From day one: rebellious, selfish, hateful, spiteful, lying, thieving, backbiting, wretched, and sinful. This is my bent as a human, innately sinful. Only seeking to fulfill what I want all the time. My wants are more important than yours when it comes right down to it if anyone would be honest with you. Funny thing is, most people will not even want to be honest, because people have a bent towards lying. Do you see how vicious this circle of sin can continue? I want a toy, but someone has it, so I covet, envy, and ultimately steal it in my heart before I actually steal it and fulfill my desire for the toy. Someone asks me if I stole the toy in question, I want to be safe from conflict and punishment so I lie. The lie gets me exactly what I want, no punishment and the toy at the same time. Problem solved. Some people don’t want to hurt their conscience so they tell the truth and get the punishment because they feel guilty. Likewise, some also don’t steal because of the same conscience violation. If anything else is true of humans, besides this bent towards sinning, it is our hate for being guilty.
Guilt is interesting, though. What we humans like to do is ignore the guilt or distract ourselves until they forget it, thus searing their conscience. Each time it gets easier and easier to ignore the conscience until it is finally hardened so that you don’t feel the guilt anymore. This same guilt does not make sense though. There is only survival of the fittest right? We are all just animals that are progressing to be better and have to be good people. Right?
WRONG.
How can we be progressing to a better world when everything around us is decaying or breaking? Man continually is dying and we still have not figured out how to live longer or forever. This endless bent to say that all “good” people are a little “bad” is absolutely true because all people are bent towards sin, but the argument that all “bad” people have some “good” in them is preposterous. All of what we do is sinful, wicked, and disgusting.
How is it that mankind can only sin continually? Because we defy God’s Law, that’s how we continually sin. What is God Law? God’s law is to love God with every part of our being and love our neighbor, or everyone around us, the same as we love ourselves. That is God’s Law.
Okay, okay, I know you’re wondering how in the fat world do we love God with every part of our being? Well the Bible lets us know how to do that. We are to treat other people with respect, not hate. We must love others more than even we love ourselves. We are to ask God to take away our desires to give us His desires for us. We must have God and His Word at the priority of our lives. We have to seek a relationship with our heavenly Father in His Word and pray to Him all the time. And there is the typical laundry list of do not’s as well. The list includes don’t murder, don’t hate, don’t lie, don’t commit adultery, don’t have sex outside of marriage, don’t covet, don’t envy, etc. There is a lot of do not’s, but there is a whole lot more of do’s than do not’s I can assure you of that. God left us quite the list of things to be doing.
But here’s the kicker, everything we do should not be motivated by “What can I get out of this?” Our motivation must be to give God the glory for all our actions, thoughts, and words. Anything we do with a self-motive is sinful, period.
Oh, and by the way, one sin, just one, is like breaking all the law that God established. It works like a giant chain, breaking a chain in any place causes the whole thing to break. Breaking one part of the law makes us guilty of all the laws. God also says that he is holy, meaning separate completely from sin and He cannot so much as look at sin because He despises it so much. So if you sinned, even just once, you have no hope of pleasing God. The punishment is death. Oh no, not physical death, it is far, FAR worse. It is an eternal separation from God and His presence, because He cannot so much as look at sin, God designed Hell. Hell is a real place where those people who sin must go in righteous judgment to be continually and eternally tormented in a never-ending inferno where your worst nightmare seems comforting in comparison to your current situation.
This is where you would object saying, so everyone goes to Hell? Yeah sure, everyone screws up sometime so you are being some kind of legalist that says everyone goes to Hell. Actually, without God’s love, yes, all people are doomed to despair in Hell. But there is a hope. The hope is not by buying your way to heaven. The hope is not by doing enough good so that God likes you enough to let you into heaven. And the hope is not by staying in Hell long enough to burn off our sin debt so that eventually we will get into heaven. The only way for you to be able to get into heaven would be for someone to take your death penalty after having lived a perfect, sinless life. They have to be fully human AND fully God since humans are infallible with a bent to sin, this is why being fully God is needful. This super-human (per se) would then have to take on death for the whole of humanity and then conquer death by rising again from the dead in order to give freely the power over it.
This sounds like an impossible task. But it happened. God sent His Son, Jesus to earth, born miraculously from a virgin to be fully human yet fully God to live a perfect life on earth. He had only a focus for others and God’s glory to teach people truth about His Word and to take the payment of death for us. He was crucified in a brutal Roman designed murder and rose from the dead three days later with over 5,000 eye-witnesses that saw Him before and after death.
Now what do I do? Nothing. You don’t DO anything. All you have to “do” is believe it happened, believe Jesus Christ died for your sins, fully cancelling out your death punishment and sin debt. Believe you do sin and that you do so many wicked things continuously. Ask Christ Jesus to forgive you of those sins and to come into your life to help you obey His law better out of thanks for what He did for you.
Okay now what, I’m saved from sin and death. Life doesn’t get any easier. Salvation only gets you the access to a wonderful relationship with a powerful God and a guarantee into heaven. Is that all you wanted? Sounds pretty selfish to someone who did all that just because He loved you. Why don’t you want to obey God’s law and please Him and get to know the Savior of your soul?! He loves you and wants you to love Him back! He doesn’t want a trite, one-sided relationship with the person he created!
Funny thing is we cannot, in our own strength so much as come close to obeying God with right motives or even do what He wants. The fantastic thing is, He tells us that by continuing in the relationship of reading His Word and praying to God like a conversation for help in order to please Him. The way we please God is by being filled with His spirit. A phenomenon that is impossible to explain until you become a Christian. There are so many things that I cannot explain on what we owe back to God. He asks only that we do our best to grow closer to Him. All He asks is that we try our hardest to be stewards of the life we are given to tell more people about His love for them and to love God the best we can. This is real love, real Christian faith.
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