What is the Christian hope for the future? Despite much teaching to the contrary, there is very little biblical emphasis upon heaven in the New Testament. The immortality of the soul is not what distinguishes Christianity from its competitors. What distinguishes Christianity is its insistence that because Jesus rose from the dead, we too shall rise from the dead. And it is this hope, a hope that stands front and center in the New Testament, that has been pushed to the periphery in the modern Church. But it has been pushed there to our peril – as Paul explains in Romans 8.

Any time the true Gospel is preached, some will interpret the preaching as licentiousness either as a criticism of the preaching or as an excuse for sin. We see this in the life of Paul who was criticized by the Judaizers as an overthrower of the law and who was scandalized by those who suggested that we sin all the more so that grace might abound. The question that confronts us this morning is how to respond to the second of these errors – how ought we to respond to licentiousness and immorality? In order to respond fittingly, we must distinguish between indicatives and imperatives; once we have done that, we’ll be equipped to understand the greatest indicative of all – Easter.