The Roman Road

Make sure you have a Bible ready and look up these verses for yourself so that you can see it is what the Bible indeed says. They are all in Romans, which is in the New Testament after the Gospels and Acts.

Romans 3.23 'For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God'
According to this, all of us have sinned against God. This includes not only big sins such as rape and murder but stuff like lies, cruelty, insensitivity towards others, losing your temper, cheating, lustfulness, envy and self-centredness. If we are honest, all of us are guilty of these sort of things from time to time.

Romans 6.23 'For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord'
According to this, those things we have done wrong have earned us a penalty. The penalty is death. But thats not the entire verse. It goes on to refer to a gift. God has offered us a gift of eternal life. We can freely receive Gods forgiveness and His pardon from the death penalty that we owed. The penalty has been paid for by Jesus' death on the cross. And like any other gift, we can't earn it, we can only receive it. To find out how, lets go to the next verse.

Romans 10.13 'Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved'
See how simple it is to receive the gift? All we have to do is recognise the fact that we've sinned and stand under penalty of death and then call out to God humbly for His forgiveness and the new life He's offering us.