A Real Inconvenient Truth

In 2006 Al Gore trotted out his film, An Inconvenient Truth, all about climate crisis. He was serious, too, flying around in private jets and driving around in SUVs and living in a 5,000 square foot home that consumed 20 times the national average for a house while he sought to spread the alarm in speaking tours. That was a questionable "inconvenient truth." There is a real inconvenient truth.

According to God's Word, all humans are sinners. No, hang on, that's not sufficient. We are conceived in sin -- sinners from birth (Psa 51:5). We are sinners from the heart from our youngest age (Gen 8:21). Mr. Gore worried about anthropogenic global warming -- man-caused climate change. God said the planet was cursed because of man (Gen 8:21). Scripture says we are rotten in our character (Rom 3:10-12), rotten in our speech (Rom 3:13-14), rotten in our behavior (Rom 3:16-17), and rotten in our core (Rom 3:18). All of this sin rots our brains (Rom 1:28), making us incapable of recognizing our own rot (Jer 17:9) and incapable of grasping God's truth (1 Cor 2:14). We are, in our natural state, spiritually dead (Eph 2:1-3). Now that is an inconvenient truth.

There is a solution to this most serious problem. God sent His Son. God provides new birth (John 3:3; 1 John 5:1). God supplies saving repentance (2 Tim 2:24-25) and faith (Php 1:29; Acts 13:48). God forgives sin based on Christ's sacrifice (Rom 3:24-25; Rom 5:9; Eph 2:13; Col 1:20). As an outcome, the one who is born of God cannot make a practice of sin (1 John 3:9) and God saves all who are His (John 10:27-29). He forgives all their unrighteousness (1 John 1:9) and supplies them with Christ's righteousness (2 Cor 5:21). He saves and adopts (Eph 1:5) angry rebels (Rom 8:7) and blesses them with every spiritual blessing (Eph 1:3).

Here's the problem. Natural Man's sin condition makes it impossible for him to detect his sin condition. That takes divine intervention. Divine intervention is the only solution. Jesus said that the problem with bad people is not bad behavior, but bad character. They produce "bad fruit" because they are "bad trees" (Matt 7:17-19). Fixing bad behavior is not the answer; the problem is the bad character. The Bible says that sin touches us to the very core and we don't see it. That's why the Christian life is a life long renewing of the mind (Rom 12:2) and renewal by the Spirit (Titus 3:5). So if you are a Christian and you find in the pages of your Bible a constant affirmation of everything you've always believed to be true, you can be pretty sure you're not getting it. If you are not finding yourself constantly corrected by God's Word, you may not be grasping God's Word. And the solution is not to read it better. The solution is to repent ... if perhaps God should grant repentance. Otherwise this really is a majorly inconvenient truth.