hen we speak to people on the streets and ask them ‘Where do you think you will spend eternity?’ a common response is ‘in heaven, because I am a good person.’ This is a widely held belief in Britain - that good people go to heaven. There are serious problems with this view though………..

The issue with this is that we grade ourselves very well when we think about our own morality and behaviour. My mother once said to me, ‘I am a good person, I have never murdered anyone, and I give money to charity.’ But interestingly, when she was faced with death and knew that she had months to live due to terminal cancer; she used to lie awake at night wondering if she would qualify for entry into heaven. Her conscience told her that things in her life had not been totally perfect and right and she knew deep down that these things; her sins would separate her from a Holy and perfectly good God.

You see, if we were to judge ourselves, we would be kind to ourselves and often would see the good. But the problem is that we will not be the judge of ourselves, the living God who is Holy and perfect will be our judge.

The one who judges us knows all about us; our secret sin and wrong doing,the motives of our hearts, the things that we have done that only we are aware of. As well as the things we have done in secret hoping no-one would ever find out.

see, we often make God in our own image. If we do not know the living God; the God written of in the Bible, we will create in our own imaginations a God who is really very similar to us. We create a God who has our moral standards, a God who likes us, and will just want to let us off the hook for the wrong things we have done. We will make a God in our own image, who will smilingly welcome us into the heaven that we have dreamt up for ourselves in our own imaginations.

But the Bible tells us that no-one is truly good, not even a single person on the earth. The Bible tells us that every person living on the earth has sin in their lives, things that they have done that are wrong.

The Bible says that sin separates us from a perfect and Holy God, and that the wages of sin is death. This means that the consequences of our sins is death. It means that we will face spiritual death (a lack of relationship with God while alive on the earth) and also physical death at the end of our earthly lives.

We will face eternal separation from God, because He is holy and perfect, and He cannot allow anything that is not perfect and Holy into His presence in heaven.

Separation from God is what will happen to us if we have not accepted the free gift of God; Jesus Christ.

So, a person who seems good, and seems to live a good life cannot be in heaven with God forever; unless they have accepted Jesus Christ as their Saviour and Lord.

No matter how good a person might seem on the outside, they will still have sins in their lives that displease God and this means that they cannot know Him now, and will not be with Him forever in heaven unless they receive Jesus as their Saviour. Jesus paid for our sins on the cross, and when we have faith in Him, God the Father forgives us for all our sins and allows us to have relationship with Him now and also access and entry to heaven in the future.