of sin present, forcing him to transgress.

And it is that law of sin, that naturally carnal condition that no man can overcome alone.

We simply cannot lift ourselves by our own bootstraps.

With this weakness we have inherited from our parents, and they from their parents, all the way back to our first parents in the Garden of Eden.

Paul said, The carnal mind is enmity against God, and it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.

It is just as impossible for a person to change himself as it is for the leopard to change its spots.

Jeremiah puts it this way, Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?

Then may ye also do good that are accustomed to do evil.

Jeremiah 13.23 Now the thought of our lost and helpless condition should startle us, friends.

As the fact sinks in upon us that we are like prisoners in jail who cannot really pardon ourselves, we begin to lose confidence in our own strength to save ourselves or even to help ourselves.

Then we turn our eyes away from self and behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.

And when I look at Jesus and see Him dying on that cross, the awfulness of sin begins to register on my mind.

A new unworthiness grips me as I finally understand that sin meant His death or mine.

As a sinner I should suffer death, but there He is, suspended between heaven and earth and dying in my place.

How can we grasp the significance of what Jesus did?

What does it do for us when we see Him there taking our place on that cross and dying in our stead?

Well, it should cause us to be very sorry for our sins, friends, because we know it was our sins that really put Him there and that caused Him to die on that cross.

It was our guilt that crushed out the life of Jesus on Calvary.

And that sorrow I feel because of what my sins did to Jesus, friends, that is repentance.

I am not talking about sorrow which springs from fear of punishment.

Now there is a godly sorrow, and there is a sorrow after this world that thinks only of itself.

Worldly sorrow, I believe, is well illustrated by the story of that preacher who was walking down the corridor of a prison, and he heard a certain prisoner over there behind the bars weeping aloud.

So the kind minister stepped over and put his hand through and patted the fellow and said, Why are you weeping?

And the prisoner answered between his sobs, Oh, I am so sorry, I am so sorry.

I was robbing a house at night, and I sneezed, and they caught me and brought me here." Well now, friends, that is a worldly sorrow.

Genuine repentance is grief because of what my sin did to Jesus.

Now the second step on the road to heaven or in getting our sins forgiven is called confession.

Now this is beautifully described in 1 John 1, 9.

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Now this promise from God to forgive is conditioned only by our confession of sin and by our faith in believing that He does what He promised to do.

Just as soon as we meet that condition, The promise becomes a fact and our sins are gone.

It's a transaction of faith which we act upon solely because we know God's Word is true.

We are not to ask God to prove that He kept His Word to us.

There will not be any certain kind of feeling as evidence that our sins are forgiven.

You know, some people wait, thinking that some ecstatic emotion will come to them, and that they will know their sins are gone because of some strange ecstatic feeling.

God said He would forgive us if we ask Him, and after we ask Him we must believe that God meant what He said and that He did what He said and that our sins are gone.

We know they are forgiven, not because we feel anything, but because He said it would happen.

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Three Steps to Heaven

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