I think one of the saddest things I have found in my adult life is that there are a lot of people who have grown up in church that think God is just waiting to punish them for their sins. Recently, I was talking with someone who was telling me about an acquaintance of theirs who’d left his wife for another woman. Several months later the new couple got pregnant. After about four months of pregnancy, the woman miscarried the child. When I commented about how hard that must have been for the couple, the person commented back to me; “Well, I guess if you leave your wife for another woman, you should expect something like that to happen.” The sad truth is, not that long ago I might have bought into that demonic theology. It’s that “God’s gonna getcha” type thinking that has ravaged our churches and stepped across the bodies of her wounded. It’s no wonder so many people who call themselves Christians today are afraid of God, and even more afraid of what others might think of them if their sins were exposed. 

          Franciscan priest, Richard Rohr, states; “Anyone who has any authentic inner experience knows that God is only beauty, mercy and total embrace, and nothing but beauty, mercy and total embrace. The Trinitarian nature of God makes that theologically certain. The only people who don’t know that are those who have never sought God’s face.” Those people who preach the “God’s gonna getcha” theology are usually stuck in trying to “keep the law”, steeped in deep religiosities, and trying to “perform well enough” to “be good enough”. There is a theme among those trying to live up to the letter of the law: They lack a deep authentic humility, have never come face-to-face with their own sin, and therefore have never truly come to know God as “Father”, the Savior of their lives. One way you see this lived out is when someone says; “Well, I’ve done a lot of things in my time, but I’ve never done "that" sin before!” It’s a good thing Christ only died for the “candy-coated, Holier then thou church-going sins”,and not the nasty, dirty, filthy, “top-ten” sins of the world…Hello!