"Lori, will you shut the light off and go to sleep?" Bob pulled his blanket over his head, but his muffled voice continued scolding his wife from beneath the covers. "For Pete's sake. You gonna read that dumb book all night?"

"Oh, don't be such a grouch," Lori returned, realizing that Bob's gruff voice also had humor in it. "Besides, it's not a dumb book!"

"Probably a silly novel," Bob teased.

"It's about Charles Manson and all the people he had murdered."

"Beautiful! Great bedtime reading," Bob said with comical false sarcasm. Then a thought hit him. Maybe God was giving him an opportunity to witness to Lori. He had prayed that his wife would receive Christ ever since he had done so two years before. They had had several good discussions, but as yet she could not see why she needed to receive Christ. So, instead of complaining, he poked his head out from under the covers and asked, "Do you think Manson could ever go to heaven?"

"Of course not!" Lori answered, and then added, "Do you?"

"I think there's one way."

"How?"

"If he received Jesus Christ as his Savior."

"That's crazy," Lori said.

"Why?"

"Because it's just too easy. Getting someone like Charles Manson to heaven just can't be that simple."

"Oh, I didn't say it would be easy to get him to heaven. I am saying it would be simply a matter of his receiving Christ."

"What's the difference?" Lori asked.

"It was hard for God to pay the price for Charles Manson's sin, just as it was hard for Him to pay the price for all our sins. God the Father sent His Son to become the man Jesus of Nazareth, who was rejected, beaten, nailed to a cross, killed, and separated from the Father just to pay for our sins. Now that's not easy! It's also true that nothing is free, including the price of getting people to heaven. But once the payment is made and eternal life is offered as a gift, then it's free and easily received."

"But I'm not as bad as Manson," Lori pointed out.

"No, but the cost of getting you and me to heaven is still too high for us to pay."

"Yes, but I'm basically a good person," Lori went on.

"Yeah. Compared to a mass murderer--but not compared to God. And it's God that's doing the judging, not Manson. The Bible says, 'THERE IS NONE WHO DOES GOOD, THERE IS NOT EVEN ONE' [Romans 3:12] and that 'all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God' [Romans 3:23]."

"All right," Lori conceded. "But it seems too easy for someone to just believe in Christ without doing anything else."

"The thing is," continued Bob, "some things are only available as a gift. Suppose I wanted my own eighteen-hole golf course. The only way I'd ever get it is for somebody else to pay for it and offer it to me as a gift. Either I'd receive it, which would seem easy to me, or I'd never have it. But either way, it cost the buyer a fortune. Because something is free doesn't mean it's cheap."

Someone like Lori, who is struggling with the concept of salvation as a gift, realizes everything has a price tag. It certainly seems unreasonable that people like Charles Manson, Adolf Hitler, and Jim Jones should get off scot-free by just believing in Christ. We can certainly agree with Lori about that. Nobody has his sins erased by believing. The point is--Jesus Christ, being God, paid the price for those sins in full (2 Corinthians 5:21; Romans 5:18). That was not easy! How easy would it be for you to send your only child to die for someone else's crimes? Lori is right. It takes a lot more than belief. But now that our sin is paid for completely, and that payment resulting in eternal life is offered by God as a gift, it can be received.

In a sense, nearly all founders of the major world religions claimed to be ways or have ways to get to God (though they all defined God differently). But Jesus claimed to be God. Many non-Christians find it difficult to believe that a man (Jesus) could become God; but that is not what happened. The Bible teaches that God became man in the form of Jesus of Nazareth--not the other way around.

Those stuck on the question of wicked people's "so easily" going to heaven must be helped to realize that they, too, are in need of Christ's payment and that they cannot earn salvation themselves. The Bible says, "All our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment" (Isaiah 64:6), "THERE IS NONE RIGHTEOUS, NOT EVEN ONE" (Romans 3:10), and "The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 6:23). We must help people realize that we cannot do the work that pays the price for our sins. Some things are like that. We could not do the work necessary to perform our own brain surgery, no matter how much we needed it done. It would have to be carried out by someone else. The mechanics of signing the paper allowing the surgeon to do it might be easy, but that does not mean the surgery would be easy to do or worthless to have done. At times it is not a good idea to reject something just because it is free and easy to receive, and the Bible says salvation is like that.

Let us look back in on Tom and Jan for a minute.

Bob and Lori stayed up talking until about 2:00 A.M., when she received Jesus Christ as her own God and Savior. They have gone on to be an exciting couple still growing in the Lord together.

Did you notice how Bob did not insensitively preach at her? Neither did he come on condescendingly toward her views. He recognized the opportunity that God made for him.

But what allowed him to make use of that God-given opportunity was the positive relationship he already had with his wife. His jokes about her reading arose from his acceptance of her, which kept their communication open.

We need to approach people like the apostle Paul, who reminded the Thessalonians, "We proved to be gentle among you, as a nursing mother tenderly cares for her own children" (1 Thessalonians 2:7).