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God is love. But God doesn't love us in our sin. He loves us out of our sin. Love that condones sin isn't really love...it is permissiveness. Those who count on God being permissive about sin...have not met Him. People tend to love the hell in others...just look how many women fall in love with the basest criminals on death row! There is a wickedness that attracts people to each other...because of the flesh. But God loves the hell...out of us. As we who are in Christ also should love. God loves the death out of us by offering us to partake of HIS life. God stands for, as we also should stand for...only that which is eternal and gives life. But there is a love and fascination with death in the world. All who turn their backs on God, even for a moment...are attracted to death. Self-awareness doesn't mean we are without the love of death and the world. It means we are aware of this pull within our hearts and minds. The righteous are they that hate their sin natures. These make no excuses nor are they trying to get away with their sins. Just like the publican who beat his breast and couldn't even look up to heaven...such was his shame and disgust at his own inclinations towards sin and wickedness. God justified this appeal since it is only right to come clean with one's sins. The righteous take responsibility for their sins with self-loathing. God is then free to love and justify such a one...since the truth is already being embraced. God is love IN truth. Not away from truth. Likewise we are to speak the truth in love. Jesus said.."I did not come to call the righteous to repentance"...since they are already self-aware and esteem their sinfulness correctly. But then there is the rest of us...and among us many who are looking to get away with their sins. The Holy Spirit convicts us of sin, they who are called to repentance....so that we might go to God for forgiveness and a change of heart. (The human heart is very wicked and selfish of itself) But in today's society and churches...we see something else. We see self-love promoted as if it was a requirement to higher virtues. When a person is "loved" just as they are...without the change of heart in a deep repentance...and offered a religious justification IN their fallen sinful state...a worse situation is created. Jesus said to the Pharisees ... Mat. 23:15 "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves." It's one thing to justify the wicked OUT of their sins...and quite another to justify the wicked IN their sins. Add to this the desire to fill the pews for human purposes such as success in ministry and increased finances...and we get the perfect storm of wickedness and iniquity whereby we do exactly as the Pharisees that Jesus condemned so roundly. Actually we become worse than the pharisees because we have the bible as a testimony to the truth. Repentance is not popular any longer...as if it ever was. But today this is seen as disrespectful and intolerable. Even in the churches. There is a lack of taking responsibility for one's own sins and general behaviour....using Jesus as a license to remain carnal...based on this notion of preemptive forgiveness. (Actually a blatant disregard for the serious nature of sin) So then people don't realize how evil they really are. Many have become much worse than before and under a worse judgment...all the while claiming to be saved. The spiritual battle that was once outside the church..in the darkness of the world...has now entered into the church. The inconceivable has taken place. The light has been quenched by the darkness. The devil has penetrated the defenses and is in the courtyard. Are we his unwitting slaves who have not gone to the cross to be liberated from the sinful nature so as to become DEAD to sin? Are we so self-absorbed that we can't see how the devil uses us to bring divisions and death to the brethren? There is an urgent need for repentance in the churches of today. We have been caught trying to serve more than one master. And that other master...the one who hides insidiously in our own self-love....has come to collect his due.