Tomorrow is Good Friday.
If anyone out there reading this hasn't ever thought about why we celebrate Easter, then now's the best time to think about it.
Jesus died on the cross for us. That's not a small thing - see
The Passion of the Christ.
A question lots of people asked after this film is, "Why? Why did He die?"
The answer is: God made us to have a relationship, a friendship, with Him. That is what He wants most from us - ourselves. To be His friends.
Unfortunately, you can't be friends with someone as perfect as God if you've got a lot of rubbish in your life - whether it's not helping enough with washing up or whether it's murder - we are imperfect.
The problem with the 'rubbish' (aka "sin") is that it keeps us from having a friendship with God. That's bad, because God is the source of all things good - without Him, there's not a single thing that is good.
So that means that when we die, cos of this sin, we remain distant from God - and that means that we don't go to heaven (which is where God is). We go to hell - eternally separated, cut off from every good thing.
This is a problem.
And we don't have the solution.
But God does! And He's made a way so that we don't have to spend eternity apart from Him :-) This is good news, quite literally.
Jesus is the way to God. He is God, the Son of God. He was born, lived a perfectly sinless life, never did a thing wrong. Then He was crucified on a Roman cross. While He was on the cross, God put on Him the sin of the whole world. He paid for it with His death.
We know that this payment worked, because before He died, Jesus predicted He would be resurrected 3 days after His death. And God did resurrect Him - this was proof that God accepted His payment.
So now we can have a choice. We can choose to accept Jesus' payment for our sins. This means we can be friends with God. We can go to heaven. It also means that we choose to let God be in control of our lives so we don't have to have all that rubbish/sin in our lives.
Or we can choose to make our own payment for our sins. This means we can't be friends with God. We are in charge of our own lives, but we won't be able to stop all the sin in them. And we can't go to heaven when we die.
So it's over to you now. What are you going to choose?