Why Jesus?

Why does Christianity claim to be the ONLY way to God? Surely if people do good things they will get into heaven, but if they do bad things they go to hell? 

What is good though? We set the standard by our own works, but God sets HIS standard by the 10 Commandments in Exodus 20:1-17. Heaven is HIS home after all! 

The Ten Commandments: 

1 You shall have no other gods before Me.
2 You shall not make for yourself a carved image
3 You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain
4 Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy
5 Honour your father and your mother
6 You shall not murder
7 You shall not commit adultery
8 You shall not steal
9 You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour
10 You shall not covet

Picture this:

A beautiful house with a perfectly white, pure, clean interior. The walls are white, the carpet is the richest, most expensive one and is white. The sofa, the chairs, the tables, the ceilings - everything pure and perfectly clean, no spec of dust, no dirt just purity. Light shining brilliantly in every room. 
One day a bedraggled man and woman come across the house and want to stay there. They are covered from head to toe in muck and dirt. From the top of their heads down to their shoeless feet - it's caked on. They go up to the door and knock on it. A person answers the door - dressed in the purest and whitest of clothes. They ask if they can stay in the house as their journey is long, but the owner of the house says "I'm so sorry, you are covered in dirt and muck and my house is clean and pure, you have to be clean to stay here!"
The man and woman go away and try to clean themselves up, but the more they try to clean themselves up, the dirtier they become because the things they use to clean themselves are also dirty and caked with muck and filth. 
They go back to the house and tell the owner that they can't clean themselves up - everything they are using is making them all the more dirty. So the owner says to them:
"Do you see that fountain, if you go and dip yourself in it, you will become clean and will be able to enter into this house!" So the man and woman go to the fountain but it's filled with blood. They refuse to dip themselves in it, at first, but then after a while the man says - this is the only way into the house, they both climb into the fountain and instantly all the dirt and muck is washed away and they come out pure and clean. 
They go back to the house and the owner sees what has happened - they have been washed as white as snow, so the owner allows them into his house. 

What does this mean? 

The house is a picture of heaven, it's pure, sinless, nothing bad or evil dwells in it. The man and woman are a picture of our hearts, tainted by sin. Their long journey is a picture of our life. Everything we do whether good (from a human stand point) or bad is tainted by sin. I'm not saying don't help people, but our motives for doing so are tainted! 
Sin separates us from God. It needs to be dealt with to gain us entry into heaven. The thing is because every good thing we do is tainted by it, we can't do anything ourselves. 
God gave us the moral law in the form of the 10 commandments and if we break one, we break them all because we HAVE TO keep each and every one perfectly for our whole life on earth. None of us can say we have kept every one perfectly so we have a dilemma, which God has solved through Jesus Christ. 

Romans 6:23 tells us For the wages of sin is death - God pays us in spiritual death for our sins, but the verse carries on but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. 

Jesus lived a perfect, sinless life. Completely obeying God and fulfilling His commandments perfectly - no errors at all! There is still the issue of death though! Jesus went to the cross as a perfect sacrifice - He died so that any who come through Him will have everlasting life, because when we stand before God, Jesus is like our defence attorney in a court of law, but instead of maybe getting us off - His sacrifice is a guarantee that we will be pardoned, because He paid the debt on our behalf. The hymnist Philip Paul Bliss (1838-76) wrote these words which sum it up perfectly: 

Bearing shame and scoffing rude,
in my place condemned He stood;
Sealed my pardon with His blood:
Hallelujah! What a Saviour! 

The ONLY way to God is His way - after all heaven is His dwelling place so He has set the rules on how to get there. Jesus Christ said, in John 14:6 "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me."

If you're trying to get to God by your own means, your own self sufficiency you won't get there. If you obey God and come through Jesus Christ, you will obtain eternal life through Him and spend eternity in heaven, a place of purity, holiness and sinfulness!