You will go to hell to spend an eternity of torment away from God’s presence and goodness and glory. We can now rephrase the original question to get a better understanding … “Will I still go to heaven if I practice lies, gossip, covetousness, adultery, drunkenness, violence, lust, murder, rape, stealing, blaspheming, delighting in evil, fornication, sexual immorality and self righteousness? ” See the difference? The answer is if you practice sin, you WILL NOT go to heaven. You don’t feel sorrow that you have offended a Holy God. You begin to fall into sin more easily, you don’t feel guilty over your sin and you become more desensitized to it. You make any excuses to justify it, and perhaps you seek out ways to set up the factors that cause you to commit that sin. When you practice sin, you get better at it. We must understand this crucial difference. Good works are the results of genuine salvation. Salvation is not the result of good works. The Christian does not do good works to attain and then maintain salvation rather, good works prevailing in the Christian is evidence that there has been a genuine spiritual rebirth and we are children of God. By contrast, in verse 7, John says, “whoever practices righteousness is righteous.” This does not mean that doing good works saves us. This certainly does not mean that Christians will be perfect and not ever sin in this life. So if we habitually, continually, constantly, joyfully and frequently practice any sin, we are not children of God. When John says in 1 John 3:6 that, “no one who abides in him keeps on sinning,” he means that no one who practices sin abides in God.
If you can truthfully answer these questions with a “Yes” or a majority of them and are truly working on the others by depending on God to provide you with strength to obey him, I think you are demonstrating the fruit of genuine salvation. Is your life characterized by “doing what is right”? (1 John 2:29)ĭo you seek to maintain a pure life? (1 John 3:3)ĭo you see a decreasing pattern of sin in your life? (1 John 3:5-6)ĭo you “walk the walk,” versus just “talk the talk?” (1 John 3:18-19)ĭo you experience victory over sin in your Christian walk? (1 John 5:4) Here are some crucial questions from on the matter of sin in the Christian’s life.ĭo you walk in light more than walking in darkness? (1 John 1:6-7)ĭo you admit and confess your sin? (1 John 1:8)Īre you obedient to God’s Word? (1 John 2:3-5) If you are the former, living in ANY blatant sin you filled in the blank which you constantly run and are desensitized to it, it probably means you are not experiencing godly sorrow over your that sin which leads to repentance, I urge you to look at the book of 1 John to see whether you have been truly saved. For the rest of us we have committed that outrageous sin in the past and have overcome it through Christ but we are sometimes still unsure if Christ washed away that BIG sin with his blood.
In desperation we usually plug in some outrageous sin we’ve committed because for some of us, we are still habitually living in that sin and it is destroying us.
We doubt that Christ is a greater Savior than our greatest sin. “Will I still go to heaven if I lied, gossiped, coveted, committed adultery, got drunk, punched someone, lusted after someone outside of marriage, murdered, killed myself, raped, stole, cursed, blasphemed, watched an inappropriate film, fornicated, committed a sexually immoral act, abandoned my children, cheated on my spouse?”Īt the outset, the question is asked in desperation because in our cores lies doubt that we are truly saved. If I skipped your sin because you are extremely holy and don’t have nothing to worry about, then fill in the blank with “self-righteousness.” I’ll explain later but first let’s see how the question is often finished. Let’s admit it, at some point we’ve all asked the following question: “Will I STILL go to heaven IF I (fill in the blank with your sin)?”