If We Deliberately Keep On Sinning

Hebrews 10:26-31 ESV

 

“If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much more severely do you think someone deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified them, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ and again, ‘The Lord will judge his people.’ It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

 

Our “Christian” Culture in 2021

 

In the “Christian” culture of America today, it appears that few take the word of God seriously. Few actually believe all these warnings in Scripture with regard to continued and deliberate sin against the Lord following a confession of him as Lord and Savior of their lives. For they have bought into the lie that their sinful lifestyles will not keep them from going to heaven when they die. And so they feel at liberty to continue in willful sin.

 

They think that they can “believe” in Jesus Christ and have their sins forgiven and have heaven guaranteed them and yet that they can continue to pursue what is unholy, vile, immoral, depraved, wicked and perverse, without judgment. This is a slap in the face to Almighty God. And it is a gross  insult to the Spirit of grace, for God’s grace to us trains us to say “NO!” to ungodliness and fleshly lusts, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives while we wait for our Lord’s soon return (Tit 2:11-14).

 

Many professing Christians today in America are caught up in a web of deceit, lying continually to cover up their sinful practices. Many are living in sexual perversion, in sexual idolatry and immorality, in homosexual relations with others of same sex attraction, and in incestual sexual relationships with other family members all the while professing faith in Jesus Christ, and all the while they are married, and thus they are also committing adultery against their spouses to whom they have declared their purity of devotion.

 

Some of these people are pastors of churches, too, who are also engaged in addiction to pornography, and some of them have gone to prostitutes, both heterosexual and homosexual, and they have had multiple extra marital affairs, and some of them are engaged in child prostitution or they are looking at child porn, or they are involved in the sexual abuse of minors or the rape of the weak and vulnerable. And some of this wickedness within “the church” has reached public attention in the past several decades.

 

Yet, even with the public attention given to these gross defilements of God’s grace and mercy, the cheap grace gospel is what is permeating the church, and it is what is largely being embraced by those professing faith in Jesus Christ. And they are accepting and embracing this idea that God no longer sees when they sin, and so they can sin as much as they want, and that God’s grace merely forgives them of their sins, and acquits them of all guilt and punishment, so they can continue in their immorality unchecked.

 

And a lot of today’s American church goes on with their performances and their plays and their entertainment and stage productions and with their comedy routines and their mocking of Scripture and with their pastors who are nothing more than comedians, entertainers, and talk show hosts or motivational speakers. And they don’t even consider what kind of lifestyles their pastors are living behind closed doors. They follow them blindly.

 

And then they get on social media and laugh and joke and tease and post meaningless memes, a lot of which are representative of this “Christian” culture of today, and of the loose morals, and of this notion that obedience, repentance, and submission are legalistic and thus are to be discarded. And then they put out these messages which are intended to water down the gospel and to give their readers the belief that they can continue living in sin and yet still be Christians and still have heaven secured them when they die.

 

And I am not saying that all professing Christians in America are living like this, but that the vast majority of them do appear to have embraced the cheap grace gospel which permits them to continue in their sins without conscience, without genuine repentance, without submission to God as Lord and Master, and without walks of obedience to our Lord in surrender of our lives to him, and in commitment to live holy lives, pleasing to God.

 

Thus, many of them have taken liberty with God’s commands for moral purity and they have wandered off from the truth to follow the lies and they have engaged themselves in all manner of evil which is destroying marriages and families and the church, and which has also brought the judgment of God on this nation and on the church because the church at large is following the ways of the world and of the flesh and not the ways of God.

 

No Sacrifice for Sins

 

So, what this is saying here is that if we deliberately keep on sinning (habitually, in addiction, in practice) after we have received the knowledge of the truth, meaning after we have professed faith in Jesus Christ, the Lord’s sacrifice for the sins of the world will not apply to our lives. For, we cannot go on living in sin or we will die in our sins. We will not have eternal life with God, but we will be judged by God as unrighteous and as unholy. And he will tell us that he never knew us and that we are to depart from him, for we are workers of iniquity.

 

And this is because Jesus died on that cross that we might die with him to sin and live to him and to his righteousness. He died that we might no longer live for ourselves but for him who gave his life up for us. His blood was shed for us on that cross to buy us back for God (to redeem us) so that we would now honor God with our bodies and so we would no longer give our bodies over to engaging in all sorts of immorality and depravity and vileness.

 

So, please know this. We are all going to stand before God one day to give an account for what we did in the body. And God is going to judge us by our deeds (our works). If we sowed to please the flesh, from the flesh we will reap destruction. But if we sowed to please the Spirit, from the Spirit we will reap eternal life. If we walked according to the flesh, we will die in our sins, but if we walked according to the Spirit, we will have eternal life.

 

[Lu 9:23-26; Jn 6:35-58; Jn 15:1-11; Rom 6:1-23; Rom 8:1-17; Eph 4:17-24; 1 Pet 2:24; 1 Co 6:9-10, 19-20; 2 Co 5:10, 15; Tit 2:11-14; Jas 1:22-25; Gal 5:16-21; Eph 5:3-6; Gal 6:7-8; Rom 2:6-8; Matt 7:21-23; Heb 10:26-27; 1 Jn 1:5-9; 1 Jn 2:3-6; 1 Jn 3:4-10; Rom 12:1-2; Eph 2:8-10]

 

The Prayer

 

Written by David Foster, Carole Bayer Sager,

Alberto Testa and Tony Renis

 

I pray you'll be our eyes

And watch us where we go

And help us to be wise

In times when we don't know

 

Let this be our prayer

When we lose our way

Lead us to a place

Guide us with your grace

To a place where we'll be safe.

 

I pray we'll find your light

And hold it in our hearts

When the stars go out each night

Remind us where you are.

 

Let this be our prayer

When shadows fill our day

Lead us to a place

Guide us with your grace

To a place where we'll be safe.