How Good do I Need to be to Get to Heaven?

 I recently ran across this story and wanted to share it.

   A  man was standing at the gates of heaven waiting to be admitted. To the man’s utter shock, Peter said, “You have to have earned a thousands points to be admitted to heaven. What have you done to earn your points?”
“I’ve never heard that before, but I think I’ll do alright. I was raised in a Christian home and have always been a part of the church. I have Sunday school attendance pins that go down the floor. I went to a Christian college and graduate school and have probably led hundreds of people to Christ. I’m now an elder in my church and am quite supportive of what the people of God do. I have three children, two boys and a girl. My oldest boy is a pastor and the younger is a staff person with a ministry to the poor. My daughter and her husband are missionaries. I have always tithed and am now giving well over 30% of my income to God’s work. I’m a bank executive and work with the poor in our city trying to get low income mortgages.”
“How am I doing so far”, he asked Peter.
“That’s one point,” Peter said. “What else have you done?”
“Good Lord…have mercy!” the man said in frustration.
“That’s it!” Peter said. “Welcome home.”

What an amazing and pointed reminder of our desperate need for grace. The world teaches us in every corner and from every angle that everything is conditional; acceptance, affection, even love is based to some degree on merit.  Before we get, we must be.  Be more, be less, but always be better.  Then, if we have said the right things, acted in the right ways, managed peoples perceptions of us correctly, we will be accepted.  In this world, accomplishment always precedes acceptance.  So is it any wonder that even the most mature believer brings that sentiment into their relationship with Christ?...  But grace is radical.

Grace grabs us, shakes us and leaves us bewildered at the experience.  Grace is scandalous.  Luke 7:36-50 tells the story of a sinful woman crashing a party of religious folk to wash the feet of Christ with her tears.  Tullian Tchividjian reminds us that two rescues took place that day.  The immoral sinner realized her desperate need for grace and cried out for it.  The moral sinners who witnessed her desperation were shocked by Christ 's response.  It shook them, it challenged their religious beliefs, it shocked them when Christ told them that they could learn from her.  Grace was offered to all in the room that day.  To rescue some from their unrighteousness and others from their self-rightousness.  But it seems as if the religious did not get it.  And that is a common theme found in the New Testament. The broken, the wounded, they understood the message of Christ more readily than the religious, the "moral". What the religious did not understand was that the Gospel is not about making bad men good, but rather making dead men alive. What the broken understood was their desperate need for just such a Gospel.

Grace, as Paul Zahn points out, is one-way love, “Grace is love that seeks you out when you have nothing to give in return. Grace is love coming at you that has nothing to do with you. Grace is being loved when you are unlovable.”.  You see, we will never be clean enough, good enough , to earn Gods favor.  It is, in fact, that knowledge that brings us to Christ, who loved us while we were unlovable.

  We will always be suspicious of Grace until we understand our desperate need for it.