ARE YOU AT PEACE WITH YOUR MAKER?
By Ernest O'Neill
Are You At Peace With Your Maker?
By Rev. Ernest O'Neill
Are you at peace with your Maker now? Are you at peace with your Maker? Do you know that you'll go to heaven when you die? Do you know that Jesus knows you and you sense, yes, I know he knows me? We are on personal terms with each other. Now last Sunday we talked about the two steps that you need to take if you want to answer yes to those questions. If you want to be able to say, yes I am at peace with my maker. I do know that I will make heaven my home. I do know my sin is forgiven.
We talked about the two steps, you remember, we said first you had to repent. That is, you had to look at the things that you'd been doing in your life up till now that you know disobey God's will and his law for you and you had to repent of those, the acts and the thoughts and the words that you've done. You had to turn from them, stop doing them. That's one part of repentance.
Then you remember the other part that we talked about was see that inside you is a whole attitude that is the real heart of sin. It's an attitude of a god, really. You need to see inside you that the reason you have disobeyed God in the past is that you have very much the attitude yourself of a god. You want your own way often and you want people to treat you in the way that God wants them to treat Him. So you need to see that. You need to see inside you is a great self-centered, self-gratifying monster that is really opposed to God Himself. You need to turn from that and to turn to God and treat God as God and the center of the universe and not yourself.
Then you remember the second step was to believe. Believe that that sinful self inside you is so diametrically opposed to God, that the only thing he can do if he wants to exist in the universe is to destroy it. But the two things can't exist in the one universe. So he's committed to destroying it. Instead of destroying it in you, which would have meant you're being wiped out too, he transferred you and it into his Son and he destroyed it there.
You've to believe that Gospel. You have to believe that the monster in you has been destroyed in Jesus. That's how a person becomes a Christian. When you do that a spirit of peace with God comes into your heart. Just the way when you have tension between you and a friend and you sort the thing out there comes a great relaxation. So it is with your Maker. A great spirit of peace with God and a great spirit of love for him and for other people come into your heart.