Welcome back to the Ask Pastor John podcast with a longtime pastor and author, John Piper. We recently received an anonymous question from an international listener to the podcast who emails us and who listens from a rural region in Nigeria. Amazing. And it's a very simple but profoundly important question that all of us, all of us must answer at some point in our lives.

Here it is. Pastor John, how do I know if I'm ready for heaven? Well, I love that somebody asks this simple, basic question because it gives me a chance to go right to the heart of the Bible, right to the heart of the best news in all the world that we call the gospel, namely that nobody is fit for heaven.

Nobody is ready for heaven. Nobody deserves heaven. Nobody can expect to go to heaven unless God steps in and provides a way by grace, grace, and by mercy that through faith, not through my good deeds or my merit, could get me there. And that's exactly why the Bible was written.

That's why Jesus came into the world. That's why there's a history of salvation. The most important part of the Bible that explains this is, I think, the letter to the Romans written by the apostle Paul. So if you want one short book, I mean, 16 chapters, but you can read it in an hour, to explain all this, go to Romans.

What he shows there first is that, and we know this, everybody knows this if we're honest with our conscience, every human being has sinned, he said, that is failed to live for God, to honor God, to glorify God. We're all selfish. Yes, we are. All of us were born that way.

And then he says, by works of the law, that is, if you try to keep a list of deeds that God requires, no human being will be justified in God's sight. In other words, you'll never be right with God if you try to go the law keeping route. That's Romans 3, verse 20.

And then we learned the breathtaking news that even though none of us deserves heaven, none of us is fit for heaven, none of us is ready for heaven in our own selves. Nevertheless, God made a way for us sinful human beings to be accepted as righteous. Believe it. Righteous, good, just, law abiding, accept us as righteous in his presence.

Now, how in the world can that be? That's the great gospel mystery. How can that be? How can a sinner, guilty, shameful failure like me be accepted by a perfectly good and holy and just judge of the universe? And we all know that's the way he is. Our conscience is dictated to us.

He's perfectly righteous. How can I ever be accepted as good and perfect and holy as his child in his very presence? Wow. How can that be? And the answer of the Bible is God puts my sin, all our sin, whoever trusts him, he puts all our sin on Jesus and puts Jesus perfection and righteousness on us.

Way back 700 years before Jesus came into the world, Isaiah 53, verse 4 prophesied, he, that is the coming Messiah, Jesus, he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. All we like sheep have gone astray. We've turned everyone to his own way and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

That's the best news in the world to me when my conscience condemns me at night and I know I've sinned and I hear the words, he laid on him the iniquity of us all. And not only this, it gets better. Not only were my sins put on Jesus, but his perfection, his righteousness, Jesus never sinned in the slightest.

His righteousness is counted by God as mine. In 2 Corinthians 5, 21, for our sake, God made him to be sin. He made him to be sin. He treated him as sin. He put our, our sin on him who knew no sin so that in him, we might become who are very sinful.

We might become the righteousness of God. That's what the Bible calls justification, being declared just or declared righteous in God's presence on the basis of the justice and the righteousness of Jesus, not ourselves. That's the great exchange. That's the great glorious mystery of how a sinner can be accepted in the presence of God.

So to say it again, in him, we become the righteousness of God in him. And that's an utterly crucial phrase in him. We become righteous before God. That means that the righteousness that enables us to be accepted 100% accepted by God is not our own righteousness. It is the perfect righteousness of Christ who never sinned so that the foundation of our acceptance with a perfectly holy God is flawless, perfect, unshakable outside us as long as we are in him.

So the major question of life is what must I do to be in Christ so that his life, his death counts for me? What must I do to be saved from my sins like this? What must I do to enjoy the hope of heaven and eternal life and joy in God's presence like this?

And the glorious biblical New Testament gospel answer is you don't do anything to earn it. You don't do anything to show yourself good enough to have it. Christ has already done what needs to be done. What we must do is stop doing in order to earn anything and instead receive, that's the key word, receive Christ who did all the doing that had to be done as the foundation of our acceptance with God.

Any doing that God expects of us now, and he does, any doing that God expects of us now is because we are accepted 100%, not in order to be accepted 1% or any percent. So we live out of our acceptance with God, which is through faith in Christ. So we receive Jesus as a precious savior.

We receive him as a perfect Lord. We receive him as an infinite treasure. And the way the Bible talks about this is we must believe in him. Believe. That's what receive is. This doesn't mean merely believe facts about him because the devil believes all the facts about Jesus and he's not saved.

Believing is receiving him for who he is, for the treasure that he is. Receiving is what Paul expresses in Philippians 3, 8, when he says, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus Christ, my Lord, for his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things.

I count them as rubbish in order to gain Christ. So receiving Jesus is receiving him as that kind of treasure. And of course, if faith is that kind of joyful embrace of Jesus, it changes us in this life. If it doesn't change us, James says, it's dead, dead faith and dead faith doesn't save any body.

It's not real. But of course, being changed in this life doesn't mean perfection. Oh, that's so important for people to hear. Think of it this way. When you put your trust in Christ, your life takes on a new direction, not a new perfection. The river turns, but it doesn't yet run with perfectly pure water.

The perfection is Jesus. And then when we die or when Jesus comes back, we will share in that complete perfection. So let me just end by giving you a belief bath, a belief bath, meaning that for one minute as I close, I want to just bathe you with passages from the Bible that tell you how to be in Christ where all these treasures are found.

Namely, believe John 1 12, to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become the children of God. John 3 16. God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

John 3 36. Whoever believes in the sun has eternal life. John 11 25. Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. Acts 10 43 to Jesus. All the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins.

Acts 16 31. Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved. Romans 10 9. If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. And one more with the reminder that it is in Christ in relation to him that we have our readiness for heaven.

Galatians 3 26. In Christ, you are all sons of God through faith. So let me end with the words of the Bible itself in 2 Corinthians 5 20. To every person who's listening to me, I speak this as personally as I can. I implore you on behalf of Christ.

I'm speaking for Christ now. Be reconciled to God. Amen. Thank you for that gospel. Grace bath, Pastor John. And if you have a question for us, if you have a question for Pastor John, you can email it into me at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. And if you want to remain anonymous, please note that point in the email and we will respect that.

Thank you for listening and for making the podcast a part of your life wherever you are. And to our international listeners outside of the United States, it's always great to hear from you and to get your questions. Of course, you can find our audio feeds and our episode archive and you can reach us through email all through our online home@desiringgod.org forward slash askpastorjohn.

Really what our ministry is all about is helping people get ready for, by grace, eternity. But what if this life turns out to have been meaningless? What if this life is mere vanity? What if all the things that we do all day, all of our work and our homework and our friendships and our loves and our activities and everything that we spend so much time consumed with, what if it's all pointless in the end?

This is a question we get on occasion and we'll address it soon. It's a heavy question, but it's a necessary one that we need to ask and we need to answer from scripture, which we will do on Wednesday. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you then. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9