FINAL EXAM

By Rick Mathes

1 Peter 2:20
For what credit is there if, when you sin and are harshly treated, you endure it with patience? But if when you do what is right and suffer for it you patiently endure it, this finds favor with God.

How can you run your hands through a cesspool of foul excrement and then lift them to a Holy God for mercy? You are making God gag and you deserve the fullness of His wrath for have such audacity; sin that killed God’s Son cannot pass for a benign wrongful digression or an acceptance that displeases God and insults His Son on the cross.

At least with guilt you can be assured that the Holy Spirit is at work in you because the devil would never convict you of sin. The shame of this is tht you haven’t repented but you have given Satan a toe-hold. It’s an unusual darkness that comes upon you because even though your eyes are open, you don’t see it but you do wreak it. It is a sickening defilement of your spirit and pollution of your soul when you turn you back on that bloody death stake on Calvary.

Love is quenched and distorted when you divorce yourself from the bonding of the Holy Spirit. The hope that once lay on the horizon is clouded over and barely visible. The joy that once ws the lifeblood of your prayers has evaporated in silence and has left you void of any positive emotions. Grace has fled and the source of your strength and perseverance has been forsaken by your choice of Lucifer over Jesus. What an awful condition to be in, all alone and forlorn with flames licking at you heels.

Backsliding or rather open-eyed willful sin deprives you of any enjoyment. It renders you useless in your generation and a bad example for the next to follow. It becomes injurious to the cause of Christ. All you do while in open sin shames not just the Cross but even the very name of “Christian.” You are in mortal and immortal danger of sinking deeper until you can’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. You are a walking corpse looking for place to be buried. But how can you escape this certain sentence of eternity in hell when your mind is enfeebled, stupefied and defiled?

God may not wajt to help you for very long. Turn around and come back to your church today!