Puzzles are a great way to pass the time. There’s just something satisfying in dumping out the box and sifting through the pieces to put together whatever picture is on the front. It’s great until you lose a piece. Has that ever happened to you? Yeah, it’s frustrating to have spent so much time putting the puzzle together only to come to the end and realize that the most important piece, the final one, is not there.
Our lives are a lot like that puzzle.
We’re told that to get into heaven we must be a ‘good person’, so we spend all of our time and effort on making moral choices, going to church, feeding the poor, helping the helpless, being nice to people even when we feel like not being nice…basically, we use our actions as the measuring stick for where we will spend eternity and figure that in the end, God will weigh the good we’ve done against the bad and let us in.
Or, on the other hand, we say a quick prayer of repentance at some point in our lives, whether to appease someone preaching at us, or because at the time we genuinely feel the need to, but after a while our lives go ‘back to normal’. We slip back into whatever sin we were doing before we ‘found Christ’…drugs, lying, stealing, sex…and pass it off under the surety that God’s grace will cover it because, after all, we did say that prayer once, even if it was a long time ago.
Wouldn’t it be a bummer if we came to the end of our lives only to find out we were missing a piece of the puzzle?
Think about it. Repentance is two-sided, turning away from sin and turning toward God. If we want to be truly repentant, we have to do both. If we want to make it to heaven, we can’t just claim belief and then live our lives any way we want to any more than we can be a good person and live a morally correct life on our own.
The missing piece is Jesus.
Repentance is more than just a prayer, or a religious experience. Yes, it’s confessing your sins to God and asking Him for forgiveness. But it’s also living like you have been forgiven. Repentance…true repentance…is having a personal relationship with Jesus that completely changes how we live. It’s not a one-time offer. It’s an action. We must be determined to rid our lives of any sins God points out to us, and then we must determine to live in a way that pleases Him.
Every choice we make, every step we take, is another piece in the puzzle of our lives, but if we get to the end, and don’t have Jesus, that missing piece will determine where we spend eternity.
“He (John) went into all the country around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” – John 3:3