Every year a local public school sends a group of students for one day to Michigan Lutheran Seminary (MLS), our synod’s boarding high school for ministerial education in Saginaw. The public school students are part of a conference Student Council exchange program.

We always try to arrange for the students to visit one period of the senior doctrine course, which I have the privilege of teaching. On that day MLS seniors learn the Great Exchange as one simple way to explain the gospel to someone who has never heard it before.

Recently the visiting Student Council group included a young woman who was wearing a headscarf that identified her as a practicing Muslim. I wondered how she would react to hearing the Great Exchange.

I teach the Great Exchange in four parts:

Part One—What God requires

God requires you to be perfect in order to get into heaven. He says that if you have perfect holiness and no sin, you can live with him forever in the place where there is perfect holiness and no sin. "Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy" (Leviticus 19:2). "Do this and you will live" (Luke 10:28).

Part Two—What God sees

When God looks at each one of us, he sees someone who is not perfect. In fact, regardless of how good we look outwardly, each of us has sinned. As a result, we are not perfectly holy, and we deserve to be rewarded with eternal death in hell. "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). "The wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23).

Part Three—Human solutions

When people realize the problem, they come up with their own solutions. Some people hope that they will be able to get into heaven because they are not as bad as other people they know. The problem is that they still have sin. Other people hope that they can get into heaven because they are improving in life and are not nearly as bad as they used to be. The problem is that they too still have sin in their lives. Still other people hope that they can get into heaven because they have tried to do enough good to balance out the bad they have done. The problem is that our good works do not make up for our sin. "All our righteous acts are like filthy rags" (Isaiah 64:6). "There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death" (Proverbs 16:25). "For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it" (James 2:10).

Part Four—God’s solution