To Encourage You

Ephesians 2:8-9 “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”

Do you realize that heaven is a place where pride will be absent? You see, it was pride that was the root of sin’s origin as Lucifer in the glory with which God had blessed him looked at himself and said, “I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High” (Isaiah 14:14).  But it was not to be, for no one will rob God of the glory due His name.  It didn’t work for Lucifer then, and it hasn’t worked for anyone else since then.  No one who will ever enter heaven will ever be able to enter based on their own merit.  They won’t be proud of themselves for having entered there. 

But is that the way people think?  Hardly!  I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people answer the question of “Do you think you’ll go to heaven?” with the answer “Yes,” and they then, so often, follow that answer up with this reason: “Because I’m a good person.”  And while many people might think that, the truth of the matter is that no one is truly good but God (Mark 10:18).  And with God as the standard, we can be sure that we are so infinitely far from “good” that the thought that “I’m a good person” should never enter our mind. But it does. Wouldn’t you agree?  It’s a concept with which we deceive ourselves, and we have lots of help with the deception. Everywhere we look we see the message proclaimed of how wonderful we are. Many claim it’s the antidote to low self-esteem. We are so much more wonderful than we realize. Isn’t that the message we so often hear?

So what is the truth about our own goodness? What does the God Who is uniquely good say? He’s told us throughout His Word, and He’s given us one example after another to prove it. Listen to the description of the natural man in Romans 1:29-32: “They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.” Then this from Romans 3:10-18: “as it is written: ‘None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.  Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive. The venom of asps is under their lips. Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; in their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they have not known.  There is no fear of God before their eyes.’”  It is all summed up in verse 23 of the same chapter where it says: “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”

But so many don’t believe this as they continue to profess “I’m a good person,” and they would be offended or even angry if you were to tell them otherwise.  They’ll claim that they obey the Ten Commandments, like the rich young ruler did in Matthew 19.  But they don’t. No one, in their natural condition, ever has. We continually violate this summary of what it means to be righteous in God’s eyes, blind to the fact that the Ten Commandments were only given to us to expose our sin, not to form a basis for us to justify ourselves.

So again, heaven is a place where pride is absent. As the passage above from Ephesians 2 tells us, everyone who has ever been saved in the past or will be saved in the future knows that he or she was only ever saved by grace. It was not of themselves. It was totally a gift of God, and God alone will get the glory for it. Another way to think about this is that no one that is in heaven right now thinks that they deserve to be there! They have NO ROOM to boast! They are not good enough, in and of themselves, to be there.  They are flabbergasted by the grace of God that provided a means for them to enter.  And they worship and glorify the One Who, alone is the Way. His name is Jesus.  No one ever has or ever will come unto the Father except by Him (John 14:6).  In the wonderful words of 2 Corinthians 5:21, we are told that it was “For our sake he (i.e., God the Father) made him (i.e., God the Son) to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” It’s an awesome truth. It’s the message of the cross. And it’s truth that we can take absolutely no credit in. We have absolutely no room to boast, but for this – as God proclaimed to Jeremiah as recorded in Jeremiah 9:24, “let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord.” 

Yes, there is no pride when our boast is in Him.  May He alone be glorified for the wonderful things He has done!