Highway to the Danger Zone

Sermon Transcript

My family and I live in a row home not far from where we’re meeting today, and it’s one of those houses in which you have to carry your trash from your patio through your house to get it out to the curb for the garbage men to get it. One Sunday night I did that and when I got into my kitchen, a mouse jumped out of the trash can through a hole in the bottom of it. Now I already said I live in a Philadelphia row home, so you know a mouse in the house kinda just comes with the territory, but if I was wiser, I would have realized that a hole in the bottom of my trash can was a dangerous thing not to address. Nonetheless, I didn’t, and a few months went by without issue, until another Sunday night came along, and once again, this time I made it to my dining room, and another critter jumped out the hole, only this time it wasn’t a mouse…it was a rat. And this rat didn’t just scurry under the stove like the mouse had. No, this rat found a spot to sit next to the bookshelf in my living room and posted up there. I didn’t deal with danger when I first encountered it, and as a result, I faced a minor disaster.

 

We’re continuing our series this morning through the book of Proverbs, and in the first 9 chapters of the book of Proverbs, the author, Solomon, is trying to persuade his sons and us to listen attentively to and live by the words of wisdom he’s going to share in the book, especially starting in chapter 10. One of the reasons he’s told us to do so is because the wisdom he is sharing will protect us from danger. In chapter 5 just before the passage on which we are focusing today, he focused on the danger of the forbidden woman, a danger to which he will return in the passage just after this one. But before he does, he acquaints us with three other dangerous scenarios, because we are all prone to treat these dangerous situations much like I treated the hole in my trash can: Instead of dealing with them, we dismiss them, or, on the flipside, we may be so overwhelmed by them as to simply give up and despair. But the wisdom we need that runs throughout this passage is to deal with danger or face disaster, and the three dangerous scenarios this passage calls us to deal with are folly’s consequences, laziness, and divisiveness. So deal with the danger of folly’s consequences, deal with the danger of laziness, and deal with the danger of divisiveness…or face disaster.

 

Deal with the danger of folly’s consequences

 

Our passage begins with the familiar address of Solomon to his son, and in this speech to his son, Solomon begins with a hypothetical scenario: If you have put up security for your neighbor, or given your pledge for a stranger. In modern terms, we might call this co-signing a loan. In ancient Israel if someone borrowed something and promised to pay it back, the lender was authorized by God to take something as collateral. Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke writes that “the pledge allowed in scripture was often a garment, a symbolic substitute for the person himself.” These garments were particularly important for shelter in the cold nights, such that if you were willing to give the lender your garment as a pledge, the lender had more confidence that you would pay him back. Indeed, not only could a garment be given as a symbolic pledge of oneself, but we even see in the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, an example of someone pledging their very life on behalf of another (Gen 43:9, 44:32).

 

The situation Solomon wants to talk to his son about here, then, is not just one in which he offers his garment for his own loan, but when he puts up his garment, money, property, or perhaps even his own life for the sake of a neighbor or even a stranger. We don’t get any details into why he would do this, but we can imagine that Solomon’s son, as the son of the king, would be wealthy, and perhaps he’d find himself in a situation where someone else was so poor that they didn’t have their own garment to offer a lender, and out of pity, the son would offer his own garment in pledge for the poor borrower. In the case of a neighbor he knows personally, that’s even more plausible, but you could imagine someone doing that out of compassion for a stranger even. It sounds reasonable enough, but later in Proverbs we’ll see over and over again that this is generally a foolish thing to do. To give a few examples, Proverbs 11:15 says that “whoever puts up security for a stranger will surely suffer harm, but he who hates striking hands in pledge is secure.” Proverbs 17:18 says, “one who lacks sense gives a pledge and puts up security in the presence of his neighbor.” And Proverbs 22:26 simply says, “Be not one of those who give pledges, who put up security for debts.”

 

Proverbs in general has a pretty negative assessment of debt, even when it’s your own; how much more foolish is it, then, to take on someone else’s debt as your own, in which case your fate is tied to how someone else behaves, something over which you have no control. Proverbs is a fan of generosity, but it takes wisdom to know the difference between generosity and slavery to a feeling of compassion. Solomon clearly knows that and clearly plans to tell his son and all of us throughout the book to simply not put up security for another, but he doesn’t do so here. Instead, he says, “If you find yourself in a situation in which you’ve already done that, here’s what to do.” Why’s he do that? Because Solomon, in his wisdom, recognizes what most of you in the room probably do too: None of us perfectly follow the path of wisdom. If we could just be perfect, Proverbs and the whole Bible wouldn’t give us instructions on how to handle the times we are foolish. It would just tell us what’s wise and leave it at that. Why give people an out, after all? But again, God is wise, he knows that even after he saves us we still struggle against sin, and so he not only tells us not to sin; he tells us how to handle it when we’ve sinned.

 

I’m often having this conversation with men who struggle with pornography. I’ll tell them, “Hey look, there is absolutely no reason you ever have to look at pornography again. It’s been over a decade since I have, and I know men who never have. It’s not a sin like the fear of man or pride that kinda happens to you and you probably won’t live the rest of your life never doing it again. You can never do this one again, and that should be your sincere plan from this day forward. But if you do ever look at it again, I want you to know that all hope will not be lost. Here’s what to do next: Confess it to God as soon as possible and ask his forgiveness. Then within 24 hours, get a trusted brother or pastor on the phone or in person, confess it to them, and discuss what it will take for this to never happen again.” Solomon is doing something like that here at the beginning of Proverbs 6. If you take Proverbs as a whole, the message about putting up security for someone else is simple: Don’t do it. But here Solomon is giving us the “if you do,” here’s how to handle it, and from it we can learn not only how to handle the situation in which you put up security for someone else, but how to handle anytime we’ve already done something foolish.

 

Here’s the instruction, verse 3: Do this, my son, and save yourself, for you have come into the hand of your neighbor. Before he even tells him what to do, he first wants his son to recognize the danger he is in. If you co-signed the loan, you’re liable. You have come into the hand of your neighbor. In verse 2 he describes it like being snared in the words of your mouth; in verse 5 he compares it to a gazelle in the hand of a hunter and a bird in the hand of a fowler. So the first thing to realize when you’ve done something foolish is just how dangerous of a situation you are now in. The LORD founded the earth by wisdom, such that when you walk in folly, you are cutting against the grain of reality. Like, if you jump out of a plane, that’s generally foolish; why? Because gravity is real, and by ignoring it, you are now putting yourself in a position to be destroyed by it.

 

But what’s the wise thing for someone who’s already jumped out of a plane to do? First, you have to realize how dangerous of a situation you are in. That’s what Solomon wants his son to see here, and that’s what you must see when you’ve done something foolish. That’s why I give guys that little speech I shared with you a moment ago, because you may find yourself there, and if you do, you have to realize you are in a desperately dangerous situation. What you do next will either set you back on the path to life or further you in the path to death, and if you just press on with life like it’s no big deal, guess what? That keeps you on the path to death. When you realize you’ve made a promise you shouldn’t have, when you realize you looked at something you shouldn’t have, when you realize you killed with your words, what’s the temptation? Try not to think about it and just move on. It’s an uncomfortable thought, admitting that you did something foolish, so many times we simply avoid acknowledging it, and what this passage is showing us is that that is just adding folly to folly. Don’t do that. Instead, recognize the danger, and deal with it.

 

So verse 3 continues: Go, hasten, and plead urgently with your neighbor. Give your eyes no sleep and your eyelids no slumber. If you’ve already jumped out of the plane, recognize the danger, and pull the parachute as soon as possible. That’s the wise response to the dangerous consequences of folly. If you put up security for your neighbor, go to your neighbor, admit how foolish you were, let him berate you for what you did and for how you’re now trying to get out of it, and beg him to let you out of it. If it’s the lender coming to collect, beg him for mercy. You can’t go back now and redo the decision. If you’ve already jumped out of the plane, you can’t jump back into it. The gazelle in the hand of the hunter can’t say, “Can I have a do over”? If you’ve promised to put up security for another, you are now snared in the words of your mouth. They have a right to require your yes to be a yes and your no to be a no. But what you can do, and what you should do especially if you can’t afford it without going into further debt yourself or if it will even cost you your life as it seems might be the case imagined here, is go to them and beg for mercy.

 

Here’s what that could sound like: “Look, I know I said I’d pay down this debt. And because I said it, you have every right to hold me to it. But I realize now that I was foolish to do so. So I’m asking you, recognizing that I don’t deserve it, to let me out of this.” One temptation we already talked about when we’ve done something foolish is to try to ignore it or minimize it; that’s foolish. But another temptation is to despair, isn’t it? To say in our hearts, “Oh I’m such a fool; just kill me now”, like someone who’s jumped out of the plane and just gives up rather than pulling the parachute, and Solomon is also saying to his son, “You have to recognize the danger you’re in, but don’t give up. Deal with it. Don’t even sleep until you’ve dealt with it.” Are you dealing with the consequences of your folly today? Are there some you’re still avoiding? Is there still someone you know you need to go to and ask for mercy? Don’t sleep until you do. Deal with the danger of folly’s consequences, and, next, deal with the danger of laziness.

 

Deal with the danger of laziness

 

In verse 6 the address changes from the son to the sluggard. While the son was told to go and plead urgently with his neighbor, the sluggard is told to go to an ant, to consider her ways, and become wise. Sluggard is not a word we use much today, but it should be one that Christians use. It’s got a nice bite to it, doesn’t it? If you call someone a sluggard, you know you’re saying something negative about them, and so most today would think it’s not nice to do so. But as it turns out, God doesn’t feel bound by our conventions of niceness, and he feels free to acknowledge the existence of sluggards throughout Proverbs. We’d more commonly call sluggardliness laziness, and throughout Proverbs sluggardliness is regarded as foolish. But if you’re already a sluggard, like a son who’s already done something foolish, what should you do? Don’t dismiss it, but don’t despair either. Instead, go to the ant, consider her ways, and gain wisdom.

 

And what should we observe in the ant? Verse 7: Without having any chief, officer, or ruler, she prepares her bread in summer and gathers her food in harvest. Ok, so at least three things we should learn from the ant to become wise: First, the ant is motivated—she does her work without having any chief, officer, or ruler. Second, the ant is disciplined—she prepares her bread in summer and gathers her food in harvest. Ants don’t work non-stop year-round; rest is not necessarily lazy. But when it is time to work, in summer and harvest, the ant works, whether the ant feels like it or not. So we can say the ant is disciplined. And third, we can see that the ant exercises foresight—she gathers food not just for today, but for the harvest, so that in the winter when food is not available, she’ll have plenty stored up. Again the biblical scholar Waltke suggests that the type of ant described here is one we have knowledge of and we know that it was an ant that stored up grain in its nest.

 

Three things to learn from the ant and emulate, then, if you want to be wise: motivation, discipline, and foresight. Don’t be the kind of employee who your boss has to constantly hound and remind to get tasks done. Without any chief, officer, or ruler, the ant gets to work. Be the kind of employee who finds productive work to do, work you know your boss would want you to do, and get it done. Kids, you know there are certain things your parents want you to do each day, right? Get dressed, brush your teeth, clean up your toys when you are done playing with them. You already know that’s what they want you to do, so don’t make them have to tell you every day; just do those things yourself. Husbands, wives, roommates—don’t wait for your spouse or roommate to ask you to clean up or do the dishes. Find some way to serve others in your home and do it. The ant is motivated. The ant is also disciplined. When summer comes, he works, whether he wants to or not. When that alarm goes off in the morning, it’s time to get up, whether you want to or not. If your employer tells you to get into the office by 9, get there by 8:55. If it’s time to sign off from your job and switch to the work of parenting, sign off and get to work. Kids, if it’s time to get ready for bed, get ready for bed. When it’s time to take out the trash or fold laundry, just do it. Kids if you can develop at this stage of your life a habit of doing things you don’t want to do in the moment but that need to get done, if you develop the habit of choosing the important thing over what feels urgent to you in that moment now, it will yield years of blessing in your future. Parents, be sure to not only tell your kids that, but model it for them in your own life. Your kids will tend to do what you do more than what you say. And finally, the ant exercises foresight. Jesus tells us not to worry about the future, but never tells us not to plan for the future. The ant knows a time is coming when grain won’t grow, so he stores some up for later. If you want to buy a house, you will need a down payment, and so you should work and restrain your spending now with that in mind. You may want to have children; are you considering what their education might cost? You may want your wife to stay home with your kids; are you considering your purchases in light of a possible one-income future? A day is coming when you won’t be physically able to work; are you storing up for it?

 

Thus far I’ve been applying the ant’s lessons to what the Bible calls work with our hands, the kind of work that deals with the material of this world and is linked to material gain, the kind of work you do around your house or at your job, and that is what is most directly in view in this passage; that’s why if you don’t do it, it’s poverty that will come upon you in verse 11. But the Bible also expands beyond that and calls us to what, for lack of a better term, we might call spiritual work, work that is less connected to this material world, and as with many things, there are two pitfalls here to avoid. One is to think that spiritual work is the work that really matters, so when you’re on the clock at work you’re reading an interesting theology article instead of doing the job God actually gave you during that time; that’s just a deceptive form of laziness, a lack of discipline. But the other pitfall, and probably the more common one in our time and place, is to actually work quite hard at your job while utterly neglecting your soul, to which Jesus wisely asks, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?” (Mark 8:36). That too is a deceptive form of laziness.

 

Did you know, for example, that the Bible actually tells you to train yourself for godliness (1 Tim 4:7), to strive for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord (Heb 12:14), to strive in prayer (Rom 15:30), and to strive to excel in building up the church (1 Cor 14:12)? In short, every Christian is commanded to work hard at growing in personal holiness and in building up the church. So let’s apply our lessons from the ant to these things. First, you should be motivated in these things. Train yourself for godliness. I promise that it is simply a product of divine providence that I happen to be preaching on this text on the same Sunday I’m teaching our Sunday seminar on spiritual disciplines. Practice the spiritual disciplines. Meditate on the Bible, pray, come to church gatherings, and find ways to build up the church. Some ideas: Join one of the serving teams I already mentioned, pray for your pastors and through your members’ directory, meet someone you don’t know at church and invite them over for lunch or dinner, find someone no one else is discipling and start discipling them, get people together to sing hymns and pray, go to Citygroup and seek to contribute fruitfully to the conversation. Next, be disciplined. Pick a time when you will meditate on scripture and pray, set an alarm, and when the time comes, do it. Mark church gatherings on your calendar and when the time comes, go. Prayerfully decide before the Lord how much you will give financially and when it’s time to give, give it. And last, exercise foresight, “for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come” (1 Tim 4:8). What else could you learn from the ant in both your material and spiritual work? Consider talking about that over lunch today. Kids, see if you and your parents can think of anything else about the ant that you can learn from for your work.

 

The sluggard needs to consider the ant because the sluggard does not naturally work. Instead, here’s what he says, verse 10: “A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest.” Again this passage is not condemning all forms of rest; in fact other passages of the Bible rebuke a refusal to rest (e.g., Psalm 127:2). God is not Pharaoh requiring the Israelites to make bricks without straw, but God has given us work to do, and probably just from our little sampling of examples in this sermon you already get the impression that he’s given us plenty of work to do, and while there is a time for rest, there is also a time for work. That’s the problem with the sluggard. He’s saying, “a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest” when he should be working, and man, can’t you relate to that? I know I can. Alarm goes off and what do we almost literally say in our minds? “Just a little more sleep.” It’s time to read my Bible and what do I say? “Just a quick check of the scores from last night”; “let me just check my text messages real quick”. We sit down at our desk, it’s time to work, and what do we say? “I’ll just check the news real quick.” It’s time to do the dishes, and what do we say? “Just a quick scroll of my social media”; “I’ll just watch one episode.” Kids, it’s time to clean up, and what do you sometimes say to your parents? “Just let me finish this one thing”!

 

How has that tendency gone in your life? Don’t you already kinda realize how dangerous those tendencies are? That’s what verse 11 makes explicit: Give in to, “a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man.” You see how dangerous laziness is? Give in to it, and suddenly you’ll find a little debt becomes a lot of debt and you’re so deep in the hole of poverty you can’t see out. You say, “That’ll never be me” but that’s foolish! Every time you give in to the urge to rest when you should be working, every time you choose to feed your flesh instead of disciplining it, every time you choose to act on what’s comfortable instead of doing what’s necessary, you are putting yourself in a dangerous position and taking one step closer to poverty. How quickly does snoozing the alarm once become snoozing it four times? How quickly does one episode become four? How often has five minutes of scrolling become one hour of scrolling? Can’t you see the danger? Deal with the danger of laziness. Go to the ant, consider her ways, and be wise. Don’t wait for a boss or a spouse or a parent or a pastor to hound you. Get to work when it’s time to work, and in the words of one book’s title, “your future self will thank you”. And, finally, deal with the danger of divisiveness.

 

Deal with the danger of divisiveness

 

In verse 12 we meet another character described as a worthless person and a wicked man. He’s characterized by perverted speech, sly body language, and evil plans, much of which we’ve already seen in Proverbs as descriptive of the wicked man, but here one of his distinguishing features is that he is continually sowing discord. And we see that particular feature of his wickedness accentuated in the list that begins in verse 16: There are six things that the LORD hates, seven that are an abomination to him. That way of putting it was a device in Hebrew poetry that we’ll see again in Proverbs that tie the items in the list together, and when the number is seven, the emphasis especially falls on the last of them. Speaking of words we need to bring back, besides sluggard, how about abomination? The God who exists is not a God of blanket affirmation. There are things he hates, things that are an abomination to him, and here are seven of them: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and, here’s the seventh: one who sows discord among brothers. There’s discord again.

 

And you can see how the list fits together. What do haughty eyes, lying tongues, hands that shed blood, and so forth, all tend to do? They all tend to sow discord. And at the end of the list we can see that the special concern is for one who sows discord among brothers, which refers in the Bible not only to the immediate family, but to the family of God, the church. There’s a sense in which the church must be separate from the world; Jesus said he came not to bring peace, but a sword, a sword that would divide even immediate families (Matt 10:34-36)! We cannot have the deepest kind of unity with people with whom we are not united in Christ. But we should strive for the deepest unity with those with whom we are united in Christ, and we should still seek to live peaceably with all as we love even our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. Discord is the opposite of these objectives, and therefore the one who sows discord among brothers is an abomination.

 

The imagery of sowing is helpful. When you sow a seed, you plant something small that then grows into something bigger, and that’s how discord works in a church family. God doesn’t just hate discord; he hates the one who even so much as sows the seed of it! Note the danger again: What’s the big deal of sowing a little seed? If that seed is a seed of discord among brothers in Christ, it’s a big deal to God. So verse 15 says of the wicked man who continually sows discord that calamity will come upon him suddenly, and in a moment he will be broken beyond healing. Here’s how the New Testament puts it, referring to the church: “If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him” (1 Cor 3:17). It is a dangerous thing to become an abomination to the living God. So deal with the danger of divisiveness or face disaster.

 

And how do you deal with the danger of divisiveness? Don’t sow the seeds. What are the seeds? We have a list here to help us. Haughty eyes is the first, and is perhaps listed first because it is the root of the rest, so let’s camp out on it for a bit. How do haughty eyes sow discord among brothers? Haughty eyes are eyes that are looking up, lusting after greater attention or greater glory for themselves. In one of the most famous stories of discord among brothers in the Bible, over 250 leading men in Israel rose up against Moses, God’s appointed leader, and Aaron, the chief priest God appointed, and said, “You have gone too far! For all in the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the LORD is among them. Why then do you exalt yourselves above the assembly of the LORD?” (Num 16:3). These were prominent men in Israel, but they weren’t content with the station God had assigned them. Why? Because two guys, that stupid Moses and that arrogant Aaron, were still above them. C.S. Lewis said pride doesn’t delight in having something, only in having more of it than someone else, and as long as someone seems to get more attention than you, pride, or haughty eyes, opposes them.

 

I can remember when I was on staff at our sending church and my direct supervisor was the lead pastor there, Matt Cohen. So he was both one of my pastors and my boss, and he was excellent at both, but there were seasons in which I found myself kind of habitually disagreeing with him, and as I examined that more in prayer the Lord showed me that while some of that revealed substantive disagreements, another significant part of it was simply my resentment that he was the boss and I wasn’t. Man that’s dangerous. It’s dangerous in any community; it’s especially dangerous in a church. That kind of attitude, those kinds of haughty eyes, sow discord among brothers.

 

A similar way haughty eyes can come out in a church context is an inability to distinguish between preference, prudence, or principle. There are times to challenge someone, even a pastor or an entire eldership on matters of principle. If I get up here and start saying the Bible isn’t entirely true or there are multiple paths to heaven or every Christian must vote for this person Tuesday then it would be right and good to raise questions about that, not haughty or proud. Those are matters of principle. Then on the other end of the spectrum, there are matters of preference: what flavor of ice cream you order, whether you prefer running or lifting weights, what sports team you cheer for. If you find out a brother or sister prefers vanilla ice cream to chocolate, it would be haughty of you to try to tell them they’re wrong or spread a bad report about them to the rest of the congregation.

 

Hopefully those examples are fairly obvious. But then in between principle and preference there is a vast range of what I’d call prudence. Should we preach the Bible or the Quran? Principle. Should we preach expositional sermon series through books of the Bible or topical sermons? Prudence. Which book of the Bible should we preach on next? Preference. Should we bring only Christians into membership or also bring professing atheists into membership? Principle. Should we bring this particular person into membership now or keep getting to know them better first? Prudence. Should we have them fill out a membership questionnaire or just interview with an elder? Preference. Now again, this is a spectrum; some prudence calls get closer to principles and some preferences get closer to prudence, but haughty eyes lack the ability to make such distinctions. The person with haughty eyes can’t imagine being wrong or even contradicted, so they just treat all their preferences and prudential judgments as though they are principles, so when someone with haughty eyes is a pastor of a church, everyone who disagrees with them is corrected and treated like an unrepentant adulterer, and when someone with haughty eyes is a member of a church, every time the pastors or another member does something with which they disagree, they are corrected and treated like unrepentant abusers. And in either case, what is sown is discord.

 

It’s not hard to see how from such a heart posture, the things that follow in this list would come. You start bending the truth about others to make them sound worse and win people to your “side”, hence the lying tongue, you start hurting those who don’t deserve it, hence shedding innocent blood, you start to devise plans of how to “win”, you start acting impulsively, and you perhaps even reach the point of publicly testifying falsely against a brother or sister. That’s how dangerous division is. Don’t even start sowing the seeds of it, or you will face disaster from God himself, who hates these things.

 

That’s the ultimate disaster, isn’t it? In the case of putting up security for someone, you might face the disaster of debt, or even of death. In the case of laziness, you might face the disaster of poverty. But in the case of divisiveness, you face the disaster of the wrath of God himself, and it’s this danger we must all deal with. Verse 12 of our passage describes the divisive person as “worthless,” but you know what Romans 3:9 says? “What then? Are we any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all…are under sin, as it is written: ‘None is righteous, no not one; no understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside, together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.” Later in that same passage we read in this description of all that “their feet are swift to shed blood; in their paths are ruin and misery” (Rom 3:15-16); what’s that sound like? Hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil—the things God hates, and yet the Bible says they’re true of all of us. The danger we all must ultimately face is the danger of facing the wrath of God as sinful people. In our passage we saw that there was hope for the one who had already committed folly in the case of putting up security for someone else, but is there any hope for those of us who have already turned aside from God and become worthless? Is there any hope for us?

 

There is hope for us too, because someone has put up his own life as security for us. Though our sin accumulated the debt of condemnation for us, God the Father, out of sheer mercy, was pleased to send God the Son to take on human flesh in Jesus Christ and to pay down that debt on our behalf. When Jesus died on the cross, we read that God canceled the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands (Col 2:14). Our debt was credited to Christ on the cross and he paid it in full. On the cross our sins were credited to his account and he became an abomination in God’s sight so that all who would turn from their sins and believe in him could be forgiven and receive the reward of eternal life, the very life he received when he rose from the dead three days later. How can you deal with the danger of falling under the wrath of God? Don’t dismiss it; there are things God hates, and we’ve done them. But don’t despair either.  Deal with it. Go, hasten, to Christ, and plead with God not on the basis of what you deserve but on the basis of his mercy in Christ, and he will forgive you, give you his Spirit to live in you, and save you from the wrath to come.

 

So now because of what Christ has done John can write to Christians and say, “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1). There’s a path to life for those who have already sinned. There’s also power to change sluggards. The work of our salvation has already been accomplished, so we can now work because it is God who works in us to will and to work for his good pleasure. In Christ we work for a loving, gracious Father, whose commandments are not burdensome. And now one in Christ, we can eagerly maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, clothe ourselves with humility toward one another, and forgive one another, as God in Christ has forgiven us. But how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?