So you are a professing believer but struggle to forgive others from your heart. Jesus said you’ll be handed over to the ‘tormentors’. (Matt. 18:35) He told a man who had been incapacitated for 38 years, after He healed him, to ‘go and sin no more or something worse will happen to him’. (John 5:14) Jesus also taught that after an ‘unclean spirit’ is removed from a person, that if given an opportunity to return, it will bring ‘seven other spirits more wicked that himself, and they enter and dwell there and the last state of that man is worse than the first.” (Matt. 12:45) And ‘perish’ is the word Jesus used to explain what will happen to anyone and everyone who fails to truly ‘repent’. (Luke 13:3,5)

“Perish”...”Tormented”...”Something worse will come”...”Worse off in the end than in the beginning”...it sounds like Jesus is using some rather harsh, yet vivid language there, does it not to you? Since these were warnings issued by Jesus, have you ever stopped to ask yourself (or even Him) what these consequences might even look like when they manifest?

Why am I spending so much time with such a ‘negative’ subject? Well, for starters, I’m convinced so many of us have failed to ‘get the memo’ on how bad the ‘bad news’ is, which then makes it challenging to truly appreciate and believe the ‘good news’ of the gospel. And where many have been deceived is to believe that since they ‘accepted Christ’ at some point in their life, that they are ‘immune’ to experiencing God’s wrath. Friends, I’m here to tell you in Jesus’s name that nothing could be further from the truth. Paul even warned us to ‘not be deceived’ because God’s wrath would indeed come upon those who practiced such things. (Eph 5:3-6). And this is not about God being ‘out to get you’, but someone else is - (John 10:10)

Oh, somebody quoted 1 Thess. 5:9 to you suggesting that “God did not appoint ‘us’ to wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ...”? Would you care to take a moment and consider who ‘us’ is Paul refers to there? I would be careful not to quickly assume it is everyone who ‘says Lord, Lord’. (Matt. 7:21).

“But we are under grace and not the law”, you say, based on what Rom. 6:14 tell us? So who exactly are the ones under grace, and not ‘under the law’? Galatians 5:18 will tell you exactly who they are because they are the ones ‘led by the Spirit’, which means they no longer fulfill the ‘lust of the flesh’ (5:16) and they ‘walk like Jesus walked’ (1 John 2:6) having been ‘born of God and no longer sin’... which means the ‘wicked one cannot touch them’. (1 John 3:6-9, 5:18). And guess why the ‘wicked one’ is still around? He’s the ‘wrath of God’ that carries out God’s judgments. Wrath, I might remind you, that Jesus came to save us from. (Rom. 5:9; John 3:17)

The mentality most professing believers demonstrate having today is akin to a person that continues to break traffic laws and is convinced he won’t be ‘ticketed’ because his dad is the local judge. Tomorrow, Lord willing, we will begin to study what those ‘tickets’ might look like as a way of addressing the question I posed in the 2nd paragraph here today.