We matter to God. He made us, and He wants to have a relationship with us.
We rebelled against God.
Both actively and passively, we've all disobeyed Him.
And our sins have separated us from Him, and broken off the relationship.
To varying degrees, most of us are aware of our distance from God.
I know I was, and you may be, too.
And so we start doing all kinds of things to try to get back to Him, like being a helpful neighbor, paying our taxes, going to church, and giving money to charities.
There's nothing wrong with these, but the Bible makes it clear that none of them can earn us God's forgiveness or re-establish our relationship with Him.
Furthermore, the sins we've committed must be punished, and the penalty we owe is death, which means both physical death as well as spiritual separation from God for eternity, in a place called hell.
The good news, as was referred to earlier, is that we matter to God.
In fact, He loves us so much that He did for us what we could never do for ourselves.
He provided a bridge over which we can find His forgiveness and restore our relationship with Him.
He built it by coming to earth as one of us, and dying on the cross to pay the death penalty we owed.
This is a picture of what the central message of the Bible is all about.
And that's what God want each of us to understand.
But it's not enough to just know about this or even agree with it.
We've go to act upon it.
God wants us to move over to the other side.
We can move to the other side by humbly admitting to God that we've rebelled against Him and need His forgiveness and leadership.
That simple act of trust and obedience results in our sins being pardoned and our debt being paid.
Our relationship with God is firmly established, because we're immediately adopted into His family as His son or daughter.
Other Bridge Illustrations on the web...
