The Right and Reasonable Wrath of God

The Single Best Reason to Trust and Follow Jesus

I want to start this morning with the clearest statement I can make of why we are doing what we are doing here at Cornerstone. I know the world is filled with pain and sorrow and anxiety and angst and uncertainly and betrayal and hurt and loss and fear. I know that there are myriad topics on your minds, concerns on your hearts, challenges in your lives. I know that in this moment you are more likely to want to know what God thinks about you and what He has done for you than what you should think about Him and what you should do for Him.

I get it. I really do. For years I have understood that American Christians in American churches want application more than interpretation. You want to know what you should do rather than know what God has done. You want to know how to be better parents, better spouses, better citizens, better everything. You just want to know how to be better than you are and make God happy enough to let you into heaven when you die, which you would like to be many, many years away.

Be practical, the teachers tell me. Tell them a story, the megachurch pastors tell me. Make them cry, some people tell me (as if manipulating your emotions is the height of preaching.) There is a place for practicality, narrative, and emotion in preaching God’s word. But unless we preach Christ and Him crucified, unless we preach God’s revelation of Himself and what He created us and what He has done for us and what He requires of us, unless it is God and not us who is the focus of our preaching and learning and obeying, then we have missed the point of God’s word and the life of faith entirely.

I preach God’s word, I strive to correctly interpret the Bible for you to understand, for one single reason: God sent His word and His Son and His Spirit into the world so you could know Him as He knows Himself and experience a measure of the joy God find in His own glory. The pathway to eternal joy is knowing God and the pathway to knowing God is knowing His word.

God pulls no punches in His word. He tells it like it is about Himself. God tells the truth about Himself. And it is that truth, Jesus said, that would set us free: free from sin, free from guilt, free from lifelong slavery to the fear of death. So, I spend less time trying to make your cry and more time trying to make you free. I speak to your mind trusting God’s word to speak to your heart and God’s Spirit to speak to your spirit. I open the door and invite you into the presence of the great King in His glory and trust Him to open your eyes to see Him as He wills to be seen.

If we are to see God as He wills to be seen, then we must follow along with Paul in his letter to the Romans as the divinely inspired Apostle sets out for us the single best reason for any person to trust and follow Jesus: the coming wrath of God.

The Right and Reasonable Wrath of God

The Questions We Must Ask

Why is God angry?

What is the effect of God’s wrath?

What can be done to avoid God’s right and reasonable wrath?