Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS

Introduction: The Offensiveness of the Gospel

I want to start this morning with a little bit of a confession. I spend too much time on social media. I should not spend the amount of time I spend on just doing this. I shouldn’t do it. Well, a few weeks ago, while I was participating in this guilty pleasure we call TikTok, I came across a video. Everyone’s feed is different because it’s catered to you. So I came across this video of these guys street preaching.

They were at a public university in Oklahoma, and these guys were there preaching. We can argue and debate about the efficacy of street preaching and whether or not that’s a valuable way to approach ministry. These street preachers were preaching in the open air. So police officers came up to them and said, You can’t be doing this. The preacher says Yes, I can,
this is constitutionally protected. I’m on public property. We’ve done this before. We know we can do this. We know you can’t shut us down.

So the police officers were saying, No, you can’t do this. One police officer was agitated, but then two other cops came over and calmed the first cop down. They said, actually, he can do this. This is perfectly legit. Honestly, I’m not sure that the preacher was representing Christ in the kindest, best way, but, again, it’s a different conversation for a different day.

This preacher is going on and on, and one of the police officers said, Here’s the issue. She goes, I have no problem with you doing this. She goes, I go to church. This is cool. This is legal. You’re on public property. You’re allowed to do this. It’s fine. She goes, well, we did get a complaint from one of the students who was passing by. The preacher guy was like, well, what was the complaint? She said, apparently, you said something about her going to hell, and she was really offended by that.

In the conversation. I was going back and forth. I don’t know what the preacher guy said. So I don’t know whether what he said was appropriate or not. I can’t judge. But it was interesting in the conversation between the police officer and the street preacher. They were going back and forth, and it became clear to me that the police officer was not bothered by the fact that this guy was talking about Jesus in a public square.

She seemed to be saying, Jesus is welcome in the public square. That’s perfectly appropriate. That’s fine. She said to him, You know, if you’re going to talk about how much God loves people and how he’s good and all the good things, that’s fine. But you can’t be in a public place telling people they’re going to hell. Talking about Jesus in a public square wasn’t the issue. It was talking about the potential for hell that was crossing the line. That was unacceptable.

I think that sentiment is very popular in American culture. I think about the Christmas season. We just celebrated Christmas. There are lights everywhere. I got a neighbor down the street who’s got all sorts of lights. When I talk to them, I’m pretty sure they don’t believe in the Bible or Jesus. But they’re decked out in the most extravagant light display you could ever see. They’ve got music going to a radio station. So you tune into a particular station on the radio, and you can hear music coming from their house. I mean, it’s all out.

But they don’t believe in Jesus. Lots of people would love for Christmas to just be about some cute baby in a manger. What they find impolite or unacceptable is when you talk about the reason why that baby was born, which was to save us from the flames of hell, to rescue us from an eternity apart from the love and mercy of God. It boggles my mind that people are okay with elements of Christianity, and yet there’s a point where you go, now stop there. Well, the rest of it doesn’t make sense if we stop there.

This sentiment exploded in American culture in the post-World War II era. From the early 1900s until the 1930s, there was a pretty significant movement away from biblical Christianity. Conservative Christians dominated pretty much every institution in American culture. The last institution that was lost was Princeton University in 1929, when the last conservative Christian Protestants at Princeton were booted out of the school. That was a watershed moment in American Christianity, where we lost control of a lot of the key institutions in American culture.

That was the culmination or the climax of a movement that had been going on for several decades, a movement away from biblical Christianity. But in the wake of World War II, after the hellishness of World War II, many Americans were clamoring for religion, clamoring for God to be back in our society. But not wanting all of Jesus, particularly that impolite part, that hell part. We don’t want that.

We want this nice, neutered version of Christianity. That got very popular in the 1940s and into the 1950s. Evangelical scholars look back and refer to that as civil religion. Civil religion explodes on the scene in American culture. It became very popular in the 1950s. People in droves start going back to church. This is the era when we add under God to the Pledge of Allegiance. This is where we add the phrase In God We Trust onto the American dollars.

There’s this movement toward Christianity in the 1950s in a significant way, but it wasn’t true biblical Christianity. It was, again, this nice neutered version of it. This shapes American culture in pretty significant ways. The United States, not the only place that fell victim to this civil religion. This happened in Britain as well. Famously, C.S. Lewis addresses this in his book The Weight of Glory. Here’s how C.S. Lewis addresses it. He says this:

“Many Christians these days do not like to mention heaven or hell, even in the pulpit. However, if we do not believe in heaven and hell, in these things unseen, our presence in church is a great tomfoolery. If we do believe them, we must sometimes overcome this spiritual prudery.”

I love the phrase spiritual prudery. Lewis, He’s saying, we’re like prudes when it comes to talking about hell. We’re afraid to talk about it. We’re kind of embarrassed by it. Lewis says, if you don’t believe in Heaven and hell, being in church is kind of tomfoolery. What’s the point? What are you doing? What are you wasting your time on? But if we do believe in heaven and hell, then we’ve got to kind of get past this spiritual prudery. This is what Lewis is challenging us to.

He is saying we must go beyond this civil religion that’s so popular, that was so popular in Western Europe and North America, and remains popular in parts of the United States. Lots of Americans want a version of Jesus that’s not offensive, but what they want is a version of Jesus that doesn’t really exist because Jesus is offensive. You cannot possibly talk about the Gospel, the truth of Scripture, without being offensive.

Now, to be clear, what we don’t want to be is one of these guys who love offending. There are some preachers out there who just live to offend. They say, I’m just telling it how it is, brother. No, you’re not. You’re being a jerk. You’re being hellish. We don’t want to be offensive just for the sake of being offensive. That doesn’t honor Christ.

But we absolutely want to speak the truth clearly, and that will be offensive. Most of you profess to be believers, I would imagine. If you are someone who talks about your faith at some point, ask yourself, take inventory. When was the last time I really offended someone because of what I believe? If you’ve not offended anyone recently, it’s probably one of two things. Either you’re not talking about your faith very much, or you’re talking about your faith in a nice, neutered fashion, and therefore you’re not really presenting biblical Christianity at that point.

Again, we’re not out to offend people for the sake of offense. That’s not the goal. But we should expect occasionally that we’re going to offend people. It’s offensive to tell someone you are so sinful and disgusting that you deserve to burn in hell forever. That is a very offensive statement to make. But it is true. You can say that statement in your own way.

There are different ways in which we can make that statement, but there are ways in which we want to stay that. But there are moments we want to offend. So this morning, I want to talk a little bit about this thing called hell. That is offensive to people. Typically, we go through books of the Bible. So in the fall, we spent a chunk of time in the book of Hebrews. From October, November, and then we’ve paused, we did an Advent series.

Then, between now and January, we’re gonna cover some questions that I’ve been asked as a pastor. God willing, in February, we’ll jump back in the book of Hebrews. So, February through May, we’ll be back in the book of Hebrews. But over the next few weeks, I want to tackle some really specific questions that I’ve been asked as a pastor. One of the questions I’ve been asked frequently is about hell. So we’ll pray one more time, and then we’ll answer some of these questions, and we’ll look at what the scripture says.

God, help us to understand your word when we look at some of these verses, help us to embrace the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it may be. I pray in Christ’s name.
Amen.

 

Why Do We Talk About Hell?

The first question I’ve been asked often is, Why would you ever want to talk about something so depressing like hell? How would you ever want to talk about that? I’ve been asked that multiple times. Here’s the number one reason. There are several reasons why we want to talk about it, but number one is because Jesus talked about it. If you take all of the teachings of Jesus, parables, sermons, and conversations, and you make a list of every topic that Jesus ever hit. If you make a list of over 100 topics that Jesus covered, and you put check marks next to each time Jesus talked about each topic.

There would be two things that would be at the top of the list, and the third place would be a distant third. There are two things that Jesus talked about more than anything else, in significant numbers. That is hell and money. You know, the two things that most preachers are uncomfortable talking about? Hell and money. They’re both uncomfortable things to talk about. I’m not being honest. So we want to talk about things like hell, because Jesus talked about things like things like hell.

 

What Is Hell Like?

The second question I’ve been asked is, What is hell like? In Matthew 13 and Matthew 24, Jesus describes hell as a place of a great gnashing of teeth, where you’re crying so much your teeth are grinding together, teeth are gnashing. I mean, that is an unbelievable image that Jesus gives us. In Matthew 25, Jesus says that hell is a place of great punishment. One of the things we get in scripture is that hell is hot. The book of Revelation uses the language, the lake of fire. Jesus uses the language in Matthew 13, the fiery furnace. Bible scholars have argued, is this literal? The lake of fire, the fiery furnaces, are these literal or just metaphoric? I gotta be honest, I’m not 100% sure. I don’t fully know.

I’ve looked at Scripture and tried to study, and I don’t have a strong opinion. But here’s what I find odd. Sometimes when you tell people that it’s a metaphor, it’s like a sigh of relief. It’s like, is hell really a lake of fire? I’m like, no, maybe it’s a metaphor. Oh, thank God. It’s just a metaphor. I think you’ve missed the point of the metaphor. The reason God gives us metaphors is to give us a taste of the reality.

If a lake of fire is the metaphor for what hell is like, and a lake of fire is really bad, that means hell is really bad. The Lake of fire, being a metaphor, should not let you off the hook. You should not breathe a sigh of relief. It’s either a lake of fire or it’s as bad as a lake of fire. Either way, it’s bad. I think we want to be careful not to unintentionally neuter the Scriptures.

 

Is Hell The Lack Of The Presence Of God?

The third question I’ve been asked about hell is, Is Hell the lack of the presence of God? This is a very common folly. In hell, you are separated from God. It’s a pretty common Protestant language. It’s not unusual language. I wouldn’t even say it’s wrong, but I’m not sure that’s precisely accurate. Two verses stand out to me. Psalm 139, verse 8. In the old King James says:

“If I go up to the heavens, you are there. If I make my bed in the depths, you are there.”

So wherever we go, God is there. And then Jeremiah 23:23, God says:

“I am the God who is everywhere.”

So, the idea that God is not present in hell, I’m not sure that’s accurate. I think a better way to talk about hell is not the absence of God, but it’s the absence of experiencing certain elements of God. Hell is the place where you experience an angle of God or an attribute of God in an intense fashion without other attributes. Meaning we experience the wrath of God without experiencing the grace and mercy of God. That should horrify all of us. If you prefer to use the language of separation from God, I think that’s appropriate. I don’t think that’s wrong, but I don’t think it’s the ideal way to talk about it.

 

Is Hell God Inflicted or Self-Inflicted?

The next question I’ve been asked pretty often is, Is hell something that God inflicts on people, or is this self-inflicted? Does God send us to hell, or do we choose to go to hell? That’s a question I’ve been asked, and I think the answer the Bible gives us is both. There’s a language of both. C.S. Lewis, one of my favorite authors, talks about this quite a bit in his book The Great Divorce. He gives some imagery of hell that I think is interesting and helpful in some ways. He clearly uses the language of ‘cast’ into hell.

The Bible uses that language. Jesus says that we’re thrown or cast in. That’s the language we see. Lewis also talks about this language. He uses what he sees in scripture, that hell is also self-inflicted. Lewis says that hell is locked from the inside for those who are in and do not want to escape. It’s an interesting language. Humans have been so poisoned by sin that, although they would want to escape the torment of hell, they would not want to acknowledge the God of Hell, Lewis says.

Human beings were connected to God back in the Garden of Eden. We had this unbridled, unbroken connection. Fabulous, wonderful, glorious. As humans, we chose to betray God to break that friendship, not realizing that God is the source of life, and therefore that broken friendship meant we were no longer connected to the source of life. So now we are spiritually dead. We are rotting, we are spoiling.

I use this imagery when we’re talking on Christmas Eve. The human soul is like a glass of milk you’ve set on a counter, sitting there rotting, spoiling, getting worse and worse. Lewis proposes, and I think I agree with him, that the human soul is rotting on this side of eternity, and into eternity just continues to rot. On the flip side, we have the soul of the believer. Those of us who love Jesus, who are connected to him.

We are in the process of growing in our faith. Our soul is getting healthier and healthier. We’re experiencing more of his joy in life, and that simply continues into eternity forever and ever and ever and ever. But, on this side of eternity, we are already being spoiled. Paul says in Colossians that our minds have become hostile toward God. This is Lewis’s imagery. In Matthew chapter 10, Jesus says:

“The condemned persons will experience destruction.”

The word he uses, destruction, the Greek word for destruction there can also be translated as totally ruined or completely undone. So Jesus says the soul of the condemned will be totally ruined or completely undone. This is a similar language to what we see from Paul in Romans chapter 1, where Paul talks about the wrath of God being poured on humans and that humans are becoming dehumanized over time.

He’s saying God is going to allow you to experience the fullness of your own choices. That over time, we’re becoming less and less human in our sensibilities and our rationality. We’re not becoming less human in our souls. Ontologically speaking, we’re still humans, but we’re becoming more and more beastly, more and more disgusting. There’s a constant decay in the language that C.S. Lewis uses in The Great Divorce.

In that book, Lewis depicts hell as being this town of human beings who are ever growing in their hatred for God and hatred for each other. Like a town of millions of people where the houses are constantly moving further and further away from each other because they can’t stand each other, and they long to be away from one another.

They are consumed with an ever-growing hate. Lewis contrasts this with the ever-growing, increasing joy that will be experienced by those who are with Christ. The ever-increasing love that we will have for God forever and ever and ever. So is Hell something God does or self-inflicted? Well, it’s both. The Bible seems to give us both of these.

 

Why Do Humans Deserve Hell?

The fifth question I’ve been asked a lot. Why is it that humans deserve to go to hell? This is what we’ll look at. So if you have a Bible, you can turn to Romans chapter 1. We’ll look at a couple of verses throughout the first few chapters of Romans. I think the question of why humans deserve to go to hell evokes some emotion. It should. The concept of hell should be unsettling. If it doesn’t bother you at all that there will be people in hell, that people are in hell, if that doesn’t bother you at all, I think you should take that to the Lord. Maybe there’s a lack of compassion. It should unsettle us. It should unnerve us. More than that, what we should be unnerved by is the fact that we ourselves deserve hell. That should be unsettling to us. Look at Romans chapter 1, verse 18. The apostle Paul says this:

“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.”

The word ‘revealed’ here that Paul uses can also be translated as demonstrated or focused, or set against. So there’s a wrath of God from heaven being revealed or focused upon, or demonstrated to ungodly, unrighteous human beings. That’s all of us. We are more sinful than we think. Your sin is worse than you think. Charles Spurgeon, the great Baptist preacher of the 1800s, said it this way. He said, “Whenever someone slanders you, take heart. You are surely worse than whatever they have said.”

Someone gossips about you, says something, you’re like, Oh, that’s all you said? You don’t know everything about me. Because we are worse than we think. Flip it over to Romans chapter 2. Look at verse 5 with me. This is Paul speaking of the state of humanity. Paul says this:

“Because of your hard and impenitent heart, you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.”

A hard-hearted heart that refuses to feel remorse, that refuses to realize how wrong it is. Because of your hard, impenitent heart, because of how hard-hearted and stubborn you are, you are storing up wrath for yourself so that when God pours out and reveals his wrath, it will be revealed and focused upon you, human beings. So Paul is saying you are storing up wrath for yourself. Flip over to Romans chapter 3. Look at verse 23. Paul says this:

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

So God has set this glorious standard. This is who I am. Be like me, meet this standard. But the reality is, all of us, not a one of us, has met the standard. Sometimes people ask questions like, It just doesn’t make sense that God would send us to hell because of this. My response is always, I don’t think you realize the standard that God has set. Let me give you a silly illustration. Let’s say you and I are going to take a baseball, and we’re going to throw the baseball to the road, about 100 yards or so away. So we each take a baseball and see how far we can throw it. You might get further than I.

So, we throw the baseball. We’ll see how far we can get to the road. Then I say to you, did you make it? Maybe you made it, maybe not. Most likely, you did not. Then I say to you, let’s see who can throw it to the North Pole. You take your baseball, I’ll take mine. We’re going to throw it to the North Pole. All right, let’s see who gets the closest. I’ll throw it. And now you throw. Let’s see who got closer. Well, you got closer, but you know what? You still fell miserably short of the standard.

See, sometimes what we do is we want to compare ourselves to other people and go, well, I’m better than that person. I’m not as sinful as that person. At least I’m not this guy or that guy. I haven’t killed anyone. God does not contrast us against other humans. God contrasts us against himself. His own glory, his own holiness, and we have fallen short.

No matter how far you think you get, you’re never going to throw that ball to the North Pole. Similarly, you’re never going to meet the standard that God has set. Then Paul says, let’s skip over to chapter 6. Romans, chapter 6, verse 23. Paul says something I think is easily missed, one of the most condemning statements. He says:

“For the wages of sin is death.”

The wages are the paycheck you deserve. A spiritual death. You go to your job, you get a paycheck. Your boss is not going to give you an arbitrary number. You’re earning something. In the same way, Paul is telling us, the spiritual death, the condemnation that God is going to bring, that’s the paycheck you’ve earned. It’s not arbitrary. It’s not like God is in heaven going, I kind of hate guys that wear teal shirts. I’m going to kill that guy with a teal shirt. No, God is looking at our actions and he’s giving us the wages we deserve. Then he says, but, oh, this is a great word there. But:

“The wages of sin are death. But the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Paul makes it very clear, yes, you earned something, you deserve something, but there is a free gift, a grace, a mercy available to you in Christ Jesus. Why do humans deserve hell? It’s because we are unrighteous and we warrant the full wrath of God. The next question I’ve been asked regularly is, if God is so gracious, why can’t he just forgive sin? Why can’t he just let it go? You’re forgiving, you’re God, you’re good. I’ve been asked this a bunch of times.

Let’s imagine we’re in a courtroom. Let’s say there are a hundred criminals in the courtroom.
They’ve committed the most wicked crimes you can imagine. Assaults, violent robberies, murders, violations of all sorts, the most heinous things. Whatever the most wicked crime you think of, these hundred criminals committed that crime. Imagine these hundred criminals coming to the courtroom, and they all deserve life in prison with no chance of parole. Can you imagine a judge would look at the hundred criminals and say, We’re just gonna let it slide.

Every single one of us would go; you don’t just let them off the hook. We want justice. Every single one of us would cry out about the flaw of that judge. Is he being paid off? Is that judge corrupt? We would instantly begin to question the credibility of that judge because we all inherently know that crimes must be punished. If God just let things slide, we would look at him and think, Is he corrupt? God loves justice. Psalm 111 says this:

“The Lord is righteous. He loves justice.”

Isaiah 30 says:

“The Lord is a God of justice.”

Isaiah 61 says:

“I, the Lord, love justice, and I hate iniquity.”

God loves justice. He loves doing the righteous thing. He always does the righteous thing. That is a good thing. We praise him for that. He is a good judge. The bad news, of course, is that we are the ones who deserve that righteous judgment. We are the cosmic criminals. But God makes it possible for us to be forgiven. You see, the human judge doesn’t have the ability to do something that the supernatural judge does. The supernatural judge, God, the creator of the universe, has the supernatural ability to look at those hundred criminals and to take the guilt of stain of their crimes and to remove them and to place them on someone else.

The human judge doesn’t have that ability. That mysterious thing that God does, where he takes the sins of humans and puts them on someone else. Can you imagine that judge in the courtroom who says, My son is in the courtroom today, and I’m going to take your sins and remove them from you and put them on my own son. I’m not going to let the sin slide. I’m going to cast that judgment upon him. The sin will be paid for so that you can go free. That is a remarkable offer.

“The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God, eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

 

Is Hell Forever?

The next question I’ve been asked is, Is hell forever? This has been debated in recent times. This has never been a point of contention throughout church history. But over the last few decades, there have been some arguments around whether hell is forever or is it just for some time. That’s a debate amongst Bible scholars in America and the West today. I do believe that hell is forever, and again, as unsettling as it is, I think there are a lot of verses that point to this. The clearest one to me is Revelation 14. It says this:

“The smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest day or night.”

That feels pretty clear to me. The smoke of their torment, the people who are being tormented in the lake of fire. The smoke of that torment goes up forever and ever and ever, and they have no rest day or night. The immediate follow-up question I’ve gotten is why? Why does hell need to be forever? The problem with this question, again, honestly, is that you don’t realize how big God is.

He is strong and big and glorious. His goodness is infinite, and betraying him is infinitely wicked. There’s a pastor in the Orlando area named R.C. Sproul who died a couple of years ago. Some of you may be familiar with R.C. Sproul. There’s this famous clip, it’s gone viral online, where he was at a conference a few years ago, and there was a question-and-answer panel. Someone from the audience asked, Why does hell have to be forever? Doesn’t it feel too harsh?

Someone else on the panel was going to answer, and R.C. interrupts him. He said, Wait, hold on. He looks at the crowd and he goes, What’s Wrong with you people? R.C.’s point was, don’t you understand? He says in the video, this creature from the dirt defies the living God, creator of heaven and earth, that is infinitely wicked. The person who asked the question, Why is hell forever? Isn’t that too harsh? It is a person who doesn’t understand the bigness of God.

Human beings are so wicked. We deserve everything God has to give us. Everything he can dish out. God is so awesome and so good. Our sin is so bad, it deserves that. Here’s the proper way to think about it. People will think about hell being forever and ever, and they’ll say, That seems too harsh because my sin is not that bad. That’s the wrong response. The right response would be, That seems so harsh, my sin must be really bad.

Another follow-up question I’ve gotten related to that is, if hell were forever, if I were in hell, then why isn’t Jesus still in hell? Why is it that Jesus, six hours on a cross, can pay for my sin, but I would have to pay for my sin forever and ever in hell? That’s a very good question that I’m not going to answer today. We will get to that, I promise. God willing, in February, when we’re back in the book of Hebrews and we get to Hebrews 7 and 8, we will answer that because that question deserves a sermon unto itself. It’s a good question, but I’m going to leave you hanging.

 

How Can We Be Saved?

Of course, this leads us to the last question. How can we be saved? I’ve already mentioned it. Imagine the courtroom with the criminals and the judge brings in his own son, and he removes all the crime and puts it on his son. He says, I will punish him so that you will not have to be punished. Here’s the deal God makes. Be loyal to him, follow him, love him, be genuinely committed to him. My son and I will take all of your crimes, and I will have him pay for them. Deal?

The brilliance of the cross, where sin is dealt with and sinners are reconciled. There’s no more brilliant innovation in human history. There’s no more brilliant moment in human history than the moment where sin is dealt with and sinners are reconciled at the cross.

 

Should We Talk About Hell in Evangelism?

The last question to address that I’ve been asked multiple times is, should we talk about hell in evangelism? I’ve heard people say this is a very common kind of idea or sentiment in evangelical circles today. People will say things like, We don’t want to scare people into hell or heaven. We shouldn’t talk about hell. We should just talk about how great God is, how good he is.

People should believe in God so they can experience the goodness of God. We shouldn’t tell them to believe in God just to get out of hell. We don’t want it to be fire insurance. This is a very popular sentiment over the last few years that I’ve seen, particularly on Twitter. People say these things on Twitter regularly, and I think to myself, you know better than Jesus, apparently. Talking about hell is not a scare tactic. It’s a Jesus tactic. Jesus did it.

Now, certainly, we want to do both. We want people to see the glory of God, the beauty of Christ, and to treasure him. We want people to love God and to put their faith in him because of how wonderful he is. Yes, because he is glorious and worthy of our trust and faith. Simultaneously, we want to make very clear to people the consequences that are set against them. That they were born into a world that is about ready to experience the full wrath of God, and that will be their trajectory if you do not put their faith in Christ and Christ alone.

We absolutely want both of those, not one or the other. They are not mutually exclusive. So those are the questions I’ve been asked. Why would we ever talk about hell? What is hell like? Is hell the absence of the presence of God? Is hell self-inflicted? Why do humans deserve to go to hell? Is hell forever? Why can’t God just let sin go? And should we use hell in evangelism? Those are all the questions. Of course, I proposed one question that I didn’t answer. Why is Jesus not in hell right now? I promise, Lord willing, we’ll get to that in a few weeks.

 

Closing: What Do We Do With This Information?

Lastly, this morning I want to propose a question. That is, what do we do with this information? Now that we know the wrath of God and this place is described as a lake of fire, what do we do with it? Well, there are two things we do with it. If you are here this morning and you are not a Christian, if you have said, I have not put my faith in Christ Jesus alone. I’m not all in on Jesus. I’m not genuinely following him with all my heart. I don’t genuinely love him with all of my heart. If. If that is you, if you are not a believer, not a follower of Christ this morning, I challenge you, I implore you, put your trust and faith in Christ this morning. Be loyal to him. Genuinely choose to follow him. Paul says this in Romans, chapter 10:

“If you declare with your mouth Jesus is Lord and you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

If you confess with your mouth, you declare, yes, he is Lord, and you genuinely believe in your heart that he rose from the dead. If that is you, then you are saved. If this morning, you are not a believer, I would implore you to put your faith in Christ this morning. If you want to talk about what that means, I’d love to have a conversation with you after the service.

The second thing is this: What do we do with this this morning? If you’re a believer, which many of us in the room this morning are, I implore you, I exhort you, tell others about the mercy of God. Think about the people that you know who are not Christians. Friends, family, loved ones, neighbors, colleagues, people that you know that don’t understand the gospel, have not believed the gospel, or have rejected Christ.

I want you to think about some names right now. Let those pictures of their faces come to your mind. Those people are on a trajectory to face unbelievable horrors. It’s on us to speak up. It’s on us to talk to them, to pray for them, to challenge them, to warn them. Ezekiel, chapter 3, verse 18. The prophet Ezekiel says this:

“If you give the wicked no warning in order to save his life, that wicked person shall die in his iniquity, but his blood shall be on your hands.”

He says, if you give no warning to those that you know are condemned, their blood’s on your hands. That is a very unsettling idea. I do not want to leave this life with the blood of people’s souls on my hands, because I didn’t warn them.

We close this morning with a quote from Charles Spurgeon, one of my favorite preachers. Charles Spurgeon said this: “If sinners be damned if they’re going to go there, Let not one go there unwarned and unprayed for.” If someone’s going to go to hell, let’s make sure they’ve been warned and let’s make sure they’ve been prayed for. Let not one go there unwarned and unprayed for. Would you pray with me this morning?

God, we thank you for your word that gives us teachings that, even though they may feel uncomfortable, give us insight into your character, your holiness, your greatness, your infinite goodness, your justice. God, I’m so thankful that you’re a God of justice, and I’m so thankful that you made a way for our sins to be paid for, to be justly dealt with. Jesus, you didn’t have to save us.

God, you weren’t required, you weren’t under any obligation to rescue us, but you chose to do it because you love us. Because you love us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Lord, we know that our sins while they are many. Your grace is even more. Your mercy is even more. That while we are great sinners, you are an even greater Savior.

We thank you. I pray this morning that we would be unsettled by the reality of judgment. But more than that, we would be inspired, and we would sense the exhortations from the prophet Ezekiel to go and warn others. May we, as Charles Spurgeon said, may we not allow any one of our friends and family members to go there unwarned and unprayed for. God, forgive us for not praying for our unsaved family members and friends the way we should. Forgive us, God.

I pray that you would give us the grace to do that. May we today sense the urgency to pray daily for our unsaved family members and friends, and neighbors. May we see the personal responsibility of those who are in our lives, those whom you have put in our lives. May we sense the urgency to share the truth, the goodness of God, and the reality of judgment. May we share both of those.

I pray you would use your people as we share the truth with those who do not know you. I pray that you would use our mouths to soften the hearts, to bring people into the faith. Would you use these people who love you to bring others into the fold? I pray all these things in Christ’s Name.

Amen.

 

Communion

Now we come to communion as we do each week. Every single week, we pause and take communion to remember Christ. To remember what Christ has done this morning for us. To pause and think, I deserve the judgment, but the son of the judge took on the guilt and stain of my crimes so that I could enjoy the goodness of the judge forever and ever and ever. We pause this morning to remember that.

If you’re here with us for the first time, we’ll tell you we have two options. We’re going to pass some baskets for communion. We’ve got two options here. Both have gluten-free, unleavened bread. There’s a little cup here. It’s got regular juice in it. There’s a little mini chalice. The mini chalice has real wine in it. So juice and wine. When the basket comes, grab whichever one you prefer, hold it, and then I’ll come up and I’ll lead us together through communion.

If you are here this morning, you are a follower of Jesus. If that’s you, we would invite you to participate with us this morning in communion. If you are here this morning, you’re not a believer. I’m so glad you’re here. I’d love to talk to you after the service. But I would ask that when the basket comes, just let it pass. Communion is for believers only. When the basket passes, don’t let the moment pass.

In this moment, if you are not a believer, I implore you, look to Christ. Instead of taking communion with us this morning, take Christ instead. For those of us who are believers, let us partake in communion and remember the mercy of our God, who sent his Son to die in our place. To rescue us from the judgment we otherwise would righteously deserve. Let’s remember Jesus together.