Day 2672 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Nahum 1:3 NIV

We've been talking about our responsibility to love like Christ and how that calling relies fully upon His truth. His truth is that we're all sinners who have chosen countless times to spurn His calling to repent and change our lives and kill off the sinful ways that we've deemed normal and acceptable for so long. His truth is that each of us have been separated from God through our desire to chase our selfish dreams and follow our deceitful hearts. His truth is that each of us have earned death through our choices. But how often is that what we hear?

Most of the time, we hear messages focused on how loving and kind our God is. We hear messages built upon His mercy and grace. We hear about how willing He is to forgive our sins and heal our hearts and lead us to a new life focused on Him and His will for us. We hear messages that lead us to this idea that He will just continue to overlook our sins and poor choices. We hear messages that bring us comfort but ignore the reality of what's at stake. We hear messages that make us think we don't need to do anything differently because His love will make up for what we choose to lack or fail to do.

We hear these messages that play down both the power of God and the danger of sin because we’ve become too weak to hear the truth. We hear messages that make God seem like some push-over who would never do anything to hurt anyone because His love is more powerful than His wrath. We hear messages that make us think that punishment could never come our way because, no matter what we do, God loves us too much to see us in pain. We hear messages that make us think that hell is some lonely place where only two or three really bad people will end up while the rest of us just get to slide right through those gates into eternal peace.

We hear messages that lead us to believe that everything is fair game because His love for us gives us the right to do as we please. We hear messages that allow us to stay right where we are without feeling this urgency to change and repent because God just wants us to be happy. We’ve taken the truth about God and turned Him into some kind of peace-loving hippy who wouldn’t actually send someone to hell knowing they would suffer and be in misery. We’ve turned Him into a cartoon where everything works out for everyone no matter what. We’ve learned to see God as nothing but love, comfort, and weakness.

But friends, if your idea of God is somewhat akin to a teddy bear that couldn’t harm a fly because He just loves it too much, then you’re believing a lie that has you on a collision course with a very rude awakening.

The problem is that while God is good, and loving, and kind, and merciful, He is also just. He is also righteous. He is also holy. He is also powerful. And those facts should terrify us! Our world is taking His patience as a sign of weakness, and that right there is as dangerous as it can possibly get! That mindset tells us that we can get by with doing whatever we want because He will simply ignore it. He will continue to overlook our sins. He will just wink at our transgressions. He will withhold His righteous judgement out of His love for us.

But, that's a lie that we humans have created in order to continue living in sin without being scared to do so. We've chosen to come up with a religion built solely on one side of who God is while completely ignoring the other. We choose to live under this assumption that His forgiveness is always going to be there so we can keep on doing as we please and just expect Him to be okay with it. But the truth is that our guilt isn't just erased because He loves us. Our sins don't just vanish because we don't want Him to punish us for them. Our transgressions do not have the power to override His sovereignty.

Sin is far more dangerous than any of us choose to imagine. Sin has a cost and that cost is death. Now, out of His amazing love for us, God sent Christ to fulfill that debt and absolve us from our guilt. But without repentance, our guilt remains. Without accepting His salvation, our sins have not been atoned for. Without accepting Christ as our Lord and Savior and changing our lives to match that declaration, we still owe that death. And if we’re so deluded that we think He won’t collect that debt someday then we’re in more trouble than we can fathom.

We've talked a whole lot about how everyone just wants to focus on the good and feel comfortable where they are and not hurt anyone's feelings with the truth about sin and the existence of it in their hearts. But friends, the guilty will not go unpunished. We can't just expect to show up at Heaven one day having never repented and changed and lived differently than the sinful lives we chose and honestly expect God to welcome us with open arms. That's not how this works because if it worked like that, then He wouldn't be the just and fair and righteous God that He is. If we got to do as we please without consequence, then He wouldn’t be God at all.

He is the moral standard and there will be punishment for those who willfully choose to fall short of that standard and live their lives like He’s just playing and doesn’t have a serious side.

God is slow to anger, but that anger is still there. And as the Bible shows us time and time again, His anger is aroused by our sins. His anger is unleashed on the sinful. His judgement still stands for those who live their lives separated from Him and ignorant of His calling to repent and change. If we don't address the sins in our lives, then those sins will be punished. It doesn't have to be that way. That's the message of the Gospel. That Christ, who was sinless, bore our sins in our place upon that tree so that we wouldn't have to do so. But that gift is something that has to be accepted, and our lives should be lived in such a way that testifies to our acceptance of it.

What I'm trying to say is that this isn't the game that so many have made it out to be. It isn't careless. It isn't easy. It isn't something to be assumed or expected. Salvation can only do its work if we open our hearts to it and allow it to change us from the inside out. If we choose to continue living in sin, then we haven't been saved from anything and we still owe that debt that our choices have earned. God will not leave the guilty unpunished. That's the very definition of fair! People want a just and fair God, well, we've got one and that fact should absolutely terrify us!

Friends, hell is a real place and sadly, millions will end up there because they never accepted God's offering of salvation. They chose to believe in this lie that His love nullified His righteous judgement. They chose to assume that His love gave them the right to do as they please and keep on hammering those nails deeper into His Son. They chose to keep asking Christ to climb back up on that cross to keep paying for their freedom to live in sin. They chose to never change, never repent, never come to know Jesus, never seek the narrow path, never be uncomfortable. They chose this hollow idea of a faith that cost them nothing and required nothing and therefore gave them nothing.

They chose to see God as a weak being who wouldn’t really make anyone suffer for living sinful lives. They chose to take God’s love and mercy for granted and continue living it up in the darkness. They chose to believe that their sins automatically vanished just because God’s a really nice guy. They chose to see His patience as weakness and thought that hell was only for the worst of the worst. Friends, hell is for everyone who sins, and if nobody’s ever told you, that means all of us. That’s right, each of us have earned a first-class, non-stop, one-way ticket to all the suffering and misery and despair that we can’t being to imagine. And make no mistake, as much as God’s love doesn’t want to see any of us end up there, His righteousness and His judgement won’t fail to be upheld and rendered.

Do not make the mistake of seeing God as nothing but love and kindness. He is the very definition of both, but He is also the very definition of just and holy. And so we’d better make some changes and start getting real serious about the sins in our lives because we can be assured that He definitely is! And if we’re not, then don’t be surprised when those gates don’t open and we don’t get the reward we simply don’t deserve.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold