Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered outside the gate. Therefore, let us go forth to him outside the camp, bearing his reproach. For we have no continuing city here, but we seek one to come.
Select a thought to read by choosing a collection, the month, and then the day:
“He who doubts is damned.”
Paul, in Romans
If you have a doubt about whether or not a certain deed is good or evil, play it safe and avoid it. In the above Scripture, Paul was teaching that if a deed causes condemnation to rise in your heart, God is warning you that He will damn you in the coming Final Judgment for it unless you repent. That sense of guilt is God’s voice talking to you. In a sermon delivered in 1980, Preacher Clark said the same thing this way: “Where there is a doubt, there is a damn.”
What these two men of God were teaching is that if your heart condemns you, that means that you are not living up to the standard God has set for you. And if you are doing things that your heart condemns you for doing, then you cannot stand before God in the judgment with a clean conscience. Condemnation is deadly for the soul; it is God’s measuring stick that He has created within your heart to let you know what is permitted for you and what is not, and that internal standard cannot be avoided. It is there, and it is not going to go away.
Paul wrote, “Blessed is the man who is not condemned by what he allows himself to do” (Rom. 14:22). If you are doing only what God has put in your heart as acceptable to do, you are a very blessed person. Those who live according to such a standard will be saved in the end, and those who do not will spend eternity in the Lake of Fire. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.