Or despisest thou the riches of His goodness and forbearance and longsuffering..? – Romans 2:4

O impenitent man, you are placed in the very focus of Christian light, and yet you follow evil! Will you not think of this? Time was when a man would have to work for years to earn enough money to buy a Bible. There were times when he could not have earned one even with that toil; now the Word of God lies upon your table, you have a copy of it in almost every room of your house; is not this a boon from God? This is the land of the open Bible, and the land of the preached Word of God; in this you prove the riches of God’s goodness. Do you despise this wealth of mercy? What is more, you have been favoured with a tender conscience. When you do wrong you know it, and smart for it. What means those wakeful nights after you have yielded to a temptation? What means that miserable feeling of shame? that fever of unrest? You find it hard to stifle the inward monitor, and difficult to resist the Spirit of God. Your road to perdition is made peculiarly hard; do you mean to follow it at all costs, and go over hedge and ditch to hell?

Be it never forgotten that sin is to God much more intolerable than it is to us. He is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. Things which we call little sins are great and grievous evils to Him: they do, as it were, touch the apple of His eye. “Oh, do not,” He says, “do not this abominable thing that I hate!” His Spirit is grieved and vexed with every idle word and every sensual thought; and hence it is a wonder of wonders that a God so sensitive of sin, a God so able to avenge Himself of His adversaries, a God who knows the abundance of human evil, and marks it all, should nevertheless exhibit riches of goodness and forbearance and longsuffering. ~ C.H. Spurgeon