The lack of God-centeredness leads to self-centeredness. Sin celebrates its middle letter-sIn. It proclaims, "It's your life, right? Pump your body with drugs, your mind with greed, your nights with pleasure." The godless lead a me-dominated, childish life, a life of "doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it" (Eph. 2:3 MSG).
God says to love. I choose to hate.
God instructs, "Forgive." I opt to get even.
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God calls for self-control. I promote self-indulgence.
Sin, for a season, quenches thirst. But so does salt water. Given time, the thirst returns, more demanding and demanding more than ever. "Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more" (Eph. 4:19 NIV, emphasis mine).
We pay a high price for such self-obsession. "God isn't pleased at being ignored" (Rom. 8:8 MSG). Paul speaks of sinners when he describes those who knew God, but they wouldn't worship him as God or even give him thanks. And they began to think up foolish ideas of what God was like. The result was that their minds became dark and confused. . . .
So God let them go ahead and do whatever shameful things their hearts desired. As a result, they did vile and degrading things with each other's bodies (Rom. 1:21-24).
You've seen the chaos. The husband ignoring his wife. The dictator murdering the millions. Grown men seducing the young. The young propositioning the old. When you do what you want, and I do what I want, and no one gives a lick as to what God wants, humanity implodes. The infection of the person leads to the corruption of the populace. As Joseph Alleine wrote: "O miserable man, what a deformed monster has sin made you! God made you 'little lower than the angels;' sin has made you little better than the devils."1 Extract God; expect earthly chaos and, many times worse, expect eternal misery.
God has made it clear. The plague of sin will not cross his shores. Infected souls never walk his streets. "Unjust people who don't care about God will not be joining in his kingdom. Those who use and abuse each other, use and abuse sex, use and abuse the earth and everything in it, don't qualify as citizens in God's kingdom" (1 Cor. 6:9-10 MSG). God refuses to compromise the spiritual purity of heaven.