Our text for Sunday will make you thankful for the sufficiency of Jesus’ salvific work on our behalf.  It appears, if you read the text too quickly, that getting into Heaven requires feeding the hungry, giving drinks to the thirsty, housing strangers, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and visiting those in prison.  It doesn’t say how many people one would have to feed or clothe so that makes it a little scary.  What if one more shirt off your back was required and you missed Heaven by one shirt? Ouch!   What if you did all of the above but never visited a prisoner?  What if you visited the wrong prisoner just to check it off your list and it didn’t count?  What if you were hungry and you ate the sandwich you were supposed to give to somebody else?  Would you go to hell with a full stomach? Is that what is really going on here?  If we are going to get this right, we’ll need to think about all that Jesus said and not just what He said at the end of the Olivet Discourse (Matthew 25).  If we believe that the rest of the Bible is inspired, we should also consider what the apostle’s commentary on Jesus’ teaching had to say.  The truth is, we’ll never get to Heaven by feeding people and giving them shirts.  AND, we won’t be in Heaven if we don’t.  Huh?  We’ll see upon closer inspection of the text that the good works of the righteous were preceded by something else.  We’ll see that their deeds were evidence of that something else and not the cause for their admission to eternal life.   We’ll see that the condemned were not condemned because they did not do certain things but rather that the absence of good deeds was evidence that something else was missing.  Some of these texts are a bit frightening—with good reason.  We are all going to live in one of two places forever and we have this short life to make up our minds about where that will be.  If we get a bit startled into reality, it will be for our eternal good.  There’s more to say about all this but as I said at the beginning, it is the work of Jesus that secures salvation for those who believe.  Salvation is for the glory of God and we’ll have nothing to boast about in the last days except Christ the Savior and the way He paid the penalty for our sins.  “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”