“Now I will answer your question, “Do you believe there is home in heaven for people who commit suicide?” The answer is that if you kill yourself you will go to hell and suffer the fires of eternal damnation for ever and forever, but not because you commit murder, for you are not and never have been a born again believer. You are only religious. That is why you have fallen for the devil’s lies. You suppose your sin to be disobeying your husband in regard to naming your daughter. You are a sinner for many reasons more serious than that. You need forgiveness for being a self centered person who has chosen to believe the devil rather than believe God.

You said, “The devil is stronger than I am and I lie defeated.” The devil’s only weapon against you is lies. The reality is that you are blinded to the simplicity of the gospel of Jesus Christ. You try to forgive yourself when that is impossible. You struggle and fight when the battle has already been won by Jesus Christ. The devil has no power except that which he convinces you that he has through his lies. It is your guilt that gives Satan a place in your mind.

There is only one way open to you. It is a plain and sure way to peace and forgiveness. You must believe God regarding the sacrificial death of Jesus on your behalf. I will make this as plain and to the point as I possibly can.

1. You overrate yourself by pretending that your greatest sin is the naming of your daughter, when deep down inside you are unclean in every thought and act (Isa. 64:6). You ooze of pride. That you contemplate committing murder, leaving your family and the truck driver to suffer, is a statement of your utter self centeredness (Mat. 22:39). You are indeed a sinner who has offended God and are worthy of eternal damnation. There is nothing good in you (Rom. 7:18); and no reason why God should be merciful to you (Ps. 5:5).

2. Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners just like you (1 Tim. 1:15). He lived the life you should have and did not live. He overcame the devil and his own flesh, living a perfect life (Heb. 4:15). In contrast to all the rest of us humans, after proving himself for 33 years, the perfect man Jesus was fully qualified to enter heaven as a man (John 3:35).

3. But before he entered heaven, Jesus went into a garden and, kneeling before the Father, he received your sin onto his own body (Isa. 53:6). Every one of your sins was placed on Jesus (1 Pet. 2:24). He felt the shame and weight that you now feel (Heb. 12:2). On the cross he felt deserted by God as you now feel (Mat. 27:46). God made him to be sin for you (2 Corinthians 5:21). He took your place at the place of execution (Isa. 53:4-5). You do indeed deserve the wrath of God, and so Jesus stood in your place and took the full wrath of God upon his own body (Isa. 53:10).

4. You can know what God thinks of your sin by looking at how he responded to his son Jesus. God does indeed hate sin as seen by the cross. That was you hanging on the cross, dying for your sin (Galatians 2:20). You were punished in the body of Jesus (1 Pet. 3:18). God did not forgive you until the steel of vengeance was plunged into Jesus’ flesh, and his life’s blood all ran out (Eph. 2:13; Heb. 9:14; 1 Pet. 1:19; Eph 2:13).

5. You can also know what God thinks about you the sinner by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. God accepted Jesus’ payment for sin as seen by the fact that God raised him from the dead and received him back into heaven to sit on the Father’s right hand as the overcoming man (Eph. 1:20; Col. 2:12-13; Heb. 9:12; 1 Pet. 1:21).

6. When God raised Jesus from the dead he also raised you from the dead (Rom. 6). Every sin you have ever committed and will commit were placed on the body of Jesus when he died. Your sin has been paid for in full (Heb. 10:10, 12, 14). God remembers your sins no more (Heb. 10:17).

7. The devil, and maybe even your church, would have you to believe otherwise. There is no such thing as forgiving yourself or personally overcoming the devil. You cannot fight a battle that has already been won by our representative elder brother—the Lord Jesus Christ (Col. 2:15).

8. The last step is yours. It is called believing, repenting, giving up, trusting, yielding, calling on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ to be your Savior. You can make this complicated, as you have done, or you can confess that you are a hopeless, hell bound sinner who does not deserve forgiveness, yet one for whom Christ died and rose again. If you look inside your soul, as the devil would have you do, you will only see darkness, but if you look without to the one who died for you, there is eternal home and assurance of forgiveness (John 3:14-18; 1 John 1:9; Acts 16:31).

9. I have prayed for you. I do believe that you are going to be saved and send me a letter of rejoicing (1 John 5:14). “

Michael Pearl

No Greater Joy

http://www.nogreaterjoy.org/

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