Devotional Message 4/9/25 - Getting to God

Devotional by Minister Jordan Hooker - Tseva Co-Founder

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We live in a time in which every person has their own supposed means of getting to God. Some people say that you need to do nice things for other people, while others say that you need to do some ritual. Whatever the specifics of each person’s supposed path, they all boil down to one thing: do this thing, and God will be happy with you.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In the book of Galatians, Paul sets out to prove that there is no other Gospel. The Gospel is that, while you are a sinner, deserving God’s righteous anger, God sent His Son, Jesus, to live a perfectly righteous life on your behalf and to die for your wickedness. Buried in a tomb, Jesus rose from the grave on the third day. By trusting in this, not in yourself or your deeds, and turning from your sinful deeds, you enter a saving and loving relationship with God.

This may seem simplistic to some people, with them believing that there must be more to it. This might be what caused the Galatian believers to believe that there was some extra work that had to be done for their justification before God. They had been convinced by a group of people, called Judaizers, that beside believing in the Gospel, they also needed to keep the Old Testament Laws to be saved. Paul finds out about this, and it understandably unsettled, concerned about the souls of the people that he worked so hard to bring to the Lord. He says, in Galatians 1, that the Galatian Christians were deserting Christ’s true Gospel for another gospel of a different kind, that is unable to save anyone. Further, he condemns anyone that preaches this false gospel, going so far as to say that even if an angel preached it, it is not to be believed and rather is to be destroyed. He uses some hard language to drive home the point that there is only one Gospel that is able to save, and any addition to it really means the subtraction of its ability to save you.

The direct parallels that we have today that relate to the Judaizers of that day are myriad. On the one hand, we have the Catholics who think that we need to trust Christ plus do other things to be saved. On the other hand, many liberal denominations believe that we are saved by buying into social justice and doing nice things for people from marginalized groups. To be clear, these are false gospels that cannot save you. No amount of doing anything from your own effort can save you from God’s righteous judgment. The only thing that you can do to be saved is to believe in the work that Jesus did and finished on the cross. I implore you to believe that today, whether you have not yet believed, or whether you've been a Christian for decades. There are no other means by which we can approach a holy God.

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Have a blessed week.

The Founders of Tseva Clothing Co.