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(I corrected several path problems on August 29, August 30, and September 1, including these selections: Which  Version?, Christmas, Images, Body of Christ Discovered, Hymn Midis, KJV Bible, and Spiritual Warfare.  Sorry for any problems; please let know if you find others. - Gary)

Penalties and Consequences

There was a time in my life when I lived to eat. My appetite was famous; the joke at church dinners was not to let me be first in line, or there would be nothing left. Gluttony was one of my besetting sins, and for years I saw nothing wrong with it. When I finally did allow the Lord to open my eyes, I recognized that food was an idol for me. The Lord forgave me, of course, and delivered me from that particular sin of indulgence, but a lifetime of food abuse has consequences. I have high cholesterol now, and will have to take medication for it the rest of my life. Although I'm still not obese, my weight has increased slowly but steadily over the years. I have serious allergies, and some of these, particularly the one for chocolate, have had lasting effects on my body.

The eternal penalty (wages) for sin is death, and God does deliver us from the penalty when we are born again. The consequences, or temporal effects of sin, though, can haunt us throughout our lives. The Lord forgave David for adultery and murder, but the consequence was a family that rebelled against him time after time. The result of Solomon's idolatry was the loss of much of the kingdom to his son. Abraham sinned by refusing to believe God's promise of an heir through Sarah, and through Ishmael, the father of the Arabs, we're still seeing the consequences.

Most of us have know alcoholics or drug addicts who have been delivered from their addiction, and who in many cases become devout Christians. Besides the effects on their own bodies, sometimes fatal, their sin very often results in ruined lives for those close to them, or prison time for crimes they committed. Probably the most common vice that Christians have to deal with is smoking. Scripture tells us that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, so when we defile our bodies, we're defiling a place where the Holy Spirit resides, if we're Christians. The Lord will certainly forgive us for smoking, but he will not necessarily deliver us from the consequences. We all know the health effects of cigarette smoke, on us and on those around us. The Lord may heal us of cancer or heart disease, but he may not, since he is sovereign. A Christian is no less immune to the results of sin, in this world anyway, than the worst sinner.

For the lost, of course, the penalty for sin is far more important than the aftereffects in this life. As Christians we pay a very short-term price for sins we have committed, or continue to commit, but for the unsaved the cost is eternity in hell. The scourge of AIDS is a part of the price for sexual immorality for many. Apart from the devastating effects of the disease on the individuals involved, AIDS results in astronomical health costs and productivity loss for society as a whole. The effects on friends and loved ones defy calculation. Nonetheless, the tragedy of someone dying of AIDS is far less tragic than that of someone dying in sin, no matter what the cause.

That does not mean, at all, that we should belittle the consequences of sin as being unimportant in the cosmic scheme. God did not create this world so that we might endure pain and suffering, or revel in the contrast between temporal misery and eternal bliss. We are called on to be salt and light, and part of what that means is ministering to a hurting world. Christ calls us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, protect the weak, and visit those who are sick or in prison. If our only ministry as a church is evangelism, reaching the lost, we've done only part of our job, if the most important part. Christ cared enough for the people around him, in his earthly ministry, to both forgive their sins and minister to their physical need, as he did with crippled man brought to him on a mat.

The so-called "social gospel," popular in the 1960's and 1970's, made a great show of meeting people's physical needs, reasoning that people who were happy and well-fed would somehow show their gratitude by coming to Christ. Too often, there was too much "social," and very little gospel. It does no good, from God's perspective, to have a world full of happy, well-nourished sinners all bound for Hell. We should love the whole person in ministry, not just the body or the soul. That doesn't mean just the lost, either; we must never forget that many of those in our midst, in the body of Christ, have needs and hurts as deep as any in the outside world. My particular calling is to minister to the needs of Christians, so that we can be equipped to do the work God has called us to do. The Lord can't use broken and flawed instruments, and only he can mend them.

As individual Christians, we need to be aware of the consequences of our own sins, both to ourselves and to others. To Zaccheus, that meant a willingness to pay back four-fold anything he had gained fraudulently from others. To us, it might mean asking forgiveness for wrongs we have done, or paying what we owe, or helping someone in trouble as a result of something we did or should have done. Above all, it means making ourselves available for whatever God wants us to do. We all had a share in driving the nails into Christ's flesh, but he paid the penalty for our sin-debt willingly. We can do no less than deal with the consequences.

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