What I’ll Say When I Stand Before God

We will all stand before the Father. Do you know what you’ll say?

Walk into many churches today and you won’t hear much about judgment. Not much about standing before the God of all creation and giving an account for our lives.  You might hear some mushy, watered-down version of God’s love, but not about his wrath and judgment. 

That kind of preaching seems to have gone out of style. There may be a good reason it isn’t popular anymore. I can recall the preachers of old who seemed to take great joy in heaping condemnation on their congregations as if they delighted in making people squirm.

Preachers who love to make others feel guilty aren’t preaching the gospel of Jesus. Jesus himself seemed to avoid those kinds of sermons for the regular folk. Still, he didn’t preach easy, comfortable faith. Not at all! His call to anyone who desired to be his follower was based on that person recognizing the value of being his disciple. And Jesus knew that the only kind of follower who would be satisfied with him would be one that recognized the value of Jesus. That he is worth it all.

Consider the following …

He called upon any would-be followers to embrace the possibility that following him may lead to death:

“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

—Matthew 16:24

He said that anyone who thinks their life here on earth is the most important thing would wind up losing it:

For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.

—Matthew 16:25

He told the rich young ruler:

“If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

—Matthew 19:21

Being a Jesus follower does not involve prosperity in the sense that we will be rich, healthy, and comfortable. In fact, it’s more about forsaking our love for those things in favor of the vast wealth of being a citizen of the kingdom of heaven. It’s about not laying up for ourselves treasure on earth (where decay rules) and instead laying up eternal treasures in heaven (where there is no decay). It’s about investing in eternity rather than in the here and now (which is fleeting).

In other words, following Jesus requires us to prioritize the things of our lives so that it is clear that we value the things that God values.

When Jesus said in Matthew 16:24 “Whoever wants to be my disciple,” he implied that being his disciple is more important than anything else. That’s because being a follower of Jesus is our only pathway out of the grave. Following him is the only way to live with purpose and meaning here on earth. We not only get immortality, but we get to begin living as eternal beings in the present age. 

I would argue that anyone who lives with the expectation that the future is eternal and free of sin, despair, and chaos (since it will be spent in the presence of our crucified and risen Lord Jesus and the Father) will live much differently than those who don’t share that hope.

Think about it: If you have no hope for eternity, then you’re stuck with the present, and the present is a dark and meaningless place without Jesus because it is one day coming to a screeching halt. And once it does end, we will all stand before the Father. Fortunately, because of my faith in Jesus, I already know what I will say: “I appeal to your mercy by the blood of Jesus. I have no other reason for you to accept me. I simply believed Jesus when he said that he is ‘the way, the truth, and the life.’ That’s all I have, Lord.”

I live with this confident expectation that I will unashamedly stand before God, not because I was a good man, but because I trusted in a good man — the man Jesus Christ. If you don’t have him, if you don’t know him, or if you don’t love him, you are living only for the few short years you have on Planet Earth.

In my humble opinion, that ain’t much. I encourage everyone to invest in eternity! The dividends are incredible.