Romans 2:16 - It's not even cheating

The day will surely come when God, by Jesus Christ, will judge everyone's secret life. This is my message.

In university, it might surprise you to learn that I was not the most diligent student ever. My study style could very aptly be described as “cram, show up and throw up”.

Believe it or not, despite the fact that this involved very little sleep and massive doses of caffeine, most of the time this worked really well. I did really well.

But this one time, I turned up to a Maths exam, ready to regurgitate the barely-digested fragments of knowledge that had passed my tonsils but a few hours before. I was feeling confident, smug even.

One of the worst feelings in the world is turning up to an exam room to find it empty.

I had got my exams out of order – I was meaning to be sitting a Physics exam. I turned up late and very unprepared. All that I was able to put on paper were a few facts that I’d learned almost coincidentally, en route to learning about other things.

In life I believe we do very similar things. We, at the end of this age, will face an exam (Biblical reference to come). We will be judged (even as Christians) according to what we have done. Sure, it won’t determine whether or not we go to heaven or hell (that is determined by our response to the Gospel), but there are rewards in heaven for things done here on Earth.

We are one day going to be required to answer some very penetrating questions, in the big exam room in the sky. It will be the exam to end all exams. The big one. The test.

But I have this overwhelming feeling that so much of our time, we’re preparing for a different exam. An exam that doesn’t exist. And never will exist.

I feel that if I were to write the exam, it would look like this:

1. How hot was your wife?
2. How intelligent was your wife?
3. How many pastors liked and respected you?
4. Did you manage to drive a sports car?

In fact it would be a pretty short test. The bad news (or Good News, actually), is that this test can be boiled down to one question:

1. What did you do with my son Jesus?

End of test.

The good thing about this is that I don’t have to worry if I don’t have a good answer for one of the questions that is not on the test. I don’t have to worry about how superficially beautiful my wife will be because, quite frankly, it doesn’t matter in the light of eternity. That question is not on the test. In heaven there will be no such thing as marriage (Matthew 22:30). So I don’t need to worry about. It’s on the ‘optional, nice to have’ list.

God, I pray that you’ll help me to prepare for the right exam.