The Greatest Love Story Ever Told

Everything I believe starts here.

“For I am not ashamed of this Good News about Christ…” — Romans 1:16

This excerpt is from my new book, “31 Days of Faith-Building Moments.”

Jesus was the sacrifice for our sins, so that we don’t live in eternity apart from Him.

Think about that for a second. Eternity is a long time. Forever separated from the One who created you, who knows you better than you know yourself, who designed you with purpose and intention, and who created you for Him.

That’s what was at stake.

God wants nothing more than to live forever with the ones He created in His image. It was the whole point of life in the garden. Imagine daily taking a physical walk with God in the most amazing paradise ever.

Not a metaphorical walk. Not a feeling of His presence during quiet time.

An actual walk in the cool of the day, with the God who spoke the universe into existence.

The free will He allowed in His creations destroyed all that.

Humanity chose its own chains, prompted by a deceiver who tapped into that free will for his own evil purposes.

Do you know this story?

In the beginning, God created Adam and Eve and placed them in a perfect garden. This garden was a paradise where they walked with Him face-to-face in the cool of the day. No separation. No shame. No death. Just pure, unbroken relationship with their Creator.

He gave them one boundary: don’t eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Literally everything else in the garden was theirs for the taking.

But a serpent, who was Satan himself, convinced Eve that God was holding out on them. That they could be like God if they just took what He’d forbidden. So they ate the fruit.

And Adam, who was standing right there next to Eve, followed her cue and chose the same rebellion. In that moment, sin entered the equation and terminated a glorious path for humanity.

Thanks to these two, we’ve all inherited a spiritual death that puts us constantly on our back foot against God.

You may wonder, what’s the big deal about sin?

Sure, people do bad things sometimes. But why does that separate us from God?

Sin isn’t just cheating on your spouse or committing heinous crimes. Sin takes that part of us that was so aligned with God as His most precious creation — body, mind, and spirit — and stains it with self-centeredness and rebellion against Him.

Sin isn’t just about what we do. It’s an inner condition about who we think we are and should be.

Sin is horrific and an affront to a Holy God. Sin and God can’t be together.

In the same way light and darkness can’t occupy the same space, holiness and sin can’t coexist. It’s not that God won’t allow it, it’s that He can’t. His very nature makes it impossible.

The larger problem was that if Adam and Eve had stayed in the garden, continuing to eat from the Tree of Life in this new sinful state, they would have lived physically forever.

But they would have been eternally separated from God. There would have been no way back. Imagine what it would feel like to be cut off from the ones you love most for all time.

Cut off permanently, with no hope of ever seeing them again, hearing their voice, or feeling their presence.

That’s what sin did. It severed a connection that was never supposed to be broken.

So God had to remove them from the garden so they could physically die and officially terminate that path.

This way, with eternal separation no longer guaranteed, He could provide a sacrifice to right the ship.

It sounds harsh until you realize what God was actually doing.

He was protecting the possibility of redemption. Physical death became the doorway to eternal life instead of the prison sentence of eternal separation.

He offered the most precious thing He had, His only Son, to pay that whole price with a death none of us can really imagine.

Not a symbolic gesture or a metaphor for how much He cares.

An actual, brutal, horrifying death that satisfied the requirement for sin to be paid for.

In that moment, when Jesus died on a cross on a hill in Calvary, the deepest and most entrenched evil turned all its forces on Him.

And He took it, bruised and bloodied, so we wouldn’t have to.

Every bit of darkness, every ounce of hatred, every consequence of every sin that had ever been committed or ever would be committed.

All of it landed on Jesus in those final hours. He wiped the slate clean so you and I could walk free and look forward to eternity with Him.

The wild thing is, there’s nothing we can do to earn it, it’s free.

And we certainly don’t deserve it, but all we have to do to get it is to ask for it.

That’s it. We don’t have to perform in any kind of way, clean ourselves up first, or prove ourselves worthy of it. We don’t have to perform a ritual to have access to it.

We just have to ask.

The sacrifices we do make are to daily lay down our own flesh.

Our flesh is that part of us that still wants to point toward that rebellion. We accept Jesus’ sacrifice for us, but our carnal desires, if you will, still try to take center stage and place us above God.

It’s like the rattles of sin still floating around trying to deceive us all over again.

We have to sacrifice our own desires and the temptation for rebellion every day to keep that in check.

We like to think we would’ve done better than Adam and Eve because we’re so enlightened. That we would’ve seen sin for what it was and wouldn’t have fallen for the lie.

But every day we make the same choice Adam and Eve made. We believe we know better than God.

Our flesh is weak and always points towards death.

Sacrificing these desires seems impossible at times, and persistent forces outside of us work hard to convince us that our flesh will be what saves us.

The culture around us screams that following your heart and your desires is the path to freedom. That denying yourself anything is oppressive and unhealthy.

But look where following our flesh got Adam and Eve. Look where it gets us every single time.

Our flesh wars against God.

This is why the struggle feels so hard.

But this is the example Jesus sets for us.

If He can lay down his life for all of humanity, then surely we can try to do the same with the things in our lives that trip us up.

In light of His sacrifice, it doesn’t feel like too much to ask.

When you really sit with what He did — what He gave up, what He endured, what He rescued you from — suddenly saying no to that thing you know isn’t good for you doesn’t seem quite so impossible.

And if we can sit even more deeply with how terrible sin truly is, we’ll be horrified at the thought of it in light of what He did for us.

The best part is that His sacrifice removes the horrific stain of sin so that we can be in relationship with God again, without limitations or detailed rituals to cleanse ourselves first.

No more wondering if you’ve done enough. No more anxiety about whether you’ve measured up. No more performing to try to earn your way back to Him.

The way is open, and the path is clear. Because He cleared it.

We still physically die. But because He rose from the dead and ascended to heaven, if we choose, with our free will, we can spend eternity with Him.

The same free will that got us into this mess in the first place is now the tool God uses to invite us into relationship with Him.

He won’t force you. He won’t override your choice.