Sin. It must be dealt with. We all are sinners.
The Holy God and Creator does not allow sin in his presence.
Jesus Christ gave his perfect and sinless human life as an offering, and as a willing substitute for the rejection and wrath that we are due, and his sacrifice is sufficient to save any sinner who will acknowledge it.
Any righteous acts a human does is not pertinent to whether one goes to heaven. Apart from Jesus’s work, on our own, all of our righteous deeds and good works are like we are clothed with filthy rags; they are not sufficient to hide or reduce our sinfulness. Therefore if we reject the redeemer, we retain our sin, and cannot enter into God’s presence.
Good works cannot get us into heaven; neither saint nor sinner.
Self sacrifice and the Golden Rule mean more to me than mere words.
My relative does good works. But he lost out on the ‘persuasion lottery’ of scriptural studies. God knows he tried. A Christian seeking to be a man of the cloth.
Now his ears are closed, especially to the ‘ignorant’. He’s highly educated, and I can’t overcome that bias which I also consider quite natural.