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It’s a while ago now, but just before I went on leave, we explored one of those thorny themes that we try to avoid, but is a big one in the New Testament.

God’s judgment.

It’s not popular because we like to think of ourselves as tolerant people. The only sin in our time, it seems, is to force ones own beliefs on somebody else or label what they believe as wrong. Don’t get me wrong here - I’m not advocating that we become Bible-bashing and arogant. I think tolerance is quite central to the mission of the church, but we need to recognise that Jesus taught on judgment. It is thus something that we need to get a good grasp of if we are to live the Christian life as God intended.

You might remember that we are using the letter to the Romans as a framework for our Living the Christian Life series. The first half is heavy going as Paul lays a theological foundation for some more practical advice later in the letter. It’s tempting for us to jump straight into that stuff, but theology is a conversation bewtween the things of our time and the things of God. As the things of our time continually change, the theological conversation changes too, and we learn more about what it means to be Christian. Paul knew that some serious theological thinking was part of faithful living and so reminds the Romans of some weighty theologial stuff built on the teaching of Jesus.

Jesus’ teaching on judgment can be summarised as follows:

1. There is a judgment (Matt 12:35-26)
2. Jesus will do it (John 5:22-24)
3. We don’t do it (Matt 7:1-2)

In Romans 2:1-16, Paul takes his assertions from chapter one (see God’s wrath here) and drops a bomb shell on the Roman people.

The very things that had attracted God’s anger were present in the lives of the faith community. They had no excuse and would not escape God’s judgement either. Believing in Jesus wasn’t an excuse to do whatever you liked and the only reason God’s judgment hadn’t happened already was becasue God was patient, wanting to give everybody time to do their best to get it right.

This leads us to a difficult part of the Bible. We’ve always heard that there is nothing we’ve ever done to deserve God’s love. We can’t earn it - God simply gives it as an act of grace. But v 5-11 seem to suggest that we can be saved by doing good things.

If you think about it, if we could be saved by doing good stuff, Jesus becomes irrelevant. His death was unnecessary and his ressurection nothing but a good trick. However it’s pretty obvious that the rest of the Bible says that we can’t be saved by doing good stuff. Even the rest of Paul’s writing says that ‘grace’ is the only means by which we can have a proper relationship with God.

What Paul is saying is this: We are saved by grace, but we are judged by works.

That is, while the opportuntity to relate to God in the way in which we were designed to can only happen as a result of God’s action, the quality of life and faith that we live is a result of our actions. We are fully answerable for what we do as Christian people.

Unfortunately, Paul doesn’t elaborate much more on this. It seems like there are ‘levels’ in heaven (see 1 Cor 3:11-15) but what that means is anybody’s guess. I assume that if our actions are poor, we will still get to heaven, but have to spend eternity sitting in the corner. Who knows…

Anyway, there were a few things I highlighted for us to remember as we live the Christian life:

It’s Jesus job to judge, not ours.

I thought this was worth emphasising. We are a tolerant people and we serve people regardless of their race, belief, ecomonic situation or whatever. In the past, people have been subconsciously forced to behave a certain way before they could really belong to a church and this has always been interpreted as judgment by those on the outside. But God calls us to belong first and then begins the work of transformation.

Drug addicts don’t have to be clean to be part of our community.

Gamblers don’t have to be debt free.

Nobody has to be perfect. Fortunately!

We belong; we believe; we behave. We are a group of broken people learning, loving and living together and experiencing healing in the process. It requires patience on our part, but how patient has God been with us?!

We admonish people in love.

With all this in mind, the temptation to let anybody do anything, thus avoiding accountability and conflict, becomes very real. This is not what Paul means.

Jesus was quite clear in Matt 18:15-18 that we need to keep each other accountable, and sometimes that means confronting distructive attitudes and behaviour.

LIVE the Christian life.

James says that faith without actions is dead. And so it is.

We are in the situation where we’ve heard the gospel story over and over and have no excuse at all for not producing actions of the highest quality. Yet we still seem embarrassed, ashamed, apathetic, or even anti the idea of stepping out of our comfort zones to really live the life we’re called to.

Mr Keating in Dead Poets Society told his students to ’seize the day’. They were only on earth for a short period of time. This was their opportuntity to make their lives extraordinary, He wanted them to ’suck the marrow out of life’ and make the most of everything that came their way.

Jesus says the same thing. Seize the day. Live the Christian life and live it well. Don’t waste it and end up an old person regretting all the things you never did for God but could have.

If you remember nothing else, remember this: just live it.

I dare you.