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“If you give away cups of cold water,” Jesus says, “YOU WILL BE SAVED. You WILL be in heaven.” And our immediate response is: “Okay, Lord, how MANY cups of cold water? One a day? Fifty a week? Or do I have to become heaven’s waterboy in order to qualify for a mansion?”

One of our employees here at the Voice of Prophecy recently had a new-car glow about them when we sat down together for our 8:00 a.m. worship. Well, we’re an extremely nosy bunch of Christian people, and some of us just about had a coronary when we found out that she had gotten her brand new Toyota Camry off the showroom floor for something like $14,700. The loss leader of all loss leaders. The heart fibrillations come, of course, because your standard MSRP runs at about twenty-one grand, and some of us have paid even more than that for ours. Identical Camrys, identical packages, right down to the floor mats, and one lucky person pays six thousand less for hers. Go figure.

In that same vein, many of you, I’m sure, have sat on an airplane and found out that the person sitting right next to you, eating the exact same food you’re getting, and with exactly the same lack of legroom, got their ticket for a third of the amount you paid. Don’t we hate to be on the sucker end of such sagas?

But you know, we seem to find in the New Testament parables Jesus told, and the preaching He did, that He must have, at one point, had a job working for United Airlines. Because Jesus — and I say this carefully and reverently — seemed to give out various ticket prices to different people. Never mind the story where various workers in the vineyard put in hugely varying hours, and yet all got paid the same. But Jesus gave different salvation offers to various people. Have you ever focused on that? He told a rich young ruler: “Go home and sell EVERYTHING YOU HAVE! That’s the price of admission for you.” But to the thief hanging right next to Him on a cross, a man who, by the way, hadn’t fed the hungry or clothed the naked but had spent a lifetime doing the exact opposite, Jesus said very generously, “Hey, you don’t have to do ANYTHING. (Not that he could, nailed down as he was.) I accept you just as you are; I’m telling you right now that you’re going to have a really nice mansion in My kingdom. Just because. Just because you say you believe in Me.”

The reason we’re a bit bothered by our full-price coach fare here on this Wednesday is that 51 weeks a year on the Voice of Prophecy, we preach the good news that salvation is free. Our homes in heaven are based on the free gift of Jesus’ death on the cross. We preach justification, which means that Jesus’ own perfection is instantaneously credited to our account. We preach grace — which is the “unmerited favor” of God giving eternal life to us when we don’t deserve it.

And then, all at once, here in Matthew chapter 25, Jesus upsets the apple cart big-time. In fact, He turns the cart over and almost throws the apples at us. First of all, we read here in this story of the “Sheep and Goats” that God’s people are expected to constantly do five hard things. Feed the hungry. Give drinks to the thirsty. Be hospitable to the stranger. Clothe the poor and naked. And visit the prisoner. Now friend, that is a legalism list if there ever was one! That is salvation by works! AND — get this — He goes on and tells us that right here, this is the BASIS of the judgment! Those who do these five things . . . are in. They’re saved. They stand on Jesus’ right, and on His right are mansions and harps and crowns.

“Come,” He says — this is verse 34 — “you who are blessed by My Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.”
The NIV scholars jump right in and put a surcharge on this high-priced airline ticket we have to buy here in chapter 25, when they add this:

“The BASIS for judgment will be whether love is shown to God’s people.”

In his book, Living Faith, former president Jimmy Carter relates a little anecdote where a guy comes up to the pearly gates. And when St. Peter asks him, “What have you done that you should deserve to get in here?” the man hems and haws and can’t think of much. But finally he manages: “Well, during the Depression I saw a starving family out on the streets, and I think I gave them half a buck.” “Okay,” Peter says. “What else?” And after about ten more minutes of straining to remember, he recalls that, oh yeah, when a neighbor’s house burned down, he’d donated a table to them that had cost him fifty cents. Any more? Peter wanted to know. And the man confessed that no, that was it. “What should I do?” the angel asks St. Peter. And the guard to the gates of heaven says, “Aaah, give him his dollar back and tell him to go to hell.”

Well, we tend to laugh off such stories and decide they’re not very mature, but all at once, here in Matthew 25, we discover that this story is hugely mature. It’s the whole gospel truth! Help your neighbor out or you don’t get into heaven, period. And the question is this — which, by the way, is even more important than whether or not you and I personally make it through those pearly gates — “What IS the Christian gospel? What does it take to be saved? What’s the plan? Are we saved by grace or by cups of cold water? And if it takes cups of cold water to get heaven, and avoid hell, shouldn’t we go out on the streets and alleyways with a Sparkletts Water truck and do nothing else but endless good deeds? How many good deeds would be enough to be a sheep and not a goat?” You can see, friend, how salvation assurance goes right out the window with a story like this one.

There’s a great book that contains a beautiful answer to this apparent dilemma of different-prices-for-Camrys-and-heavenly mansions. In How Long, O Lord?, Dr. Ralph Neall, longtime missionary and professor of religion at Union College in Lincoln, Nebraska, puts today’s parable in with two others, and makes this comment:

“The three parables of chapter 25 — the 10 virgins, the talents, and the sheep and goats — teach us how to prepare for the return of Christ,” he writes. “A number of interesting similarities exist between the three parables. Each depicts two classes of people. In the parable of the virgins, we see the wise and foolish; while in the parable of the talents, we encounter those who improve their talents and those who do not. The sheep and the goats” — that’s ours, of course — “represent those who are kind to others and those who are not. Another parallel is that each parable points to the great reckoning day, and in each case Jesus brings joy to one class and destruction to the other.”

Okay, so these three crucial stories are here to teach us: how do we get ready for Jesus’ coming? In other words, on what basis will we be judged? Neall continues:

“These parables reveal what our RELATIONSHIP should be precisely in our daily lives.” This is Christianity where the rubber meets the road. Then he adds: “The parable of the sheep and goats reminds us to employ our gifts for others. Whatever I have that I can use to help them makes me a debtor to CHRIST. When I relate to the poor and oppressed, I am relating to HIM — this is what it means to have a ‘relationship with Jesus.’”

Let me put it this way. Friend, THE basis of judgment, of salvation, of mansions . . . is always and only and forever one thing: Do you have a trust relationship with Jesus Christ? It will never be anything else. And Matthew chapter 25 doesn’t contradict that, because Jesus tells these kind and generous people: “You did these things for ME. Unwittingly, but they were for ME. You loved Me enough to follow My example, to obey My commands, to live as Kingdom people.” And He tells the thief on the cross: “I give you eternal life because you believe in Me. And I know that if you got a reprieve, you’d show the world you believe in Me by how you lived. You’d stop being a thief. You’d start feeding the hungry.” To the rich young ruler He says: “I’ll give YOU eternal life too if you place your trust in Me . . . and not in your riches. Which, by the way — because I can read hearts and minds — I can see you will have to sell off, or you never will fully believe in Me.”

In the Clear Word paraphrase, Jesus says to the obedient people, the sheep:

“‘You have cared about others, which shows that you cared about ME.’” That’s relationship for sure! “ . . . And the Son of God will say, ‘I know you didn’t realize this because a change took place in your life, and kindness and compassion became a part of your nature. What you did by caring for those who are thought to be unimportant was acknowledged as if you had done it for Me.’”

Friend, do you want to be a sheep and have a home in God’s kingdom? Then get with His Son. Have a relationship with His Son. And also, by the way — you won’t be able to help yourself — get out there in the street and simply do what you can for Him. And for the least of His brothers. One Sparkletts Water coming up.