When I was growing up, I remember people asking me, “Are you saved?” I would wonder, saved from what? They would ask me, “Have you ever accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Savior?” When I would hesitate, not really knowing how to answer, they would proceed to tell me how He died, not only for my sins, but for the sins of the whole world. Just as John 3:16 says: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

Specifically, I can remember an occasion when I was leaving a Narcotic Anonymous, meeting in 1988 and was approached by a dear friend who asked me,

“ Ernest are you saved?” This time I responded ,” Yes.” He asked ,“How do you know that you are saved?”. “I responded, I talk with Him like I talk with you.” My dear friend upped the ante as we say, and retorted “But how do you get to God ?” With frustration ,I responded , “through prayer.” He replied, “Ernest ,the only way you can get to God is through Jesus Christ”. Because I thought I had all I needed to be called Gods’ son ,I dismissed his attempt to witness to me, with love he spoke these words, “I pray that God will send some-one real soon to share with you what I am trying to say to you”. The very next morning in my mothers’ kitchen, I recounted the conversation I had with my friend less than ten hours before. Mother said to me with the love only a mothers’ heart will allow , “He told you the truth baby.” I expressed to her my need for a Bible that I could understand and she retrieved a daily living Bible. The first time I opened it up the pages turned to John 14:6 Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. I knew without a doubt God was speaking to me .

At that moment, I knew Jesus had died for my sins. You cannot grow up in America and not know that Jesus died for your sins. We at least have the basic knowledge that He is the Son of God. Thank God for national holidays such as Christmas, because even though Jesus has to share His glory with Santa Claus, we can still hear the story of Jesus coming as baby at this holiday time.

I think most people in the United States have heard that Jesus is the Son of God and that He died for our sins. But what most people don’t understand is how they got the way they are and how he had to die for their sins. Most believe the nature of human beings is not a direct result of sin but instincts that was placed in us through evolution, such as the instinct to kill. Many feel that greed evolved from hoarding things to ourselves from fear or self-preservation. The acts of adultery (sex outside of marriage ) and polygamy (having more than one husband or wife at a time) are supposed to be left over from a time in our evolution when it insured the survival of our species.

My understanding of the evolutionists’ explanation of human behavior suggest that human behavior evolved over the process of time rather than as the result of man being separated from God by sin. What they do not want to acknowledge is that the nature of sin was caused by the fall of the human race. Evolution did not cause sin, but it is the direct result of mans’ nature being changed and separated from God by sin. Also, Evolutionist

do not wish to acknowledge that we are in desperate need of a savior because we cannot change ourselves back to the way we were before the fall, nor will we ever be able to do so. Without Jesus, there is no answer for sin and no hope for the human race. Only a short life and then, incarceration in a godless eternity.

Each of us (mankind) must experience the epiphany I experienced the day I was approached by my friend and mother. We must come to the reality of John 14:6

Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. Believe me. You want to commit yourself to Jesus-there is no other hope for mankind!

It is hard for me to understand how the human race ever got into such a mess when we know the first man Adam was created perfect. He was made in the express image of God as Genesis 1:7 says: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

Adam was the ideal man, perfect in every way: spirit, soul and body. How anyone like Adam could ever be separated from God by sin is a mystery that is as old as Genesis. This subject is something the finest theological minds have been trying to understand for a long time.

One thing we as students of the Bible do know , according to the account handed down by God through Genesis concerning creation, is that some 6,000 years ago God gave Adam and Eve a direct commandment. He told them they could eat freely of all the trees in the garden, with the exception of the one tree in the midst of the garden. God said the day they ate of that tree is the day that they would surely die.

Whatever happened the day that Adam ate of the forbidden fruit changed Adams’ nature from a nature that was in fellowship with God to one that was not. God was able to communicate with Adam after that but only to his mind in a form of instructions- an external, distant kind of relationship.

God could no longer do what he longed to do and that was to fellowship with Adam through the righteous nature He had given to him and His son. Now Adams’ heart had become sinful and separated from God by spiritual death. It was not just a matter of Adam deciding to stop sinning, because now he had become sin. Adam now had a nature that could not stop sinning. What made this worse- this nature that came with transgression did not just affect him, but affected the whole human race. Somehow this nature he had received was a spiritual death that was passed on to his children and to his childrens’ children.

The very core of Adams’ existence, everything he was and everything he had become was now locked away on the outside of God. Because Adam fathered the whole human race, they also inherited what he had become and were also locked away from God. Romans 5:12 “Wherefore, as by one man (Adam) sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned”.

So we had a problem. The whole human race had been locked up on the outside of God with no way of freeing themselves or getting back to God. This is why the gospel of redemption (to rescue or ransom) is a story of grace. What we could not do for ourselves, God did for us who have received His grace and have been born again. He wants us to know that this gift of salvation was not of ourselves, but it is the gift of God as Ephesians 2:8 says: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God”.

Here we are on the outside of God in desperate need of salvation. We could not save ourselves because every human being, born of Adam had inherited the same nature to sin. This is what Paul meant when he said in Romans 5:12 “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned”. Notice the last part of this verse says: “for that all have sinned.” The words “for that” is making reference to Adam’ original transgression that caused the whole human race to inherit spiritual death and the nature to sin.

When Paul said, “for that all have sinned,” he was saying that not one single member of the human race escaped inheriting a nature to sin from Adam .The human race is the tree that is rooted in Adams’ transgression. It is the reason every man sin and is guilty before God ,and unless we inherit a new nature from God, we cannot stop sinning. Romans 5:12 says Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned”.

The whole human race has this death penalty hanging over it. Every person born is destined to inherit spiritual death from their forefather, Adam. This death penalty is not just talking about our short life on this earth and then physical death and the grave. Spiritual death does not mean to cease to exist. There will never be a time when you do not exist. Your spirit will exist forever in one place or another. Spiritual death means to be cut off from and outside of His fellowship.

Spiritual death means to have a nature that causes you to sin, because, in that nature, you cannot quit sinning. Trapped in that nature, you cannot dwell in the presence of God, nor is that fallen nature capable of flowing in harmony with the rest of Gods’ creation….not now, not ever. If you do not accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Savior here in this life, there will be no second chance…no, not ever.

So we have a problem. The whole human race has inherited spiritual death from Adam and is outside of God. They cannot save themselves because they cannot stop sinning and have come under the penalty of judgment that God first spoke over Adam when He said “ the day you eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil that day you shall surely die.” Now they are under the penalty of Adams’ transgression because they have inherited his nature.

Now God has a problem. The whole human race has been locked away from God by spiritual death and cannot come to Him. So in order for Him to save us, He must come to us. This is the story of the Gospel and the story of grace.

So what God did to save us was to send another Adam into this earth called “The last Adam,” whom Paul revealed as none other than the Lord Jesus Christ. The mission of the last Adam was the same as the first , to create a race of people that God could, once again, call His Family.

This is what it means to be born again. After I was born again, I no longer possess a sin nature inherited from the first man Adam. I now possess a nature that has been given to me from the last man Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ, because I have been born again and have inherited His nature.

This is what Paul means in 1 Cor. 15:45 And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. And 1 Cor. 15:49 And as we have born the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly. I am no longer of the earthly but of the heavenly. I no longer belong to the family of the first man, Adam, but of the last man, Adam. For Jesus has broken the power of sin and I have been born again and belong to a new family of God. I am now a new creation in Christ and have been freed from the sin nature.

I understand a child inherits the blood of his father and not his mother. This is why Jesus had to be born of a virgin and conceived of the Holy Ghost. Had He come through the lineage of Adam, instead of being conceived of the Holy Spirit, then his father would have been Adam and not God. He too would have inherited the same spiritual death as the rest of the human race.

Moreover ,because Jesus was born of God and the bloodline between himself and Adam was broken. His father was not Adam, but God. It was not Adams’ blood but Gods’ blood running through His veins. For the first time since Adams’ fall, there was a man born free of sin. The same way that the first man Adam was fathered of God by being the first man to be created, Jesus Christ, the last Adam, was also born directly of God. Jesus was conceived of the Holy Ghost; and therefore possessed the same perfect nature as the first man ,Adam, before His separation from God.

The catastrophe of the human race came when Adam forfeited his sin-free nature, and because of his transgression, the whole human race inherited the penalty of what he had done, which was sin. Now this last man, Adam, (Jesus Christ) possessed the sin free nature that the first man, Adam ,was born with. Jesus became our sin, not a sinner, - there is a difference. Jesus took our place because he knew the claims of justice would be satisfied and the high courts of heaven could once again rule in favor of the human race.2 Cor. 5:21”For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” I will never forget the impact of the first time I understood what happened to Jesus when He hung nailed on the cross. He was dying in my place for my sin and my punishment was laid upon Him.

Matthew 27:46 And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? For a space in time, God had to forsake Jesus. The father had to turn His back on Jesus because the punishment, the death penalty, all that we had coming to us, all that He had spoken to the first man Adam, was now being fulfilled in Jesus. Jesus was the last man Adam, as he tasted death for every man, being nailed to the cross. He died for my sins and yours.

When Jesus was born, He was born with the same sinless nature that Adam was created with before his ,fall. and in order for us to be saved, we must accept the Lord Jesus Christ as our personal Savior and be born again. To be born again means that when you ask God to save you, you are believing in your heart that Jesus truly died in your place and that God raised Him from the dead. The reason God can save you is because the claims of justice against the human race have been fulfilled by the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

God said if anyone believes on Jesus they can be saved. The charges have been dropped against the human race for anyone who accepts Jesus Christ as their personal savior. This act of believing frees the Holy Spirit to do the work of regeneration in our spirit ,and by an act of creation, He takes out our old nature and creates in us a clean heart, a new nature that is free from sin. The Holy Spirit frees us from the old sin-nature that we inherited from Adam and gives us our new one that we inherited from God through Jesus. Hallelujah!!

This is why Jesus said in John 3:3 Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. John 3:6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.

So when John 3:6 said that whats’ born of the spirit is spirit, what he was saying is the part of me that is born of the Holy spirit is my human spirit. David prophesied of the day when Jesus would wash our sins away in Psalm 51:10 Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.

The world is full of religion, the word of man about the word of God and what religion does is take a person the way they are and try to change them. Religion teaches them to observe a certain set of morals or teachings that will get them into some kind of after life that is better than the one they came from.

I once heard a fellow minister of the gospel say it this way, “You cannot make a race horse out of a mule because when you get done cropping his ears and grooming his tail he will still be a mule.” You can spend lots of money on cosmetic surgery, but when you finish, you will be disappointed because, when they open the starter gate, he is still going to run like a mule because he has the heart of a mule and not a race horse. The only way he can be a race horse is that he be born a race horse and the only way we can be free of sin is to be born again.

The Bible teaches that we can be certain of our salvation. We can know that we know that we know. I beg you to take the time and repeat this prayer with me .