Who Needs Jesus? Part 4 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

We really only think about death in physical terms, not spiritual. But we are told that we are born spiritually dead, we were born with a broken relationship with God. We all need new life, we all need salvation. In this 5-part series, John North looks at what it means to need Jesus.

But God is so rich in mercy, and he loved us so much, that even though we were dead because of our sins, he gave us life when he raised Christ from the dead. (It is only by God’s grace that you have been saved!)

Ephesians 2:4-5 (NLT)

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Transcript

Here to keep you and your life focused on God by taking time with God together. I hope that our time with God together is just the first bit of time that you spend with God, but that you spend much more time with Him each day as you learn to put God first in your life.

And you know this week, we’ve been asking the question, who needs Jesus?

And we’ve looked at this passage in Ephesians chapter 2, we’ve seen that we have inherited from our parents and their parents and their parents before them all the way back to the first people who lived on earth, we’ve inherited spiritual deadness.

When those first people took their beautiful relationship with God and rebelled against God and rejected Him, something changed in their basic nature.

So that their relationship with God was broken, and we have inherited that brokenness, so that as we live our lives, we don’t have the life of God flowing through us. We don’t have a good relationship with God, and if we want that, we need Jesus who can take us back into a good relationship with God.

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And because of that broken relationship with God, we find a natural tendency within us to live very selfish lives and to even desire to do things that we know are wrong, that are damaging both to ourselves and the people around us. We find ourselves unable to change that desire to be selfish.

Only God can change that in us. We need Jesus.

We’ve seen also that our disobedience to God, our selfish lives, that so often we do things we know go against our conscience, against what we know would be right. That makes us guilty before God, the Judge of this universe. We face God’s judgement. There’s no way for us to escape that. Only God could do something.

Well, if we keep reading after the verses we’ve been looking at, we find that God did do something.

It says in verse 4:

But God – it’s just described all these things we talk about, and it says – but God, being rich in mercy because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved.

And raised us up with Him and seated us with Christ in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus in order that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus, for by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not as a result of works, so that no one should boast.

Do you know if you could be saved from your self-centered life that is destructive to yourself and others, if you could be saved from the justice of God that awaits you, then there would be no need for Jesus to have died.

But the fact is we cannot earn salvation. There’s nothing we can do to undo the ways we have broken God’s laws. We can’t buy God’s grace. We can’t pay off our misdemeanours against God. No, we have to come to God in humility and say, Oh God, I’m helpless to fix my life. I can’t provide forgiveness for myself, and I can’t change the brokenness that’s in me. I need you.

You know, when you express that to God, God comes, He does what you cannot do. Jesus takes your place in God’s judgement when he dies on the cross, and your sins are forgiven.

And God comes in and changes your basic nature so that now there is a desire to honour Him and obey Him. Yes, there’s still temptation and struggle, but now God is in your life and life is different and better. You need Jesus.

I’m John North.

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