It was Thursday night Kid’s Club, and I had just read my students the age-old story that we’ve all heard a million times about Jesus dying on the cross.
For the review, I read through some questions, trying to coax answers out of them as quickly as possible so they could get to the coloring, but the last one grabbed my attention. “How can we get into heaven?” Marisol wasted no time piping up confidently, “By doing good things.”
“But what about all the bad things we do?” I pressed. “Can we really do enough good things to make up for them?” Their faces were angelically blank. It was time for an illustration.
“If I only do one bad thing every day, that’s not really too bad is it?” They shook their heads obediently. “And I suppose, if there are seven days in a week and I do seven bad things, then it still isn’t too terrible. But if I do one bad thing every day for a whole year, how many bad things is that?” I noticed two little boys exchange nervous glances. “That makes 365 bad things. And do you guys know how many years I have been alive?”
They were hanging on my words by now. “I have been alive seventeen years. So if I have done 365 bad things every year for the last seventeen years of my life, that means 6,205 bad things,” I announced. They stared at me open-mouthed. “How can God possibly let me into heaven if I have done so many bad things?” I prompted. But all they could process at the moment was that poor Maestra was going to hell! “That is exactly why God sent His Son for us,” I explained.
In that moment, I realized how often we think just as Marisol. We tend to think of Jesus’ death as being a precautionary measure “just in case” we mess up. But even the “best” of us can never deserve what He did. Ephesians 2:8-9 says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not of yourselves; it is a gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.”
As I hugged my students goodbye that night, I was painfully aware of all the times I had wronged my Savior, but at the same time immensely grateful for the reminder He had given me.
