We said previously that the law of sowing and reaping is never made ineffective unless God aborts the process because we have been willing to take the necessary steps outlined in God's Word.

Let us say that we are a covetous person but unaware of it. God has been working on other problems of our personality. We shall continue to reap the pain that accompanies the love of money, such as continued anxiety about our gaining and retaining wealth and material things, difficulty in finding rest in Christ, and injury to our family relationships. But the blood will continue to cover our covetousness because we are obeying the Lord in the area of our personality He is stressing at the moment.

Eventually the Lord will turn to the covetousness that is in us and we will become aware of it. When He does, we are to confess our covetousness and ask for forgiveness and cleansing. If, through Christ's grace, we are set free from covetousness, our personality will be changed accordingly and the penalties that accompany covetousness will gradually disappear. The sin of covetousness will not be remembered against us in the Day of Judgment. The cleansing and deliverance we have obtained is an eternal judgment on covetousness.

If, however, we refuse to let go of our covetousness, our personality will remain unchanged. When we stand before Christ we shall reap the reward of covetousness. No appeal to mercy or grace will have any effect on the fact that we have passed into the spirit realm with a covetous personality.

Mercy and grace may intervene in that Christ may permit us to enter His new heaven and earth reign and not be cast into the flames of the Lake of Fire, but we will enter the new world of righteousness as a distorted, dwarfed personality. We will not participate in the first resurrection, the resurrection that will take place when the Lord returns to earth. We will not receive the rewards promised to the overcomer because we have not overcome.

God, in this instance, has modified the full consequence of the eternal law of sowing and reaping in that we have been saved from eternal destruction. But we have been saved by fire, having passed as a naked, untransformed personality into the new world.

Can you see how appeals to love and mercy, as a supposed "balance" to the necessity for moral change, can create serious problems in the believer's attitude toward the necessity for diligently pursuing the life of victory over sin?

The writings of the Apostles are very clear that sin shall not be permitted to enter the Kingdom of God. Any teacher of the Scriptures who attempts to weaken the force of the apostolic declarations is a false prophet and is leading himself and his followers to unimaginable pain, to weeping and gnashing of teeth, to what may prove to be shame, contempt, and everlasting remorse in the ages to come.

Be not deceived. Whatever an individual sows he shall reap. The "grace" teaching of today is the voice of the serpent: "You shall not surely die!"

Adam and Eve sinned but once. Mankind has been suffering for six thousand years as a result. Consider the severity of God!

To be continued.