Salvation Summaries

Yesterday, I flew out of Denver to San Diego for a three hour meeting with a company, and then flew back late in the day with just enough time to get some take-out Indian food from the Tamarind restaurant in Castle Rock (my usual stop on the way home from the Denver airport) before it closed.  While in San Diego and en route to the company, I had the joy of talking with a taxi cab driver from east Africa about religion.

I started out my conversation with the driver in the usual way…”How long have you been driving taxi?” and “Where are you from?”  After hearing that he was from west Africa, I asked if he was a Muslim, and he said that he was an Orthodox Christian.  I then asked if that was similar to the Catholic religion, and he said it was.

Rather than ask some basic questions about religion (such as how often he goes to church and whether he reads a Bible) as a way to ease into the more serious ones , I – for whatever reason – jumped to the main question of, “If  you were to die in a car accident today, where would you go?”

He initially didn’t understand my question, for he told me which cemetery he would be buried in. I then clarified my question by asking if he thought he would go to heaven or hell and why.

Although he didn’t specifically answer where he thought he’d go, he generalized his response by saying that you need to be a good person to go to heaven.  He then defined good by giving an example of donating to charity, and not lying or stealing.  He added that God judges you based upon the type of person you are. I then asked him about sin, and to my surprise, he didn’t seem to understand it.

Sensing that I only had another few minutes before arriving at the location of my meeting, I summarized for him how a person can know whether he will go to heaven when he dies.  My main points to him were:

1) Even if a person does good things, those good things cannot wipe out the sins he’s committed,

2) There is no sin in heaven, and for a person to enter heaven, their sins must be forgiven,

2) Jesus came to this earth to die in our place for the sins we’ve committed,

4) Jesus is the One who forgives sins, for that is why He came to this earth.  Even his name means “The Lord saves.”

When he dropped me off at the meeting location, I told him that I would need a ride back to the airport in three hours, and he agreed to come back for me.

After my meeting, he was there, and quite happy.  However, his happiness was not so much in wanting to talk with me again, but in having the good fortune of finding another person who needed a ride at the place where he had dropped me off (where the fare ended up being $100), plus, he knew he would be getting another $60 from me.

On the ride back to the airport, he didn’t want to talk about religion, and instead spoke about his children and how good they have been to him. It was nice to hear how close his family is, but I do hope he will give more thought to the conversation we had about sin and heaven.

P.S.  According to the Bible, there are number of things we should do, which are good, and things we should not do, which are bad.  There are behaviors and lifestyles that are moral, and thus good, and those that are immoral, and thus bad.  Also, it is clear that Christians are to do good things for others, especially other believers.  However, being good, or doing good things, is not how one gains God’s approval or entrance into heaven.  To become right with God and approved by Him, a person must become righteous.  Becoming righteous is not through good deeds; rather, it is through faith in Jesus, who forgives the sins of those who repent and surrender to Him as Lord of their life (I would say “repent and believe,” but there are two types of belief: one that saves and one that does not.  The one that does not, which is a general or casual belief in the Trinity, is the one most people have; the one that does essentially requires one to surrender to Jesus, which is not easy to do).  If a person could become approved by God simply by doing good things, Jesus did not need to come to this earth and die.  Because He did, good deeds – or good deeds alone – are not sufficient to gain God’s approval and entrance into heaven.