There is Forgiveness with God   “There is forgiveness with God.  Poor souls are apt to think that all those whom they read or hear of to be gone to heaven, went thither because they were so good and so holy.  It is true many of them were eminently and exemplarily so in their generations; all of them were so according to their degrees and measures, for ‘without holiness no man can see God’; and it is our duty to labor to be like unto them in holiness, if ever we intend to be so in happiness and glory.  But yet not one of them, not any one that is now in heaven, Jesus Christ alone excepted, did ever come thither any other way but by forgiveness of sins; and that will also bring us thither, though we come short of many of them in holiness and grace.”     -- John Owen (1616-1683)