Unfathomable Grace.

My friend Lydia and I have been studying through the book of Galatians over the past number of weeks. Last week we studied Galatians 5, and we were both struck by the grace of God.

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Galatians 5 gets pretty heavy nearer to the end, in verse nineteen, as it talks about:

"Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the Kingdom of God." (Galatians 5:19-21)

There are other places in the Bible that talk about these types of sins and the fact that people who do those things won't enter the Kingdom of heaven. And that always confuses me.

Because I struggle with some of the things in that list - enmity, fits of anger, envy, jealousy. To name a few.

So Lydia and I talked about it. Because that's what we do for our little Bible study together. We read a chapter every day for a week. Then we meet up and read through it again together, and then we break it down verse by verse, asking questions that we might have, talking through it, and sometimes handing some questions off to a professor from the Bible college I used to go to.

Because verse twenty-one says that "those who do such things will not inherit the Kingdom of God", does that mean that I won't inherit the Kingdom of God?

I ask myself that quite often.

The study note in my Bible says

"The present participle "do" refers to those who "make a practice of doing" such things, as a pattern of life. Their outward conduct indicates their inward spiritual status: that they are not born of God, do not have the Holy Spirit within, and are not God's true children."

While that's still pretty harsh language, it's true. And it answers my question, so that's helpful for me.

That study note led Lydia and I into a tangent (from Galatians 5) yet important conversation about the extent of God's grace, the depth of his forgiveness, and the unconditional nature of his love for us.