Some time ago, in connection with a national radio program that we produced, we went down to the center of Dallas, Texas, and stopped people on their busy round of life. We put a microphone in front of them and asked two very simple questions. The first question was, "Do you believe there's a heaven?" The second question we asked was, "If so, who goes there?"
We talked to all kinds of people, to bankers and to busboys, to teachers and to students, to men in overalls and to people in white collars. And of that group of people to whom we spoke, 75 of them told us they believed in a place called heaven.
It was when we asked our second question that we got into trouble. "Since you believe there's a heaven, who goes there?" The answers were as varied as the people to whom we spoke. Some folks just shrugged their shoulders and walked away. Others told us that they didn't know. One lady said that, frankly, it was none of our business! Of that group of people, about 75 in number, every single one of whom told us they believed in a place called heaven, only two could give us any kind of clear-cut answer as to the kind of people who go there.
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I would like to bring you a very simple message from what I believe to be one of the greatest gospel sentences in the Word of God. It is greater even than
John 3:16, for it contains in its bosom all that
John 3:16 proclaims and even more. It comes to us from
Romans 4:5. "But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness."
When you first read that sentence, you may find it a bit difficult to understand. If you look at the sentence closely, however, you will see that the Apostle Paul is describing the people that God "justifies." These are the men and women whom God declares are righteous and have an acceptable standing with Him. These are the people God will accept in heaven.
In this verse Paul gives us the characteristics of the individuals that He justifies. Those characteristics have a way of turning our values upside down, and they demonstrate the way God thinks is often quite different from our own.
The first characteristic of the people God justifies is that every single one of them has been an ungodly person.
Notice the text, "But to him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness." If you missed it there, you would find it in
Romans 5:6, where we are told the only people for whom Christ died are those who are described as "the ungodly."
This is one of the shocking declarations of the Scripture. God does not justify Bible readers. God does not justify praying people. God does not justify tithers or church members. God does not justify Baptist, or Methodist, or Roman Catholics, or Jewish people, or Episcopalians. God does not justify people who attend your church. The only people God justifies (that is, "declares righteous") are "ungodly" people.