You have an appointment one day. Fortunately, if you're a believer in Christ, the issue of sin and its judgement is over. What's now in mind will be how you've handled your stewardship of your walk with God, and whether you've produced anything for His kingdom. Okay then, so judgement, and so the Bible's very clear. I won't go into it all, but Matthew 25, Verse 41, He said separate the sheep from the goats, and the sheep go into the kingdom, and the goats go into a fire prepared not for man, but for the devil and his angels, so believe me there is an eternal consequence of sin. Mark 9 talks about it being tormented day and night, and night and day, forever. There is a consequence - and that's quite good that there's a consequence. I feel happy that God is a just God now, that the world, actually ultimately it's alright, because God's in charge, and everyone's going to get their dues. Everyone. They may not get it now, but one day they'll get their dues.
Everyone gets to be called up front. Everyone gets to be found out. Everyone. There's nothing hidden from God, so that's not bad is it? So maybe someone pulls one over you and gets away with it, or gets away with it in front of the law, but long term they never get away with it. They never get away with it eternally, but actually something else happens too. Here's the third consequence. Third consequence of sin - that's why you don't have to look at God. When you see a major tragedy or something, it's not God intervening, judging the nation or anything like that. He doesn't - it's very rare He does that. What actually is the thing that's happening is, reaping consequences, so God set laws in place, naturally and spiritually - found in Galatians 6, what a man sows, that he reaps. Sow, reap. Sow, reap. The problem you're facing today, probably was sown a while ago, so when we counsel people we often look right back to the roots of how they started, and whether - you trace it right back. One of the first places you look is in the family; did it come right there, right at the beginning of the family? Did it grow in the person's life and here they are, full of a mess, and somewhere there's sin and they're reaping? You see, if you start to tell a lie - think I got away with it. Oh, I'll tell another one. Got away with it, got away with it, got away with it, got away - I'm getting away with it. Oh, this is quite good. I'm getting away with it - and then you think oh well, you know, I'll just say sorry before I die, get right with God, and I'll be right.
Now listen, God's got another process in place, and it's called sowing and reaping, so now what you begin to find is you've got all these problems of breakdowns of trust in relationships everywhere. Life is actually going in a mess, and you can't get to figure it's right back to your sin, which has created the problem, so counselling always directs people back to what they may be reaping from what they've sown - for example, we've found in marriages a lot of people are reaping the consequence of sowing judgement against a father and a mother, bitterness is in the heart and now what's in the family, what's in the marriage now, and what's coming up in their children is the same thing that grew in their heart - they never saw it happening because they didn't recognise it or feel it.
But when the fruit is there, if you see it's an orange tree - an orange is on it, it's an orange tree. If you see that there's bitter fruit, there's definitely a bitter root, absolutely. Sin has got consequences. Now here's the fourth one, this is the grand slammer of it all. This is why God doesn't have to intervene all the time to keep the world going, because He set laws. So here's the law - you sin, you cut off from God; two, sin, you have consequences. Three, sin, there's actually a reaping, so whatever you keep doing you're going to reap, reap, reap and you reap more than what you sowed! Isn't that nice aye? That makes sin really scary, so if I sowed a little bit of judgement in my background on my parents, I got a whole heap of reaping coming up! [Laughter] and the problem you have now may be that whole lot of reaping is because you didn't notice a little bit of sinning back there. But does that mean it didn't happen? Oh no, it happened. Does that mean you can fix it up without solving that problem? No, you can't.