you're having a pool party. The backyard is decked out. You've got it arranged. You've got beautiful lanterns hanging. There's a buffet, Hawaiian buffet, you know, spread out guests are starting arrived all dressed in colorful attire when suddenly a black-aw-calacopter ascends over your backyard ropes fall down. Army Rangers begin to fall out throwing concussion grenades in the perimeter. They establish a defensive cordon around you, other gunships swoop in low, laying down suppressing fire throughout your neighborhood. How do you feel about this? And they announce and you say, what's going on here? These people with night vision goggles and kevlar vest and massive armament. And they say, we are here to rescue you. How do you feel about this? You pick up your cell phone and call your attorney. This is an egregious invasion of my privacy and a civilian neighborhood, utterly unacceptable and you're outraged at this intrusion into your private life. The exact same intervention picture it. You're in Mogadishu, Somalia. You're in the United States military. Your helicopter is crashed in the city street. Other helicopters are down. The rescue teams are all occupied and you're wounded and you're trapped inside the wreckage of the helicopter. And all around you, you can hear the angry followers of the warlord, Muhammad Farah Adi closing in, firing, ping, ping, ping already the bullets are slamming into the carcass of your fallen helicopter. A rocket propelled grenades are exploding around the courtyard where you lie wounded when suddenly a black hawk helicopter descends an outcome, delta force soldiers from the United States military and other helicopters lay suppressing fire around the cordon. How do you feel about that intervention? Here's a joy would stream down your face, wouldn't they? Because you are getting rescued. The cavalry had come. You matter. You are not forgotten and someone was coming to extract you out of harm's way. You see, the intervention of Jesus Christ in this world is met by some with an absolute what? Yon. Even in fact anger. Anger at the church. Anger at the Bible. Anger at God. Who are you to try to tell me how to live my life, right? The very intervention of Jesus Christ in this world is met by some with furious anger. It is intrusion. That's a nerve. While others find the gospel to be the most amazing, precious, life-changing, beautiful, transforming truth that they've ever known. Friends, we will not be blown away by the good news of the gospel until we have made an accurate assessment of our true spiritual condition. Until we know that our head is on the guillotine and deservedly so, we will not be transformed. We will not think the gospel is worth giving our whole heart and our whole life to. Paul says, I am not ashamed of the gospel. For is the power of God under salvation to those who believe, for in the gospel, a righteousness comes from us to God. Is that the gospel? Let me hear it a little louder. No. For in the gospel, a righteousness comes from God, not a righteousness that we produce by our efforts, by our good life, by our reform, by our religion. No, there's a righteousness from God provided to us, unrighteous people. That's a glorious thing. And you can say, Paul, why do we need this kind of radical intervention where the God of the universe would literally come and see his own son slayed on the battlefield? Why do we need that? Verse 18, Romans chapter 1, because the wrath of God is poured out against men. This is our true spiritual condition that we are under the wrath of Almighty God. If you don't get that, if you don't see that, if you don't feel the searing heat of the wrath of God which you and I deserve, you will never be transformed by the sweetness of the gospel. Take your sermon outline then. The wrath of God is not his flying off the handle like maybe one of your parents or some other authority figuring your life did in patience with you losing control, blowing their stack. No, the wrath of God is his settled opposition to evil. His determination to destroy that which is plaguing his creation, his determination to be done with that which is evil in this world. And the Bible says the wrath of God is poured out against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. And so the first thing I want us to realize is that the wrath of God is just. God's wrath is just. We deserve it. And we are subject to his wrath first of all because man has rejected God. Verse 18, 19, 2021 says that God has revealed himself to all men. God has shown the whole world who he is. He has made himself known. The invisible God has made himself visible. He has shown his character. He has shown his power. He has shown his attributes. He has pulled back the curtain and he has said, here I am. And the act of man has been to do what? To suppress that truth, to deny that truth, wanting in fact to do away with God, to be done with God, to have no God, to be God himself. Man unable to accomplish that settles for what? I will act as though. I will live as though. God does not exist. That at the core and heart of every man is our desire. The Bible says very clearly here that every man knows there is a what? But there's a God. Every man knows that he was created. Every man knows there's a powerful God. So you may have friends that say, you know, it's also says they're an atheist. There is no such thing as an atheist being an atheist is only an attempt at the very suppression. You've heard the phrase you doth protest too strongly, you know. The atheist is only in a sense when you hear somebody arguing that there is no God. Let me tell you something. Look right around behind what's happening here. Somebody is only trying to suppress what is so obvious. And in the heart of every man, they know that there is a God and they know that one day they will stand before him and they will give answer to him. God's wrath is just because man has rejected God, even though God has revealed himself, made himself clear before all men. I love the story of the little boy on the playground he's making ugly faces. The teacher spots him and comes over and says very sweetly. She said, you know, when I was a little child, I was told that if you made too many ugly faces that your face would get frozen, you know, you'd be ugly like that the rest of your life. No little kid looked up at her and gazed into her face and said, at least you were warned. The wrath of God is the warning, is it not? The wrath of God is God's warning that says there are no innocent people. There are no people who have never heard. There are no people who need a second chance. There are no people who have been denied the truth. Man is rendered by the universal knowledge of God and his revelation to be without what? Excuse, nobody can raise their hand and said, how come no messenger came to me? How come nobody informed me? How come nobody filled me in on the truth? I need another opportunity. No, the Bible says, man is without excuse because God has made himself known to all man and how has he done it? That which is known about God is evident within man, for God made it evident. For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes is eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood through what has been made so that man is without excuse. This one writer said, all science proceeds in the assumption that inorganic life cannot produce organic life. Yet if there is no personal creator, then life must have happened by chance. One scientist who wasn't a Christian, by the way, said that organic life, happening by accident, is as ridiculous and improbable as the proposition that a tornado blowing through a junkyard would assemble a Boeing 747. Let me ask you something. What are the odds of a tornado blowing through a junkyard assembling a Boeing 747? Million to one, ten million, hundred million to one, billion to one? How much money would you put on that happening? How much would you bet on that happening? And you have scores of man, women and children are betting their whole life and their whole eternity on this kind of proposition. That everything we see in this universe is a force of impersonal activity. Space and time and matter, somehow where that matter came from, of course, is unexplained, came together in this huge impersonal soup and somehow out of it emerged complex life that exists today. Let me tell you something. Little four and five year olds in preschool can shake their head and say, that's ridiculous. God made the world. And yet we teach in school throughout our country, throughout the world, denying, suppressing God, suppressing that which is obvious. After one road, after the satellite detection of the birth pangs of the universe, you understand what that phrase means, satellites now picking up the sound and life that emanated from the very beginning of our universe, the fascinating discovery. After that was announced in April 1992, a Guardian contributor wrote, it is difficult to know what the appropriate reactions to such mind-expanding discoveries should be except to get down on one's knees in total humility and give thanks to God for cunningly contriving to allow this infinitesimal part of the universe called Earth to be bestowed with something called air. Kepler said, the undeveloped astronomer is mad. Look into the sky and see the complexity of our universe and you are rendered, you can do nothing else but say, oh Lord my God, look at the tiniest human self and the complexity of it, the composition of it. The all the factors that have to be present, extend, allow it to thrive and survive and reproduce and all one can do is say, oh Lord my God, how excellent is your name and all the heaven declared, the glory of God, all of life declared, it cries out, it screams for it. There is a God, there is a God, there is a God. I think of Romania, I think of the crowds gathered as their communist dictator, Chao Chescu, tried to force on them years and years, decades of atheism and arrested pastors, particularly pastors in the town of Timiswara, and they're a pastor led his congregation in defiance. And when they arrested this pastor, a crowd of 20,000 gathered in the square around his house and you know what they chanted, there is a God, there is a God, in defiance of the state, the most obvious truth. But there's a God and for man to reject him, leave some subject to the wrath of God. Imagine a little boy, his father says, you may not have that puppy in the house. And the boy waits till after it's dark and he sneaks his little puppy into spend the night in his bedroom, but then he hears the ominous creak of his father coming down the hallway. He grabs up the puppy and he throws him his toy box and he sits on the lid. And then comes dad into the room and dad says, what is that? I hear there's a thump, thump, thump of the tail, there's the scratch, there's the wine of the puppy and the little boy says, I don't know. It's just this ridiculous modern man saying, I will live in this world and I will function as if there is no God, as if I am God. Man takes the obvious knowledge of God and suppresses it and denies it and because of that the wrath of God is poured out. Not just because man rejects God, but secondly, because man perverts the truth, he doesn't just suppress that he perverts it and he creates, he doesn't just fail to give God the honor that he's due. He takes that very honor and that very gratitude and he transfers it to the creation, to creatures, to counterfeit God, to idle. And so the Bible says our foolish hearts are darkened, does it not? And it says that professing to be wise, we were fools and exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator. Man perverts the truth and the bottom line is we were created to worship, we're inescapably religious, we're going to worship something, we're going to value something and prioritize and give our affections to something and if not to the true God, then we'll give it to objects of creation, the good gift of God. And the shame of it is will that worship set us free? No, it will addict us and enslave us. Let me put it as plainly as I can. What's our base problem as creatures? We have been separated from our father. In the Garden of Eden, we are separated from our father. What happens to children separated from their parents? What have they become? What happens to a child lost at the theme park? He's what? He's afraid, he's frightened, he's anxious, children separated, children who grow up without their parents, children who at an early age are broken off from their mother or from their father, often struggle all their lives with anxiety over that separation, with insecurity. So if that's the human race, if we are insecure, then what do we try to do to comfort ourselves and cause ourselves to feel like we really are valuable, we give our affection over to things that we think can accomplish that. Those things are our functional idol. Friends, idolaters aren't people who live in the depths of Africa and some jungle at the end of the world who have erected totem poles, we are idolaters. We give the affection and attention that only God deserves to His good gift. How many mothers would say, I've made an idol out of my what? Out of my children. I look to my relationship with my children to give me value and worth instead of getting that from the Lord. And so I get angry with my children, I get too critical and too controlling in their lives because it is important for me that my children obey because when they obey, it soothes my sense of insecurity and ill-were and it tells me I really am valuable. How many men are passionate about their work and their work has to go right and they lose sleep over it and they are driven about it because the accomplishment of their work tells them what you are valuable, you are significant, it soothes us inside and so it can be about physical beauty, so it can be about health. If I lose my health, I would rather be what? People say, I'd rather be dead. If there's something that you'd rather be dead because you don't possess that, that is your functional idol. If I lose my spouse, if I don't have this relationship, if I don't have this guy, if I'm not married by such an age, if my life isn't perfect and orderly, if my desk isn't perfect, if my schedule isn't well ordered, if I don't get my sleep, if the house isn't picked up, if the food isn't ready on time, if the bills aren't paid, I demand that perfectionism is an idol. Control. I will not trust God, I will run my life. Look at the fascination people have in our world for sports teams. You might think of people that got Florida and Florida State stuff on their cars, stuff on their windshield, the shirts, the clothes, the whole rigmarole, and scream and yell and paint their faces and all that. That's just all good, clean, fun, but I smell idolatry. You look at these, this is just a good example, you look at, you shift up to Wisconsin, you got some 325 pound packer fan, and 20 degrees below zero is belly hanging out of his bread far of jersey. He's chewing on a bratwurst, the juice is just running down, and the packer scores that's down to go, we're number one. We, this double hardhead couldn't run 5 yards, if he was pressed to do that, but we are number one, there has to be this collective identity that in the progress of my athletic team, sometimes in some way my feeling of insignificance are abated in this world, and that's why it becomes possessive and so important that my team do well because it soothes my own feelings of insignificance. We're an idolatrous people, and that's why the wrath of God is poured out against men. I was reading this week about a scientist in Japan who are trying to stimulate the repopulation of a peninsula there. There is a peninsula with albatross and endangered albatross, and so they set up 100 wooden albatross decoys to try to attract these birds back to breed in this area, but it wasn't working out as planned. In fact, one albatross in particular had bonded with one of the wooden decoys, and built a gorgeous nest and fought off every other potential shooter who came around, and literally they said stood at attention, at wrapped attention, before this wooden decoy every single day. And the fact is, the naturalists were pulling their hat and said, this bird is going to die. It will not reproduce, it will not make it, it doesn't have any interest because it's smitten with a piece of wood, such as the way of men. Isn't it sad? Isn't it sad that we are so devoted to things that are sterile? We are so devoted to things that will never soothe the ultimate insecurity of our souls. That's what it means they're addicting. You've got to have it, and then you've got to have it more, and then you've got to have it more. And that nice house you thought you needed to have as a kid and that nice marriage and that nice family and that nice job and that nice just becomes, you become more hungry and more ravenous and more disillusioned because it never satisfied. That's idolatry. The wrath of God is poured out against men. We're suppressing the truth and perverting the truth, and secondly then the wrath of God is terrible, Romans 1 tells us. The wrath of God is terrible. But look at its operation. You know, it's fascinating about it. How would you expect the wrath of God to be revealed against men? Dunder, lightning, pale, fire, brimstone from heaven? Now what it says at all, all God has to do, the punishment is what? Nothing. Nothing. What does it say in verse 24 and 26? It says God gave them over. God exercises his wrath towards men by simply allowing men what they want, whatever they desire. He simply gives men what they want the most. He lets them go. He allows them to go as far down as they desire. Verse 24, God gave them over to the lust of their heart. Verse 26, God gave them over to degrading passions. Verse 28, God gave them over to a depraved mind. So God created the world with a certain order to it. He knows how we're made. He knows how we thrive. Now, princes, you can say that I made one man and one woman to have relations with each other in an intimacy in the bonds of marriage, and we violate that, then our lives are going to pay the price. There's going to be a natural destructive disease. He said, I made you to eat and drink and moderation, we violate that, and our lives are going to pay the price. You see, inherent built-in in the natural order of things is break the laws of God and life will unravel. Life will come apart. Complete disintegration is what we see in Romans chapter 1 of man rejecting God. We see this complete disintegration of life. Parents, what do you have to do to send your children to hell? Nothing. Nothing. Just let them go. The Bible said that, train up a child in the way that the child would go. And when he is old, he won't depart from it. How many of you thought that was a promise? That's a warning. Train up a child in the way the child would go. How many times I talked to parents and they will say, well, my child didn't want to do this or my child didn't want to do that. I asked my child where they wanted to go to school, asked my child this or asked me, well, the child would go the way he wants to go. And when he is old, he will not depart from it. Whom the Lord loves, he what? He chases, he disciplines, people say to me, gosh, pastor, my life's cave and in, where's God? Are you kidding? Where's God? He's disciplining you. He loves you. It's the person who's failing to hell on, you know, on, on bliss. That's the person who ought to quake for their soul because God is just letting them go, not even intervening, not even exercising his grace to pull their cord, right? And bring them back into conformity, look to his will, complete disintegration of life. Look at what it says in verse 28. It didn't see fit to acknowledge God any longer so God gave them over to a depraved mind to do the things which are not proper. There's 21 vices listed here. Unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil, envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, gossip, slanderers, haters of God, insulin, arrogance. Insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedience of parents, disobedience of parents, disobedience of parents, disobedience of parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful. And then look at this disintegration, even though they know the origins of God that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but they also give hearty approval to those who practice them. That means even if man knows that this behavior will cause personal disintegration and destruction to do it anyway. I mean, even if somebody has shown the lemmings running over the cliff, they just run anyway. To understand the slavery and addiction of idolatry, if I am captured by my insecurity and my self-loathing and sense of insignificance, then I am hungry to pursue whatever I think will. I think will soothe my soul and I will do it even if it cost me everything. And what's the illustration given in Romans chapter 1 of the destructive behavior of man? What one sin is kind of singled out? Don't you see it verse 27, 26 is it? What one sin is singled out? Oh, homosexuality. Could you have a better illustration of man's ability to self-destruct, to act absolutely contrary to his nature? You don't have to have more than about a three-year-olds understanding of human anatomy to figure out that homosexuality is unnatural. I mean, three-year-olds can put blocks together. That's all it takes. And yet man can act in a way that's so obviously contrary to the what we were created to be and then not only function that way, but defend it, honor it, begin to call it good. And I mean, you don't need a better argument for the disintegration of homosexuality than to say if everybody adopted it within a couple generations, there would be what? That would be the utter obliteration of mankind. That's all, I mean, honestly, you don't have to be a Rhodes scholar to figure this stuff out. And I'll tell you, if you don't shut her when you read verse 27, it says in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts. Now listen to this. I mean, honestly, the word of God not have a 20th century, 21st century ring to it and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error. You ever seen somebody with age, you ever held somebody as dying of age? It's horrible. It's a horrible plague. It's a horrible and our hearts ought to go out to people who in the emptiness and loneliness of their existence will grasp on to a form of behavior, tempting to quell the longings in their hearts and this form of behavior leads to this end. If you've got a righteous condemning bone in your body towards the homosexual, let me ask you something, who do you think you are? Your heart ought to be moved to the ends by which men can find to destroy himself, the dysfunctional family, the broken home and on it goes the absolute wreck that men can make of his life and his culture. And all God has to do is just let us have what we want. I love the stories in Oregon, middle school, there having a problem. Girls are going into the bathroom, putting on lipstick and then kissing the mirror. I don't get that, frankly. I don't know what that has to do with the whole beauty thing, but they were doing it. And so the maintenance people were sick and tired of the mess. They had to clean up every day so the maintenance guys and the principal got together and they came up with an idea. They got a bunch of girls into the girl's restroom and the principal said, look at this mirror covered with lipstick. We're having this problem every day. It is a major pain to our maintenance guys. Joe's got to clean this up every day. I mean, Joe, show him what you have to do every day. So Joe takes his toilet bowl brush, swishes it around the toilet bowl and cleans off the mirror, you know. Reports are that the mirrors are pretty clean at that middle school. That behavior has stopped, but I'll tell you what's sad. And you and I know it's true in our life. We keep kissing the mirror. We know it only. Even things we know that are destructive for us. We do it and do it and do it again. And that leads us to the last point in the beautiful word. In many ways, the wrath of God is not only just and it's not only terrible. It's wonderful because it drives us to the gospel. To understand that if the wrath of God is poured out on the unrighteousness of man, then we had better find a way to be righteous. Or we will be subject to this wrath and the gospel is the only answer is the only hope. If the wrath of God is merited by our lives and our behavior, then the only hope we have is that God would provide a righteousness for us through the perfect life and ministry of Jesus Christ, that his righteousness would cover all our sin, all our corruption, all our mistakes. The gospels are only hope. Do you see how pathetic it is? If the wrath of God is what it is and his holiness and his purity, and we are what the Bible says we are, corrupt to our core, then how are we ever by religion or reform going to clean up our lives and make it acceptable to God not going to happen? We've got to come to the place where we can say, I will never be good enough. I will never be good enough. And when you can say that, you are this close to the kingdom of God. Then Jesus, I must trust Jesus. And I want to ask you, if you will search your heart this day, Christians will you search your heart this day and say, what are the functional idols that I am depending on for my daily security before God instead of on the perfect righteousness of Christ? In what ways do I continue to boast in my performance, in my being a good dad, in my being a good provider, in my being an honest and decent person, in what ways do I continue to trust in my present spiritual attainment and not boast in the cross and the cross only? That I have nothing to represent myself with our God absolutely nothing except Jesus. Because until you come to that point, you won't be utterly taken by the gospel. You'll still believe you saved yourself. You'll still believe somehow or another you didn't need the intervention of God. The wrath of God drives us to seek our righteousness in Christ and only Christ is all we've got. Will you open up your heart even now and say, I am flush with pride. I am flush with self-righteousness and self-love. I need to be liberated by this truth that I will boast only in the cross. There is no good thing in me. But I can receive this perfect righteousness that would have God look at me so that I could live in such a way every day that I am utterly secure because I have received by faith the perfect righteousness of Jesus and it covers me. It was all of him, none of me. Have you done that? Are you doing that? Are you doing that every day? I am saying, I am a sinner, I am an idolater, I am a failure, there's nothing but corruption in me. So I am running to the cross every day. The wrath of God drives us there and the wrath of God reveals to us the love of God. It's not unusual for somebody to say, I don't believe in this angry God, I don't buy the business of hell, my God is a loving God. Well, whatever that God is, he is not loving very much because if you are good enough to avoid hell, you are pretty lovable. My God is a loving God. He had to go to hell for me. He had to suffer hell himself in my place. That is a loving God. Take away the wrath of God, take away hell, take away God's righteous anger and you don't end up with a loving God. You end up with some nambi-pambi God who will never change your life, you'll never move you to any devotion. You'll be a nambi-pambi Christian like most of people fill in the seats and most of the churches in our country. It's only when you see the white-hot wrath of God that the gospel will grip your heart at the rescue which you enjoy. I told you that story at the beginning of the sermon because I just finished a book called Black Hawk Down, the story of the United States military's raid and Logan issues Somali in which a number of helicopters were shot out of the sky and in fact there was one helicopter crash and nobody was coming to rescue them. In came the Somalis from every side and through the testimony of the pilot most of his crew was dead and there he was trapped in the wreckage unable to move, unable to pry himself out. When suddenly out of the sky moments from death, grenades going off all around them came two Delta Force operatives out of a helicopter repelling down. Now you have to know that those operatives were in a helicopter and they were watching the scene below and they saw that everybody on the ground was going to die, they were going to be overrun and the operatives radioed their commander in the sky and they said we want to go in. We want permission to be lowered in and they said permission denied. We will not lose two more good men in a hopeless case and the men said then we don't seek permission and they lowered themselves in and they went anyway. They established a defensive perimeter, they got the people out of the helicopter, the carcass of the helicopter, they propped them up with guns and they were promptly overrun by the Somalis and they were butchered and you saw their bodies on national TV being dragged through the street. One pilot survived. He was so beat up that Somalis didn't kill him. He survived because of the bravery of these men who went in knowing they would die and I want to tell you something that pilot will be at those Delta Force guys grades every anniversary for the rest of his life. And my question is do you know that Jesus Christ dropped himself into this world knowing that he would die and he came to save you and it was the only way to save you. That's how bad we were. So what's your view of yourself? Is your view of yourself that you're pretty good or is your view of yourself that you are a sinner trapped in wreckage and going down? And there's absolutely nothing you can do to save yourself only the loving intervention of your God. Because until you get that the gospel won't grab your heart and set you free. You see it's the love of God for us that transforms us. John Rocker's picture for the Atlanta Braves. He apparently is not real fond of minorities. He's made these very arrogant comments and now he's on the hot seat. In fact, the baseball commissioner has decried that because of his racist comments that he has to have mental health counseling. Do you think John Rocker's mentally ill or is he like most other Americans? He just needs the gospel. AIDS is sweeping the continent of Africa. Politicians are starting to get on board. They're saying we should send millions of dollars there. Alan Key said when is government going to stop sending money to solve our problems. The problem of AIDS in Africa won't be solved by money. It's a problem of promiscuity. And unless we're willing to address the root causes of promiscuity, our money is a joke. Unless we're willing to give people the gospel of Jesus Christ that will satisfy their souls so that they will see seeking satisfaction and promiscuity, then we don't have any solution. It's the gospel that people need. It's the love of God that transforms our lives and our hearts that wreckage of human sin only the gospel can pull us out. I want to read a letter from a dear friend. My earliest memories are clouded by scenes of my dad coming home in a drunken rage and beating my mom. I saw him throw a can of beer which barely missed her and went right through the wall. Domestic violence was a way of life in our home and even when my dad wasn't drinking you couldn't stand to be around him. He was so sarcastic and critical. I want to ask my mom why do you stay in such an abusive marriage her response was I'm determined to have you kids grow up with a father. I remember thinking what a joke. The sad truth is my dad was never a father to me and the last thing I ever wanted to be was like him. Apparently I transferred my affection to my older brother. No kid ever had such a hero as a big brother. He was good looking, athletic and fun to be with. He even stood up to my dad which made him the bravest person in the world in my book. Then something strange began to happen. I didn't understand it then but I began to be sexually abused by my brother. The brother that I idolized believe it or not. This went on for years and the experience evolved into a strange mixture of fear and fascination for me until somewhere along the line I made the simple choice to enjoy it before I knew it. I was a teenager with a strong attraction for members of my own sex brothers and sisters the helicopter is down in that guy's life isn't it? This is the ruin of man's rebellion being played out in a child life what could possibly save him. It was at age 13 my rescue came before I had a chance to experiment with my sexuality I received God's gift of eternal life. I believe with all my heart it's the only thing that prevented me from living out a homosexual lifestyle I wouldn't even be alive today if God hadn't intervened. My childhood memories are sitting on the floor crying with my dad across the room ignoring me how I long for him to get up and comfort me but he doesn't. But my adult through my adult eyes I see another image of a heavenly father who sees me from far off not with the eyes of icy contempt but with pity. And he comes he runs to me not to kick me but without stretched arms to embrace me with love and kisses. That's my dad that's my heavenly father who's wild about me and tonight when I go to sleep I have an older brother named Jesus who's worthy of my idol status. He won't come as a predator but as my protector and he concludes sometimes I just wonder if it's all a dream it's so good. This is the gospel brothers and sisters you are either under the wrath of God which you deserve or you are the object of the loving affection of the heavenly father which you don't deserve but which you receive by faith which is it for you. The wrath of God reveals the gospel and God says you want it you want it to be right between us and come to me come to me I have what you need.