The Bible talks about something called the "Judgment seat of Christ." It's also called the "Great White Throne judgment." "All of us must appear in front of Christ's judgment seat.

Then all people will receive what they deserve for the good or evil they have done while living in their bodies," (2 Cor. 5:10). Here God will judge the living and the dead.

This will take place at the end of the age when the final battle between good and evil is over, and people are sent to their eternal destination of heaven or hell. For people who have not accepted Jesus as their savior, things will not be too good.

They will stand at the Judgment seat of Christ and be asked whether they accepted Jesus or not. If they did not, their just reward in the courtrooms of heaven is to pay for their own sins by spending eternity in hell.

For those of us who have asked Jesus to be our Lord and savior, we will never be judged for our sins again in this way. Jesus paid for them by dying on the cross, and our destiny is to spend eternity in heaven forever with Him.

However, there is something else we will need to deal with at the Judgment Seat. We will be judged for how obedient we were to Him on this earth. Did we follow Him the best we could, or did we go our own way?

He will judge the motives of our heart, i.e. did we do the right things for the wrong reasons. He will ask us if we followed His commandments. He'll want to know if we kept our temples [our bodies] holy the way He asked us to.

Only a lifestyle of submission to His Word, self-denial, self-control, discipline, and obedience will bring him the prize or crown to lay at Jesus' feet. We may not end up in hell for our sins, but we will answer for how we lived our lives before Him and others.

Those Christians who think they can get away with just about anything because God will forgive them, will barely get into heaven by the skin of their teeth! "Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven," (Matt. 7:21).

We Christians will be held to a higher standard than sinners are because we have the truth and we know better.

This doesn't mean God is sitting up in heaven waiting for us to mess up and sin so He can knock us over the head with a 2"x4." But we cannot live like the world does and expect to be pleasing to God.

We will never fullfill His great plan for our lives, and life will be miserable. Being a Christian doesn't mean you lose your ability to sin. But it does mean you lose your ability to enjoy it. If you know what's right and don't do it, it's sin (James 4:17).

God is holy. God is righteous. God is just and although He is a God of love, He is also a God of judgment. The goal of every believer should be to stand at the Great White Throne of Judgment and hear Him say, "Well, done thou good and faithful servant! Enter ye into the joy of the Lord!" (Matt. 25:23 KJV).


Source: School Of The Bible For Kids, p. 45 by Becky Fischer