Love for the wandering

I came across this quote from the Puritan Richard Baxter

Let us then hear the words of Christ, whenever we feel the tendency growing in us to become dull and careless. "Did I die for them and you will not look after them? Were they worthy of my blood and yet they are not worthy of your labour? Did I come down from heaven to seek and save that which was lost, and you will not go next door or to the next street to seek after them? Compared with mine, how small is your labour and condescension. I debased myself to do this, but it is your honour to be so employed. Have I done and suffered so much for their salvation, and was I willing to make you a co-worker with me, and yet you refuse that little which lies within your hands."

Words that end in SHUN

Colin Buchanon is no ordinary song-writer.  He is a Christian song writer for kids, and he not afraid to hit them with the truth of the gospel.  On an album entitled 'Super-Saviour' he writes a song called, 'Big Bible words that end in SHUN'.  It opens,

Big words that end in SHUN

Show what The Lord had DONE

Through Jesus, his own SON

... Big words that end in SHUN.
           

Then he sings about revela-SHUN, substitu-SHUN, salva-SHUN, justifica-SHUN, imputa-SHUN, redemp-SHUN, adop-SHUN, and propitiat-SHUN.  There are a lot of big Bible words ending in SHUN (tion)!  The word that we are looking at this morning is 'propitiation'.  Colin explains that this means that 'God's anger is turned away.'

                         

The word 'propitiation' was more familiar to English speakers of previous generations.  For example, in the King James Version we read, '... Christ Jesus, whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood' (Romans 3:24-25), and, 'herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins' (1 John 4:10).  In our NIVs the Greek word is translated 'sacrifice of atonement' or 'atoning sacrifice.'  But is propitiation what happens as a result of this atoning sacrifice and is propitiation a truth worth celebrating?

'God's anger is turned away.'  For the first two and half chapters of Romans the apostle Paul outlines that all of humankind is guilty of sin.  'All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.'  God's anger at human sin is clearly spelt out.  Then we read, 'God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement ...' (Romans 3:25).  We are called to respond to this sacrifice with faith and the result is peace with God.  We no longer need fear being condemned and we are accepted as dearly loved children.  Because of the death of God the Son, God can look at us without displeasure and we can look at him without fear.  God's anger has been turned away.

This all raises three questions.

                  

1.  Can God be both good and angry?

To 'propitiate' someone means to appease or pacify their anger.  This assumes that God is angry.  Indeed, God's anger is portrayed in the Bible as being a personal thing.  Without Christ people are the subjects of his holy anger. We were by nature deserving of wrath (Ephesians 2:3).  It is obvious why many people don't like this teaching.  In the lovely hymn, 'In Christ Alone', there is a line with states that at the cross 'the wrath of God was satisfied', and some people have changed this to read 'the love of God was magnified.'

                                    

The love of God and the anger of God are not opposites.  For God to be good and angry does not mean that he cannot not be good and loving.  If God was not angered at human sin then he would not be good, he would not be holy.  The opposite of a loving God is not an angry God but an indifferent god, a god who simply does not care about the evil that is done in the world.
                                         

We have already seen that God's anger is very different from our anger.  God is slow to anger and abounding in love.  His anger is not irrational or the result of a lack of patience.  It is not stirred up by injured vanity.  God's anger is his settled response to evil.  Were there no evil, then he would not be angry.  In holy love he makes peace with objects of his anger.

                                     

2.  Does our God act like a petty pagan deity?

Some people claim that the idea of God being angry, and then being appeased by a sacrifice, makes him look like a petty pagan deity.  However, the gods of the pagans were easily angered and could fly off the handle, whereas our God is slow to anger and abounding in love.  Also, in pagan religions, it was humans who had to take the initiative to divert the divine wrath, whereas the initiative in Christianity lies with our God.

                            

In the Old Testament the picture is of a gracious God who provides the sacrifices in order that he might act graciously towards sinful people.  God takes the initiative.  God reveals the way.  Similarly, in the New Testament it is God who takes the initiative; God is motivated out of sheer love and grace to send his Son to die as a propitiation for us. 'God does not love us because Christ died for us; Christ died for us because God loves us' (Stott).

The Old Testament sacrificial system looked ahead to the sacrifice of God's own Son.  Note that this sacrifice comes at such a great cost to God.  This is more than an animal or vegetable.  This is not even a third party.  Cruel religions would burn their children on an alter.  But on the cross God himself, in the person of God the Son, willingly dies for others. 

It is God himself who in holy wrath needs to be propitiated, God himself who in holy love undertook to do the propitiating, and God himself who in the person of his Son died for the propitiation of our sins.  thus God took his own loving initiative to appease his own righteous anger by bearing it his own self in his own Son when he took our place and died for us.

3.  WHJD?
You might be familiar with the question 'what would Jesus do?' (WWJD?).  That is a good thing to ask in every situation we face.  But there is a more important question we need to be clear about: what has Jesus done? (WHJD?)  If we are not clear about what Jesus has done then we won't get Christianity.  If we don't understand what Jesus has done we will never be inspired to change.  If we are not sure what Jesus has done then we will have a false-religion of humanity working its way towards God rather than God coming to our rescue.  This is why doctrine matters.  This is why we are spending so much time thinking about what Jesus has done on the cross.

WWJD, on its own, can't save you.  Even as we try to imitate Jesus our actions fall so short of his perfection.  The Bible teaches us that our righteous deeds are like filthy rags.  So self-righteousness is a road to hell.  Without grasping WHJD we will end up living lives marked by humiliating defeat in the face of certain temptations and, in other areas of our lives, superficial change that is marred by ego and pride.

WHJD?  'Moved by the perfection of his holy love, God in Christ substituted himself for us sinners' (Stott).  God's anger is turned away.  Because of the death of God the Son, God can look at us without displeasure and we can look at him without fear.  This is life-changing truth.  This is truth that we must remind ourselves every day.  In Christian teaching we never go beyond the message of the cross; instead we grow deeper in our grasp of it.    

The author Michael Horton noticed that sermons that simply focus on the things that we ought to do for God don't actually change people, what we need to be told is what God has done for us. 

'... bring me into the chamber of a holy God, where I am completely undone, and tell me about what God has done in Christ to save me; tell me about the marvellous indicatives of the gospel - God's surprising interventions of salvation on the stage of history despite human rebellion - and the flickering candle of faith is inflamed, giving light to others ... On its own, more advice (law, commands, exhortations) will only lead to either self-righteousness or despair.  Yet the more Christ is held up before us as sufficient for our justification and sanctification, the more we begin to die to ourselves and live to God' (Christless Christianity).

Love is all we need? (Glenstal abbot on Saturday Night Show)

The abbot of Glenstal Abbey was being interviewed on last week's Saturday night show.  Brendan O'Connor asked him, 'Do you think there is heaven ... And will we be going there if we are good people?'

This is how the abbot answered, '... The only question we will be asked when we get to the other side is "did you love? How much did you love?" And that is the examination, and that is all there is to it.'

Brendan seemed glad with this reply.  Presumably he believes that he is loving enough to meet God's standard of love!

In one sense the abbot has a point.  We will be judged by the fruit of our salvation, and love is a key element of that fruit.  However, in a whole load of ways the abbot has missed the point.

Firstly, the abbot seems to think that we can make it to heaven without Jesus.  Yes, Jesus showed us the way of love, but Jesus came to rescue us from the fact that we have failed to love.  Jesus died that we may be forgiven.  I am confident that I am going to heaven, not because I am loving, but because Jesus died for my sin (including my lack of love).

Secondly, think of Jesus' standard of love.  He reaffirms the commands to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength; and to love our neighbour as ourselves (Mark 12:30-31).  God's standard of love exposes my guilt.  If all you need to do is love, then I am doomed.  I have failed.  In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught that any one who says, 'you fool', is on danger of the fires of hell (Matthew 5:22).

Please don't tell people all they need is love in order that they might earn their way into heaven.  That is to leave us hopeless.  Don't get me wrong!  Love matters.  The love that caused the Father to send his one and only Son to die that whoever believes in him would not perish but have eternal life(John 3:16).  Love matters.  The love that comes as a grateful response, to being loved ('we love because he first loved us', 1 John 4:19).  Love matters.  When we put our trust in Jesus, he gives us the person of the Holy Spirit, and enables us to love like we have never loved before (the fruit of the Spirit is love, Galatians 5:22)..  

Michael Horton writes,

Those who think that they can wrap themselves in the fig leaves of their loving intentions and actions toward God and neighbour are in for a big surprise.  "Just love God and people" is not the gospel; it is precisely that holy demand of the law that we have grievously failed to keep ... Our love toward God is the essence of the law; God's love toward us in Jesus Christ is the essence of the gospel.  "In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 4:10).

Leo's lions

Our friend Leo Colgan is one of Munster's most prominent referees (his picture even features in the Munster program).  Anyway, we were at his house last night to play scrabble with himself and Tarah.  I asked him to give me his Lion's starting fifteen.  He thinks that Murray and Parling will be two players who will blossom on tour and work their way into contention.

1.  Healy
2.  Hubbard
3.  Jones
4.  Parling
5.  O'Connell (who will captain the side)
6.  O'Brien
7.  Tupuric
8.  Faletua (which comes up as 'false tuna' on autocorrect)
9.  Murray
10.  Sexton
11.  North
12.  Davies
13.  O'Driscoll
14.  Cuthbert
15.  Kearney

Pictures of the cross

One of the awkward questions that we may be asked when we present the gospel is 'how can a loving God send people to hell?'  The Bible doesn't struggle with that question the way we do.  In fact the Bible aims to answer a different question.  'How can a holy God not send people to hell?'

You won't get far in reading the Bible before you realise that God is angry.  It is true that God's anger is not like ours - it is not prompted by injured vanity, it is not petty, it is not irrational or ignoble.  It is his predicable, settled hostility to sin.  God's anger is aroused by evil, and evil alone.  But his anger is red-hot.

Given that we all have thought, said and done wicked things we may ask how a holy God can avoid sending us to hell.  How can a holy God pardon our rebellion against him?  'Only by providing a divine substitute for the sinner, so that the substitute would receive the judgement and sinner the pardon' (Stott).  This is a doctrine call Penal Substitution, and we are going to examine it by looking at five pictures in the Old Testament.

1.  Abraham and Isaac

The first picture is taken from the book of Genesis.  God tests Abraham's faith by commanding him to sacrifice his son, Isaac.  Abraham takes the boy up Mount Moriah (where Jerusalem would later be situated).  At the last moment, when it was clear that he would do what God said, Abraham is told not to slay Isaac but to kill a ram instead.  That ram was sacrificed as a burnt offering in the place of Isaac.  That ram died as a substitute for another.  Like the man, Jesus, who died the death of a substitute, in that area, many centuries later.

2.  The Passover

In the book of Exodus we see how the blood of a substitute saves people from God's judgement.  On the night of the Passover God's judgement swept over the land of Egypt.  But the judgement passed over every home that had its doorposts marked by the blood of a lamb.  That lamb died so that God's people did not have to.  Each of the four gospels associate the death of Jesus with the Passover.  The first Lord's was a Passover meal.  The apostle Paul explicitly declares that Jesus, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed (1 Corinthians 5:7-8).

3.  The Sin offerings of the Old Testament

The sin offerings of the Old Testament showed that the blood of a substitute was demanded to pay the price of the people's guilt.  Of course the blood of an animal can not make up for our sin.  These offering pointed ahead to what Jesus would do on the cross.  The New Testament teaches that Jesus 'offered himself' (Hebrews 9:14), and gave himself up for us as a sacrifice to God (Ephesians 5:2).  John Stott explains that Jesus sacrificed himself (not animals), once and for all (not repeatedly), and thus secured for us purification of our consciences and restoration to God.

4.  The scapegoat

The day of atonement gives us a clear example of a substitute bearing the sin of guilty people.  On that day the high priest took two male goats.  One goat was sacrificed and its blood was sprinkled in the usual way. On the other goat the high priest lays his hands, confesses the people's sin and wickedness, and then the drives it into the wilderness, so that it carries away their sins.  One goat demonstrated the means by which our sin is dealt with (a substitute bears our penalty) and the other the results of the atonement (our sins are taken away from us).

5.  Isaiah 53

The prophecy found in Isaiah 53 is a wonderful foretelling of what would happen to Jesus on the cross.  It was written hundreds of years before the event.  Yet when I read it at the youth fellowship in our last church one person asked, 'which gospel is that from?’ It sounds as if it was written after the events rather than before them.

'He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him ... the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all ... it was the LORD’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer ... the LORD makes his life a guilt offering ... he bore the sin of many and made intersession for the transgressors.'  These verses seem to be clear about a substitute who bears the penalty for our sin.

Conclusion - Does Penal Substitution pit the Father against the Son?

We have looked at the Old Testament for teaching on Penal Substitution.  We can also see this doctrine taught in the New Testament.  Notably, Romans 4:25 (He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification), 1 Peter 2:24 (He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree . . .), 1 Peter 3:18 (For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God).

However, the doctrine of Penal Substitution has many critics.  For example, there is a blog called 'The Red Letter Christian.'  You know the way some Bibles highlight the words of Jesus by printing them in red.  Well, the people behind this blog say that they want to highlight the words of Jesus.  That is good.  But actually all the teaching of the Bible needs to be taken into account.  The whole of the Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit, not just the words of Jesus.

Anyway, one man, writing on the Red Letter Christian blog, calls penal substitution a 'schizophrenic view that pits God against Jesus.'  Another writer of a similar ilk, Steve Chalke, famously referred to penal substitution as 'cosmic child-abuse '.  Such criticisms are based on caricatures of this doctrine, so we must be careful how we teach it.

Take the following illustration.  It comes from America of the 1930s and centres on a man called John Griffith.  

John was a bridge-conductor across the Mississippi River.  He was responsible for raising and lowering the bridge so that boats could get through and trains could pass.  John had an eight-year old son who loved to accompany him to work.

One day the father and son decided to eat their lunch on the bank of the river when John realised that in about three minutes the Memphis Belle carrying about three hundred passengers was getting ready to cross the bridge.  But the bridge had not being lowered.  John didn't want to alarm his son, so he patted him on the shoulder and told him to stay where he was while he sorted out the bridge.

When he got up the stairs to the lever, John realised that his son had managed to climb to the bridge and had fallen between the gears of the bridge.  He could hear the train coming, with its three hundred people on board.  He tried to think of any way there might be that he could lower the bridge and not crush his son.  There was none.  He lowered the bridge just in him.  His son dying to save those people's lives.  As he watched the train go by he could see a man reading his paper, a woman drinking her tea, and another talking to his wife.  He screamed at the top of his lungs, 'don't you know what I've just done for you?'

On one hand that's a good picture of something of the cost of the cross to God the Father.  But in other ways this picture falls so short.  The cross was not an accident but a rescue that had been planned before the foundation of the world.  God the Son was not a helpless victim who happened to be on the wrong place at the wrong time, he went willingly to his death.  God the father was not subject to circumstances outside of his control but was choosing to gloriously display both his holiness and mercy.  If this picture is the only illustration we use to explain the cross then we will be accused of pitting the Father against the Son.

Take another illustration set in the Second World War.  

     

Scottish soldiers were forced by their Japanese captors to labour on a jungle railroad.   Moral among the prisoners was low and their behaviour had become barbarous towards each other.  Then something happened.  When the shovels were counted there appeared to be one missing.  The officer in-charge was enraged.  He demand that the shovel be returned.  When no one moved he threatened to kill all of the prisoners on the spot.  He meant what he said.  Then, finally, one man stepped forward.  The officer put away his gun, picked up a shovel, and beat the man to death.  When this was over, the survivors pocked up the body and carried it to the second tool check.  On the second check it was discovered that no shovel was missing, there had been a miss-counting.  Word spread throughout the whole camp.  An innocent man had been willing to die to save others.  People were inured and he behaviour of the prisoners was transformed.  They began to treat each other as brothers.

On one hand that is a great picture of the loving sacrifice of the Son.  Jesus came into the world to die.  He set his face to Jerusalem knowing what awaited him there.  The only truly innocent man dies so that those who trust in him will be spared eternal death.  Such love should inspire us.  But again this picture falls short of the glory of the cross and if this is all we teach about the cross we will play into the hands of those who despise the notion of penal substitution.  For he cross was not an act of injustice, but of justice upheld.  The father is nothing like the cruel Japanese soldier.  His anger is not the irrational, and vain.  He is the God of immeasurable love giving an incalculable gift to save a wretched people.

In order to teach the doctrine of the cross correctly we must not portray either Jesus choosing to pacify an angry God and wrestle from him a grudging salvation, or, God sending a helpless son to die for guilty people. Instead, we read of a God who sent his Son in love (he did not have salvation reluctantly wrestled out of his hands) and we read of the Son who willing gave his life for us (John 15).

We must not lose sight of either the love of the Father or the love of the Son.  We must not lose sight of the cooperation of the Father and the Son.  We must not lose sight of the intent of the Father and the Son.  We must not see love a simply the result of the cross but love is the cause of the cross.  We must delight in the truth that 'God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them.  And he committed to us the message of reconciliation'  (2 Corinthians 5:19).

Three books

A few weeks ago I was frustrated, none of the books I was reading were grabbing me.  I feel a little lost, and bored, if I am not in the middle of a book that has caught my attention.  Now I am engrossed in two, and have a third I want to mention.

The first is by Michael Horton, and is called 'Christless Christianity'. It an a fascinating insight into the American evangelical scene.  He points to the lose of any sense of the majesty of God and centrality of the gospel.  I find America fascinating, and am aware that many of he trends that start there come here in various forms.  This book is really encouraging me to seek to present the gospel in all its purity.  

The second book is a second-hand copy of 'The Secret History of the IRA' that I picked up last summer.  It would be convenient to simply portray the IRA in a negative light, to see the world in simple black and white.  But it is not that easy.  There were injustices committed against the nationalist community that contributed to the rise of the troubles.  That is not to deny the horror and the barbarism of the violence that was committed in the name of republicanism.

The third book that I am enjoying, although it is not a gripping a read, is a book called 'The Momentous Event' by the grandfather of my friend Peter Grier.  This book sets out the case for amillenialism (the belief that the millennial reign of Christ, in Revelation 20, is a symbolic description of the current age).  I am drawn to this understanding of end times because I am sickened by some of the speculations associated with certain pre-millennial preachers, who sell books and attract audiences with their claims that we are about to be micro-chipped etc.  I find that the highly speculative guessing of these preachers becomes a distraction from preaching the cross and being ready for Christ's return through living a Spirit-empowered life.

How can a holy God forgive?

(The following is partly adapted from John Stott's 'The Cross of Christ', chapter 4).

The question might be asked, why does God need the cross in order to forgive?  Why does he demand the payment of such a price?  Why can't he simply forgive and forget?  After all if we are sinned against we are told simply to forgive.  No price needs to be paid.  No-one's death is required before we forgive each other. Why can't God do what he commands us to do?  Why can't he practise what he preaches? Why is it impossible for God to forgive us without his Son's sacrifice for sin?

John Stott states that such questions betray our shallowness rather than our sophistication.  We are simply private individuals and any sin against us is simply a personal offence.  For us to forgive does not alter the balance of justice in the world.  We can leave the issue of justice to God.  But God is the creator of all morality.  He is both the injured party and the divine judge.  He is the king against whom all wickedness is treason.  He is the one who gave us life and to whom we owe our life.  He is the God of immeasurable love, love that we have spurned.  Indeed, the central problem with our opening questions is that they fail to give due weight to the fact that God is God and we are not!

The crucial issue is actually how it is possible for him to forgive.  How does our God, who has been stirred to righteous anger, come to peace with those who have acted as his enemies?  How does our God, who lovingly yearns to embrace sinful people, do so in a way that does not condone our evil?  How can he express his love without compromising his holiness?  How can he both be a righteous God and a Saviour?  

1.  The gravity of sin

A couple of years ago, on the BBC news, there was an item on a particular mega-church in America.  The church has tens of thousands of attendees.  Everything is professional and polished.  We might be impressed.  But even the news reporter noticed something was missing.  He said something along the lines of, 'you will not hear much talk about traditional doctrines like sin and judgement here.'  Writing a few decades earlier, A. W. Tozer said, 'There is a strange conspiracy of silence in the world today - even in religious circles - about man's responsibility for sin, the reality of judgement, and about an outraged God and the necessity for a crucified Saviour.'

The New Testament speaks of sin in terms of missing the mark, inward corruption, stepping over a known boundary, and as lawlessness.  The emphasis is on the 'godless self-centredness of sin.'  When we sin we are not just failing to love God with all our being, we are actively refusing to acknowledge and obey our Creator and Lord.  It has been described in terms of 'getting rid of the Lord God' in order to put ourselves in his place in a spirit of 'God-almightiness.'  'Sin is defiance, arrogance, the desire to be equal with God ... the assertion of human independence over against God' (Brunner).  Sin is utter terrible and God is utterly holy.

2.  God's holiness and wrath 
   
People today feel the freedom to make God look the way they want him to look.  They rightly claim that he is compassionate, good and kind.  But they wrongly assume that he is tolerant of human sin.  They think that he would not be bothered about their everyday offences because they neither see the seriousness of all wrongdoing nor understand the utter holiness of a perfect God.  Even in churches people have lost vision of the majesty of God.

The Bible speaks of God being transcendent, the high and lofty one.  The Bible speaks of a God who is inapproachable light and a consuming fire.  The Bible speaks of God standing at a distance from sinful humanity.  It even portrays God as being made nauseous by our moral compromises, they are distasteful and repulsive to him, and he vomits out of his mouth those who refuse to give him their full allegiance.

You cannot read the Bible properly and fail to see that God is good and angry.  But we do him a great disservice if we imagine that his divine anger is like our human anger.  'What provokes our anger (injured vanity) never provokes his; what provokes his anger (evil) seldom provokes ours' (Stott). 'God’s wrath in the Bible is never the capricious, self-indulgent, irritable, morally ignoble thing that human anger so often is.  It is, instead, a right and necessary reaction to objective moral evil' (Packer).  'His anger is neither mysterious nor irrational.  It is never unpredictable, but always predictable, because it is evoked by evil and by evil alone ... [It] is his steady, unrelenting, unremitting, uncompromising antagonism to evil in all its forms and manifestations' (Stott).

Conclusion

Sin is serious.  It is 'cosmic-treason' (Sproul).  It is hostility towards God.  It is deep-rooted rebellion.  God is angered by every act of sin and refuses to condone any of our wrongdoing.  What's more the Bible tells us that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  So how can their be hope for any of us?  How can we escape the Day of God's Vengeance?  How can a God who has a red-hot antagonism to all that is evil, accept us as dearly loved children, given the evil in our past and the fact that we fail him every single day?

The answer, as John Stott puts it, is that

At the cross in holy love God through Christ paid the full penalty of our disobedience himself. He bore the judgement we deserve in order to bring us the forgiveness we do not deserve. On the cross divine mercy and justice were equally expressed and eternally reconciled. God's holy love was 'satisfied.'

One writer says that 'only he who knows the greatness of God's wrath will be mastered by the greatness of mercy' (Gustav Stahlin).  We used to be objects of God's wrath, but God, who is rich in mercy, has made us alive in Christ in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus (Eph. 2:1-10).  We are rescued by grace through faith.  God's forgiving, justifying, reconciling love is extended to us as we admit our moral bankruptcy, hold out our empty hands to receive the free gift of eternal life, and now live in Christ our risen king.

One final question: what is the relationship with sin now?  Well, if we have been born again we are no longer slaves of sin.  We have been forgiven. We have been justified.  We need not fear the Day of Judgement.  God has given us a new heart and has placed the person of the Holy Spirit within us, transforming us from within.  He promises that we will not be tempted beyond what we can bear and that he will give us an escape route when we are tempted (1 Cor. 10:13).  Sin is not our master anymore.

Yet, the Apostle John tells us that we lie if we say we have no sin and that thankfully the blood of Jesus goes on cleansing us from all sin.  But when the Christian sins it is more of a lapse than a lifestyle.  If we refuse to enter the battle sin, if we redefine what is sin to justify how we live and if we ignore God's moral commands, then we are simply demonstrating that we have not yet enthroned Christ as our king, we have not yet received his forgiving grace, he has not yet entered our lives, and we are not yet born again.  So the Apostle Paul can write:

Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral [which includes sex outside marriage] nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. [We could also add Jesus' warning about not forgiving or James warning about not controlling our tongues]. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God (1 Cor. 6:9-11).

Friends, may each one of us know what it is to be washed, sanctified and justified in the name of the Lord Jesus.  May we grow in the assurance that we have been saved from the wrath of God as we witness the transforming presence of Jesus within us.  May we produce fruit in keeping with repentance.  May we keep close to God as we confess our sins every day.  May we delight in the fact that our God of perfect holiness has acted, through the death of his Son on the cross, to save sinful wretches like us!