SINCE EARLY this year, I have been going through the basics of being a Christian. Today, I want to pull it all together before we move on to the place of the Holy Spirit in our lives today.
We have seen some very basic facts. We have seen...
• that God truly loves us and has a great and wonderful plan for us
• that there is a gulf between ourselves and God which separates us from the experience of that plan
• that sin is the basic problem which causes that gulf to exist

and we have constantly seen throughout

• that God has acted to bridge the gulf when all our pious and religious deeds are totally inadequate to bridge it.

A WONDERFUL PLAN
The original Puritans of the 16th and 17th Centuries were far from joyless. Sometimes people tell you they were the Ayatllahs of the English Church. But they also understood God's simple, basic and essential plan. In their Westminster Catechism, the question is posed, “What is the chief and highest end of man?” In other words, putting it into modern English, “What were human beings mainly created for?” And the answer is, “Man's chief and highest end is to glorify God, and fully to enjoy him forever.”
It's a relationship of mutual pleasure! It's us giving God a good time, and him giving us a good time.
Is that a realistic attitude?
We saw what Jesus said. “I have come so that you might have life and have it more abundantly.” So he does want us to enjoy an overflowing, worthwhile life. Not a life free from troubles, but a life of peace and outbreaks of joy as we see results for our labours, a life bearing fruit for the Kingdom of God.
Being true to Jesus Christ isn’t supposed to be a life of drudgery and misery, even if that’s how if’s frequently presented in the media, and even by some Christians. But that's not biblical. It’s not what Jesus plans.
Christianity is a hopeful, cheerful faith.
Buddhism hopes to experience nothing, because they think that all experience leads to sin and suffering. Nirvana is the bliss of total detachment.
Islam hopes for mediated joys, brought to you by djinns and by the black–eyed virgin houris.
But the gospel of Jesus Christ promises personal and immediate joys through relationship with Jesus.

A FAILED EXPERIENCE
Yet very few people find this experience. There are three basic possibilities.One is that the promise is empty and worthless. The famous film producer, Sam Goldwyn, once remarked that a verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it is written on. Is Jesus’ promise like one of Sam Goldwyn's verbal contracts?
If you think how strong the drive in us is to have that kind of life, it has to be something God created us for.
Or maybe we have failed to meet the pre–requisites for experiencing that life.
And the third is that, although we have at some stage met the pre–requisites, we have since then ceased to satisfy the requirements.
My experiences when I did my Masters Degree might give you a picture.
I wanted a course leading to a professional qualification in Town and Country Planning.
The first place I applied to was Macquarie University. In fact, they had contacted me first. But, when I put in my application, I made two discoveries. First, their course at that time didn’t lead to professional qualifications. It was a good course, but the Royal Australian Planning Institute didn’t recognise it as a qualification for membership. The second problem was that they said I didn’t have the required minimum qualifications to get in.
So I applied to Sydney University. I met their requirements to get in and the course was accepted by the RAPI.
Then, at the end of my first year, they changed management, and that led to a change in course requirements. Suddenly I didn’t fully comply anymore, and I had to take an additional course to satisfy them. It was a blow, because I had taken on nearly a full–time course load, hoping to finish the course in two years, and this extra term of work meant that it was now going to take me four years. I was underimpressed!
Macquarie’s course was like a meaningless promise. It sounded good, but was clearly not going to take me where I was going.
Sydney University’s course was good. It worked, and it applied to me.
But then something changed, and what had been good no longer suited me or I no longer suited it.
So, if we are not enjoying the abundant life, if there isn’t a lot of joy in our lives, and if Jesus wasn’t talking nonsense, then we have never begun on the abundant life, or we have moved from where it can be poured out on us.
Jesus doesn’t talk nonsense. He might say things that ask us to think; but he doesn’t offer us what he can’t deliver on. So that leaves us with never having gotten into the course, or with something’s having changed since we arrived.

THE SIN PROBLEM
So we saw that the basic problem is sin. It is what causes the unbridgeable gulf between us and God. As God says,
ISA 59:2 But your iniquities have separated
you from your God;
your sins have hidden his face from you,
so that he will not hear.
Never think of God as a cranky old codger who turns his back on us because of our little failures, and petulantly refuses to talk to us despite all our efforts.
The true picture is of God reaching out, saying, “Come to me: I want you to be my much–loved child!” And, instead, we walk up to him and slap his face.
The two most basic commandments are to love God with all we've got and to love our neighbour as ardently as we love ourselves. And these two commandments are the ones we most constantly and totally break.
How do we satisfy God if we have turned against him at such a basic level? These are not commandments about what we are to do, but about the attitude we are to bring.
As part of my job, I have to do work for people who mean nothing to me. Sometimes they aren’t even names. I just know that someone at such and such a firm wants such and such a database. If that person gets what is wanted at the specified time, I have done my bit. But God isn’t like that. What he wants above all is the right relationship, and the acts of obedience flow from that.
A few weeks ago, I was going to lunch wth a friend, and I found I had no money and the ATM near where I work wasn’t working. So my friend shouted me — about $7 worth.
Then some things happened which stopped me from paying the debt back, and I was getting around with the money burning a hole in my pocket until this Friday. It wasn’t just a matter of the debt — it was a matter of the relationship. I knew my friend wouldn’t really care whether or not I paid up. But there was no way that I wanted to risk letting $7 crack a good friendship.
Yet we let far more than $7 stand between ourselves and God. We might pay a debt or two, but the relationship has never existed. It’s worse than being as though God didn’t know who we are: it’s as though we were dead in his eyes. He doesn’t know us, because we don’t come close enough.
As the Bible says,
All have sinned and come short of the Glory of God.
The problem is that we can’t possibly hope to bridge the gap ourselves. What can I give in exchange for all the wrong I have done? What good thing can compensate for the simplest bad thing? If I murder someone, how many glasses of water have to be given to thirsty strangers before the debt is square? You can’t compare apples and screwdrivers. If you are a fruiterer and I destroy your truckload of apples, you aren’t going to want me to give you the same weight in screwdrivers.
Furthermore, the gospel makes it abundantly clear that God has bridged that gulf in Jesus. So, whenever I try to bridge the gap with my own puny, human efforts, all I am actually doing is saying to God once again, “I want nothing to do with you. I’ll fix this myself!” Another slap!

WHAT DO I DO?
It’s very clear that our need is overwhelming. And the only possible solution is one coming from God himself.
Here is the full answer: God has acted for us in Christ, building that bridge to cross the uncrossable gulf.
The Bible tells us that God is love. It says,
God loved the world...
But how do we know whether he really does love us?
When you went to Sunday School, no doubt you heard about all the good things God showers on us — the springtime and the harvest, and soft refreshing rain. We can look at nature and all its gifts and think to ourselves that God probably loves us.
But I need more than a probable. I want to know for sure. If I have nothing to go on, I have no reason to remain a believer. I may as well go and eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow I die.
How do I know for sure?
There's only one way, and that is Jesus.
Yes, the gifts of nature may imply a loving God, but they may equally imply that God loves diamonds, and humans are just one of the more convenient ways to get diamonds out of the rocks, so it pays God, for the sake of his hobby, to maintain reasonable life support for diamond mine workers. The rest of us are just backup, and get the air to breathe as a by–product.
But, if God loved me enough to send his son, then I really have something to go on.
If there is no way that I can rebuild the bridge, if my sinfulness means that even my efforts to return are so tainted with selfishness and rebellion that they only serve to drive the breach wider, then the solution can come only from God's side. There's no other solution.
I've met people who suggest that Jesus was a very good man who was rewarded by God. They say that God adopted him as his Son.
But what good is that to me? God looks around and says, “Joe Bloggs, you are so good, I’m going to have you killed for the sins of the world.”
And Joe Bloggs says, “Oh good! I always wanted that!”
Like fun he does!