Please enjoy this excerpt from Manage Your Mission – Living wisely and abundantly for today and eternity. This book will help craft your life mission, establish its priorities, and succeed in each area: Faith – Family – Fitness – Field – Friends – Fun – Finances.
When addressing faith in God, we must discuss the real God. After all, the Ten Commandments start by warning us not to have any other gods. Unfortunately, it is common for people to make a god in their image, and the biggest difference between the false gods and the true God is his holiness. Christianity is different from every other worldview in that it offers grace, but that grace only makes sense in light of God’s holiness.
Is God loving? Of course. The Bible teaches that God is love, but that isn’t his only attribute — despite what some teach. He is also a consuming fire, among other things (Hebrews 12:29). Note how the Bible explains how God displays that love right after teaching God is love.
1 John 4:8–10 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
Propitiation means to satisfy God’s wrath. So while God is indeed love, he shows that love by sending his own Son as a sacrifice to satisfy his wrath against the sins of believers. In other words, Jesus dying on the cross makes no sense without the holiness of God. Rightly understanding God starts with a healthy fear: Proverbs 1:7 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction. But most people don’t fear God, so they don’t have wisdom or knowledge about him.
Our culture — including countless churchgoers — is so flippant about using the Lord’s name in vain, and our media, entertainment, education, and government organizations typically mock or ignore God 24×7. But God is so perfectly holy that we can’t fully comprehend it. He isn’t “the man upstairs” or our cosmic butler. He isn’t someone we get to sit in judgment over, as he is the supreme judge.
Some think they’ll lecture God when they face him, but consider what the prophet Isaiah said when he came in contact with God: Isaiah 6:5 And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” I guarantee you that your judgments of God will evaporate instantly when you face him.
I talked to an inmate once while doing prison ministry who seemed redeemed. As I got to know him, he said, “I’ve murdered four people. [Pause] Well, one was an accident.” I condition myself not to overreact, but upon reflection, it was a sadly amusing example of minimizing our sin even as we confess it. He wanted to clarify that despite convictions for four murders, he had only intentionally murdered three people.
God doesn’t have days when He’s in a bad mood, such that he doesn’t forgive some sins, or in a better mood, where he lets some slide. God deals with every sin with perfect justice — either the sinner pays for his sins in Hell, or Jesus paid for them at the cross. But no sin goes unpunished, and no sin is punished twice. That’s how a perfectly righteous and holy God can offer grace and mercy yet still be just.
Make no mistake: God can see more depravity in my good works than I see in my sin. That doesn’t mean we can’t please God, just that we are so vastly removed from his holiness that we don’t have a proper perspective on our actions.
And it isn’t just our actions; it is our thoughts. People can be very evil in their minds, even if laws, rules, or peer pressure keep them from acting on their thoughts. Sinful thoughts might be worse than anything we would do. And thoughts can lead to actions. As Matthew 15:19 says, “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.”
So own your sin and don’t try to rationalize it away. Everyone likes to have a scapegoat. It is biblical — right out of Leviticus 16 — where the people would tie a red ribbon to a goat and symbolically have him take their sins away. But don’t try to blame others for things you have done. A no-excuses approach is better. God already knows the truth, and you’ll be better off when you are honest with him. But don’t have such a finely-tuned conscience that you pretend your standards are higher than God’s and don’t accept his forgiveness.
We need to understand who God is before we make our plans. People who say that the God of the Old Testament is different than the God of the New Testament haven’t read either Testament closely. In the Old Testament, God forgave the Israelites again and again. In the New Testament, Jesus judges. A lot. Even in the Sermon on the Mount, he says we are all evil (Matthew 7:11 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!). There are many more examples like that. We learn about God’s holiness and other attributes in the Bible, so let’s turn to that next.
Copyright 2022
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible
Eternity Matters 