If You Died Today, Are You Sure Where You’d Go?
Imagine standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, lacing up your best running shoes, and telling everyone watching that you’re going to jump the ten miles across. You give it everything you have. Maybe you clear fifty feet. Maybe someone younger and stronger clears a hundred. It doesn’t matter—every single person who tries ends up at the bottom. That’s the picture I gave our church this Sunday as I opened 1 Corinthians 15, because I wanted us to feel, before we ever got to the good news, just how far short we all fall.
I asked our church two questions to start: if you died today, are you 100% sure your sins are forgiven and you have eternal life? And what do you think you must do to receive that forgiveness? Those questions matter for all eternity, and Paul answers them for us in 1 Corinthians 15:1-11, where he reminds the church “of the gospel that I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved.” I built the whole message around one verse we memorized together: *Christ died for our sins.* Three truths sit inside that phrase—the problem of sin, the penalty of sin, and the payment of sin.
The Problem: Our Sin
The Bible doesn’t soften this. “There is none righteous… no, not one.” Romans 3:23 says all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God—like every jumper at the Grand Canyon, sincere effort included. I walked us through the Ten Commandments—lying, stealing, dishonoring parents, using God’s name flippantly—and asked plainly, “Have you ever taken anything that didn’t belong to you? Have you ever lied before?” That’s what the Bible calls sin: the breaking of God’s law. We don’t even come close to hitting the mark, no matter how hard we try.
The Penalty: What We Deserve
Here’s where I had to be honest with our people—this part isn’t good news yet. Romans 6:23 says “the wages of sin is death,” and I used a paycheck illustration to make it land: if you worked all week and I refused to pay you, you’d rightly be upset. You earned it. In the same way, we have earned death—not just physical death, but what Revelation 20 calls the second death, the lake of fire. God is a righteous judge, and “God will not overlook sin. Justice demands that sin would be judged.” That’s the weight we all carry before we ever hear the rest of the verse.
The Payment: Christ Died for Our Sins
But our verse doesn’t stop at “our sins.” It says Christ died for our sins—and that’s the gospel, the good news. “The problem of our sin is not good news. The penalty of our sin is not the good news. But the payment of our sin, when Jesus took our place on the cross, that’s the good news.” I told the story of a business owner buried under a million dollars in debt, rescued by someone wealthy enough to pay it off entirely—not just the past, but enough left over for the future. That’s what Christ does. He doesn’t just forgive your past sin; he credits his own righteousness to your account, so that when you stand before God, you stand there “not because you’ve been baptized, not because you’re a member of this church, not because you’re a sincere person, but because Christ credited his righteousness to your account.”
And Christ didn’t just die—he rose. Paul lists eyewitnesses by name, most of them still alive when he wrote, essentially inviting cross-examination: don’t take my word for it, go ask them yourselves. Christ conquered sin, death, and hell, and the result in verse 11 is simple: “and so you believed.”
What Believing Actually Means
That word *believe* gets misused constantly. James 2:19 says even the demons believe there is one God—”and shudder.” Head knowledge isn’t saving faith. I told the story of Charles Blondin, the tightrope walker who crossed Niagara Falls and asked the crowd if they believed he could carry a man across in a wheelbarrow. They erupted—yes, we believe! But when he pointed to one man and said, “You, sir, get in the wheelbarrow,” the man vanished. That’s the difference between intellectual agreement and actual trust. Biblical faith is trusting Jesus alone for your salvation—not Jesus plus baptism, not Jesus plus church membership, not Jesus plus anything else. Just like sitting in a chair without inspecting it first, salvation means putting your full weight on Christ.
Discussion Questions
- Pastor Stalmaker used the Grand Canyon illustration to show that sincerity and effort don’t close the gap of Romans 3:23. Where in your own life have you tried to “jump” toward righteousness on your own strength?
- The paycheck illustration showed that we’ve earned what we deserve—death. How does understanding the penalty of sin change the way you hear the phrase “Christ died for our sins”?
- Charles Blondin asked the crowd to get in the wheelbarrow, and only one man actually did. Are you still standing on the edge intellectually agreeing with the gospel, or have you fully trusted Christ alone?
If you’re reading this and you couldn’t honestly say you have that assurance—that if you died today you’d be with Jesus—I want you to hear what I said Sunday: Jesus is willing to save you from sin and hell if you ask him. The only question left is whether you’re willing to do it right now. I’d love to talk with you in the lobby, this week, anytime—wherever you are on that road, grace is waiting for you.
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We hope you enjoyed the sermon and would love to see you in person. Plan your visit to Community Baptist Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee today!