I never stabbed a spinach omelete through tear-filled eyes until this morning, sitting across from my neighbor whom I'll call Billy Bill.

"In just sixty seconds, your life can turn upside down," said Bill with tears tumbling down his sun-weathered cheeks. Billy did not speak theoretically. Two massive strokes put his wife in six hospitals, left both of them jobless, emptied their bank accounts, and turned him into a prize trophy in the crosshairs of collectors.

“I’ve never been brought lower than this," said Billy Bill. "Never. Some nights I wake up and check to see if my wife is still breathing.”

Restraining my tears was like trying to stop a dam break with my pinky. “I don’t know what it’s like to wonder if my wife will still be alive in the morning,” I replied through the optical mess. In the back of my mind I knew that I couldn’t walk out of this restaurant without asking what he was trusting to save him. What kind of friend would I be if all I did was take him to breakfast and pray for him? He grabbed his cup of coffee. I sipped mine, silently asked God for help and said, “Billy, may I ask you a personal question?”

“Of course, go right ahead.”

“If you died tonight, are you 100% positive, do you know for sure, that you would go to heaven and be forgiven of all your sins?”

“Not at all. Do you think there is a way to know?”

“I do. When I was twelve something happened to me, and then I knew for sure that I was forgiven and would be with God forever when I die.”

“What happened?”

“Let me explain where it all started. At the end of His famous Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said to all the people, ‘You shall be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.’ Billy, no matter how hard you try or how hard I try, if that’s God’s standard, we’re not going to make it.”

“Well, yea, we mess up. My idea of perfection is being free from sin. But everyone sins.”

“So you see the problem. If God’s standard is perfect, performing ten thousand good deeds, going to confession a million times, or doing penance two times over for every sin won’t makes us perfect enough. In fact, even our best deeds don’t add credit with God because our sinful deeds stand against us.”

I took Billy through five of the Ten Commandments and he readily agreed that we were serious breakers of all of them. “Billy, if you stand before a righteous and holy God, how could He let a blaspheming, lying, thieving, adulterer, and murderer at heart into His kingdom?”

“I don’t think He would. But by repentance, acknowledgement, and doing good works, I'm bett'n on the hope that He'll let me in."

“I used to see it very similar to that: God looks at my bad deeds and He looks at my good deeds, and if the good outweigh the bad, chances are that I’ll make it. But God is not partially good but perfectly good which means even one sin is all it takes to separate us from God forever. Do you ever feel like you are good enough to go to heaven?"

"I honestly don't. But I do try and yet I have a lot of guilt all the time."

"If your daughter became a bank robber and turned against everything you taught her, would you still love her?"

"Of course."

"You see, in spite of her actions, you still love her because your love for her is unconditional. When you trust in Jesus Christ alone, God accepts you as He would accept His own Son. And now you can obey Him not in fear but in love. The Bible says that perfect loves casts out all fear."

“But don’t good deeds matter?”

“Yes! But they are not the means of salvation but the mark of salvation. If someone says, ‘I follow Jesus,’ but lives like the devil, you and I know that he doesn't really believe in Jesus. Faith without works is dead. But those same good works won't save me. Imagine me standing before a good judge with a criminal record. And I say, ‘But Judge, I went to confession, gave to charity, and polished your car on the way in here.’ That judge is going to look at me and say, ‘That’s all great, but it doesn’t change the fact that you broke the law and must now pay its consequences.’"

Billy's face betrayed wonder. “But what do I need to do? I know God is trying to teach me something through all this, but I’m just not getting it.”

“A Philippian jailor once asked Paul the apostle a similar question. And Paul said, ‘Believe.’ Trust in the Lord Jesus Christ that He paid your fine, that His death was sufficient as the book of Hebrews says, Jesus died once for all—He doesn’t need to be sacrificed a second time—and if you do this God will forgive you. God’s forgiveness does not depend on what we can do for Him but on what His Son already did for us. Do you know what Christ screamed on the cross?”

“What?”

“’It is finished!’ It’s the Greek word, tetelestai. It means, ‘Paid in full.’ If I owed you $100,000, and someone else came along and paid it, you’d write on the check, tetelestai. That’s what Jesus did for your debt. He paid it. That means there isn’t anything you need to do to make up for your sins. All God asks is that you trust in His Son's death.’

Billy and I talked for over 90 minutes and the gospel weaved in and out of the conversation all the way through. God opened more entry points into the gospel than there were scones in the cafe.

Although Billy heard the gospel ten different times, the light didn’t go on. He’s entirely open but it hasn’t clicked yet. He still feels he has to “do” something to get right with God. This testifies to our inherent performance-driven approach to knowing God. We want something to do, something that earns us credit that makes us feel secure in our effort. But God must strip us naked of all our morality and good deeds so that we will see that to have Christ is to have all, and to trust Him plus something else is as false a gospel as to reject Him entirely.

As our time closed, I asked, "Billy, how can I be a friend to you?"

"By doing stuff like this." Our plan is to meet once a month, and my wife is calling his wife today to set up a time to go out for coffee. God has dropped an outreach opportunity into our lap like nothing I’ve experienced before. And it all started one day when I bumped into Billy at the park, getting my kids a drink at the water fountain.

We serve an awesome God. And that’s an understatement.