Sermon Starters: God's Loving Justice

I'll backfill last week's sermon. This is the second of two sermons on God at Brookside Wesleyan Church in Wellsville.

God's Loving Justice

Text: Hebrews 12:5-11

Introduction

• Getting my children shots for kindergarten--not because we were evil parents, a moment of pain to save death or a lifetime of trouble
• We think pleasure is good and pain is bad. This is not actually the case.

Some preliminary questions about God and justice:

• God allows evil because it is better for us to choose him freely than to be forced to. But then there will be evil.
• We have to believe that God allows suffering for a greater good, though we don't often know why (relative that died of cancer, Star Trek episode "City on the Edge of Forever")
• Abraham discussing Sodom with God--God will do what's right

1. God's loving justice gets us back on the right path.

• pain is a good thing--it is a warning
• CIP and hot stoves
• consequences remind us of the way God has made the universe
• "Spare the rod and spoil the child" -- episodes in parenting

2. God's loving justice protects others from us.

• Speed laws and seat belt rules
• Traffic lights
• Think of justice as protection rather than punishment
• Jail as protection

3. God's loving justice lets us go if we ultimately abandon him. 

• God lets go. Romans 1
• hardened hearts
• C.S. Lewis' thought experiment in the Great Divorce
• "Life imprisonment"
• Hell as letting us go to the torment of self-imposed separation from God

Conclusion

• training for a race and discipline