“I am doing the best I can and I’m sincere.”
Even if you could do far better than you are doing now, you still can’t do well enough because you don’t please God by being good (Galatians 2:21), but by trusting Jesus (John 1:12).
Also, sincerity is not the way to heaven. What if you are sincerely wrong? (Remember John 14:6?) If you are relying on your sincerity, then you are saying that because you are sincere, you are good enough on your own to be with God. To appeal to your sincerity is to appeal to pride, because you are appealing to something that is in you, and not to God, for your reason to go to heaven. You must have faith in Jesus.
If you study the New Testament, you will see that God’s love is almost always given in direct correlation to the cross: herein is love, for God so loved, God commended His love, etc. (See John 3:16; Romans 5:5,6,8; Galatians 2:20; Ephesians 2:4,5; 5:2,25; 1 John 3:16; 4:10; and Revelation 1:5, among others.) The cross is the focal point of God’s love for the world. How can we point to the cross without making reference to sin? How can we refer to sin without using the Law (Romans 7:7)? The biblical way to express God’s love to a sinner is to show him how great his sin is (using the Law—see Romans 7:13; Galatians 3:24), and then give him the incredible grace of God in Christ. This was the key to reaching so many on the Day of Pentecost. They were “devout” Jews who knew the Law and its holy demands, and therefore readily accepted the mercy of God in Christ to escape its fearful wrath.
Here, then, is how we can get sinners to cry out, according to Paris Reidhead:
If I had my way, I would declare a moratorium on public preaching of “the plan of salvation” in America for one to two years. Then I would call on everyone who has use of the airwaves and the pulpits to preach the holiness of God, the righteousness of God, and the Law of God, until sinners would cry out, “What must we do to be saved?” Then I would take them off in a corner and whisper the gospel to them. Don’t use John 3:16. Such drastic action is needed because we have gospel-hardened a generation of sinners by telling them how to be saved before they have any understanding why they need to be saved.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616), the world’s outstanding figure in literature, lived near his Bible, as shown by the numerous quotations from it in his plays and dramas. His end came when he was only 52 years of age. His last will and testament revealed his faith in God:
“I commend my soul into the hands of God my Creator, hoping and
assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ my
Saviour, to be made partaker of life everlasting; and my body to the
earth, whereof it is made.”
