God forgives us no matter what we do, right? Therefore we can always depend on Him to forgive us when we mess up and we shouldn’t have to bother about resisting temptation, right? To break it down even further, we like to sin and God likes to forgive, so it works out for everyone… or does it?

This attitude, unfortunately, has become all too common throughout Christianity and has been since it’s beginning 2000ish years ago. Several places in the New Testament we see the writers addressing this very issue (John 8:10-11; Acts 5:1-10; Romans 6; 1 Corinthians 5; etc. just to name a few). Some of these passages may seem harsh but it’s this harshness that helps us realize the gravity of the situation we’re facing.

The bible tells us there are many consequences to our sin like: addiction to the sin, self-inflicted injury, injury to others, injury to the church (which is the body of Christ), it desensitizes us to the prompting of the Holy Spirit and it can hurt the public image of all Christians thereby discrediting Christ Himself in the eyes of the world. It seems our sin has consequences that reach further than what we can see on the surface.

Yes, God tells us He can forgive all our sins. Does this mean we can presume to be apathetic about the presence of willful sin in our lives or is there too much at stake?