Get your pencils out, it’s test time!

How do you think you stand up to God’s Top 10?

Have a listen and see how you come out.

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Romans 12:17-21 Never pay back evil with more evil. Do things in such a way that everyone can see you are honorable. ¹⁸Do all that you can to live in peace with everyone.

¹⁹Dear friends, never take revenge. Leave that to the righteous anger of God. For the Scriptures say, “I will take revenge; I will pay them back,” says the LORD.

²⁰Instead, “If your enemies are hungry, feed them.   If they are thirsty, give them something to drink.  In doing this, you will heap burning coals of shame on their heads.”

²¹Don’t let evil conquer you, but conquer evil by doing good.

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If you knew on 9/1 about the 9/11 attacks that would kill thousands of people in the Twin Towers, how hard would you try to save those people?  How much work would you do to convince the government to stop those flights or keep people from going to work in those buildings or whatever you could do?  It probably wouldn’t be easy because until that day, nobody would believe something like that could happen in America.  Would you try anyway?  Would you make sacrifices to save all those lives?

Do you remember watching as people jumped from the building and fell to their death because the fire was so terrible?  It was a horrible sight.  Would you work to keep that from happening?  Now how about the millions of people who will die in their sins and face much more suffering in Hell than anybody felt in the Twin Towers?  Would you do anything to stop those people from dying in their rebellion against God?

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This is kind of a continuation of “Well FORGIVE me!”  It deals with the place of forgiveness in situations of repeated abuse.  Can you mesh forgiveness with justice?  Is there a way to give grace without promoting lawlessness?

I don’t mention this in the talk, but if you think about it, the answer to that questions was Jesus giving his life on the cross.  If God wanted to forgive everybody without any desire for change, Jesus wouldn’t have needed to die.  God could have just said “I forgive everybody no matter what.”  And it would have allowed everybody to continue living wicked and selfish lives.  But then Heaven and Earth would both be places of eternal evil because the law would have been thrown away to make place for universal forgiveness.  But in making his ultimate sacrifice, Jesus demonstrated the legal consequence of our evil as a motivation for us to stop breaking God’s law and live a life in accordance with all God asks of us.  So if we are willing to turn away from our selfish lawlessness and obey God, he can forgive us and promote justice at the same time.

Jesus said “Those who obey my commandments are the ones who love me.”  So if we truly care about Jesus and what he said and did for us, our lives must be changed out of our love for him.  We can’t live as enemies of God if we truly love him.  So when people say something like “Just ask Jesus into your heart” it’s never some mantra or empty religious ritual that saves you.  It’s the fact that the love Jesus demonstrated for us with his life, death, and resurrection, motivates us to return love to him and live lives that will make him happy.  We enter into a relationship of mutual love and find forgiveness, not as a technicality for some empty prayer, but out of deep desire for God to be reunited with us in purity and righteousness.

So real grace not only forgives a perpetrator, but also promotes his or her best interest, which is eternal righteousness in accordance with God’s law.

Get it?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:50 — 16.0MB)