I have some bad news for you. You will be judged according to your character.
“A man’s work is his character.” George MacDonald
The good news is the one who will judge us is described as love - perfect love.
This does not mean it will all be smooth sailing. God sees what your sin is doing to your soul. Because he loves you, he will destroy that which is destroying you. For some, this will be an incredibly painful process. It will be hell.
“For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more; it strives for perfection, even that itself may be perfected—not in itself, but in the object. As it was love that first created humanity, so even human love, in proportion to its divinity, will go on creating the beautiful for its own outpouring. There is nothing eternal but that which loves and can be loved, and love is ever climbing towards the consummation when such shall be the universe, imperishable, divine.
Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love’s kind, must be destroyed.
And our God is a consuming fire.” (George MacDonald (1824-1905), Unspoken Sermons)
God will not be more severe than need be, but he will be as severe as need be.
“To regard any suffering with satisfaction, save it be sympathetically with its curative quality, comes of evil, is inhuman because undivine, is a thing God is incapable of. His nature is always to forgive, and just because he forgives, he punishes. Because God is so altogether alien to wrong, because it is to him a heart-pain and trouble that one of his little ones should do the evil thing, there is, I believe, no extreme of suffering to which, for the sake of destroying the evil thing in them, he would not subject them. A man might flatter, or bribe, or coax a tyrant; but there is no refuge from the love of God; that love will, for very love, insist upon the uttermost farthing.” 1 (Unspoken Sermons)
But it does not have to be this way. Christ came to save us (and this world) from sin. Only he is able to do this because only he is good enough to do this.
“To try too hard to make people good is one way to make them worse. The only way to make them good is to be good.” ~ MacDonald
The Gospel (which means good news) is the character of God as revealed in Christ. Only he can make us all we were meant to be. Only Jesus can make us like God. Only he can satisfy our deepest desire for unconditional love and save our souls from sin.
“We are not made for law, we are made for love.” ~ MacDonald
God, the creator of the universe, became a man and died for you. He loves you. (A person’s value is not determined by their size. Value is determined by how much that person or thing is loved.) God loves you with a perfect, unconditional, and never-ending love. He came to this earth in disguise as a man and allowed himself to be crucified by evil men to show how patient and how kind God is. If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus. The cross points to the character of God. Jesus is the not Lord simply because he is the creator, he is Lord by virtue of his love. And he knows that only love can save us.
“It is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another.” ~ Unspoken Sermons
But first we need to know we are loved in order to love.
“The love of our neighbour is the only door out of the dungeon of self.” Unspoken Sermons
“It needs a clean heart to have pure hands, all the power of a live soul to keep the law—a power of life, not of struggle; the strength of love, not the effort of duty.” Unspoken Sermons
Because God loves us, he does not want us to hate and abuse each other. He wants us to love each other.
“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that.” Luke 6:32, 33
“Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” 1 John 4:8
Come to the light. Stop rebelling. Turn and follow the Messiah. He offers you forgiveness. He is the rightful king.
“No man is condemned for anything he has done; he is condemned for continuing to do wrong. He is condemned for not coming out of the darkness, for not coming to the light.” Unspoken Sermons
1. We should not be surprised at this. We all know that most people insist on doing things the hard way. They cannot be told. They must make a mess of things before they come to their senses. Many - perhaps most - church goers have heard testimonies of those who came to Christ while in prison. Were they forced to accept Christ against their will? Was the prodigal forced to return to his father? God often brings a person to repentance through suffering.
Note: G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien all spoke very highly of MacDonald. Sadly, few Christians have taken Lewis' advice and read Unspoken Sermons. The deeper something is, the more open to misinterpretation. Because MacDonald is widely misunderstood and often misrepresented, few Christians bother to read his books for themselves. If you call yourself a Christian, do yourself a favour and read David Jack's translation of George MacDonald's book Donal Grant. You'll be hard pressed to find deeper spiritual truths outside the Bible. MacDonald knew God.