The difference between the converted and the unconverted person is the response to truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears the voice of Jesus Christ. The converted person humbles himself before truth. The person who is of the truth hears His voice, and the implication is response. The converted person hears God's words. The unconverted do not respond to the truth. They do not believe Him. The very fact that they were not responding to the things that He spoke was proof that they were of Satan the Devil. What is difficult is the yielding to the truth. To love truth sincerely means to pursue it with an earnest, conscientious, unflagging zeal. It means to be prepared to follow the light of evidence, even to the most unwelcome conclusions. To do this is very difficult and very painful, but it is clearly involved in the notion of earnest love of truth. Those who respond to Him are going to find every once in a while families are broken up as a result. One sees the truth. One understands it. One begins to apply it, but the others in the family do not see it in the same way. They do not respond in the same way, and the family begins to undergo a crisis as a result of the conversion of the one person. Truth is not easy to accept whenever it cuts across the grain of our belief, or even more seriously, what we are currently practicing, especially if that practice gives us a certain measure of pleasure or a certain measure of acceptance before those that we admire and respect. They will believe that Jesus kept the Sabbath. They will believe that God's holy days ought to be kept and that Christmas and Easter are pagan, but they will not do it themselves. The reason is that it is too big of a price for them to pay. Mankind suppresses the truth in unrighteousness. Although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. They exchanged the truth of God for the lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator. Even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting. Truth comes very close to being personified. Truth is stuffed, and if stuffing of the truth is allowed to continue unchecked, then it is inevitably going to lead to idolatry. The idolatry will be a direct consequence of ignoring the evidence of the truth of the existence of the Creator God. Man is left on his own to devise his own means of worshipping a god. Whatever representation he comes up with is going to automatically be a lie. It will be idolatry nonetheless in the form of some kind of an attitude, some kind of conduct, because we refuse to repent and to face up to the truth that is evident in the Word of God. The most common idol that we come up with is ourselves. The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. The wrath of God is simply that God does nothing. He simply leaves man to his devices. He abandons man. He lets His laws take their course and the penalty will come. Human nature is still in us, and there still works in us what Paul calls the law of sin and death, and it is working overtime to keep us stuffing the truth. The carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. There is a perversity within us that wants to turn us away from the truth of God, and that we would rather feel comfortable without the truth of God than to confront something that we know within us is not in harmony with the character, the mind, or the standards of God. The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. There is in us, to a greater or lesser degree, the willingness to reject truth before it can lodge as a permanent part of our character. We have been redeemed from aimless conduct received by tradition from our fathers. We have been redee