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“In fact, 15 percent of everything Christ said relates to this topic (money and possessions) – more than His teachings on heaven and hell combined. Why did Jesus put such an emphasis on money and possessions? Because there’s a fundamental connection between our spiritual lives and how we think about and handle money. We may try to divorce our faith and our finances, but God sees them as inseparable.”
- Randy Alcorn in The Treasure Principle (2001, p.8)
C. S. Lewis said: "to love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one. Wrap it around carefully with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket of your selfishness. But in that casket -- safe, dark, motionless, airless -- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable .... The only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers of love is .... Hell."
Charles H. Spurgeon in training young ministers said to his students, "When you talk about heaven let your face light up with a heavenly glory. When you tell about hell, your everyday face will do.
Bill Bright, just months before he died in July 2003: "Even though I’ve always believed in heaven and hell, after I became a believer, I gave little thought to it. But in recent months I’ve been writing on heaven and hell. My logic is this: The God whom we worship created at least 100 billion galaxies—some astronomers would say 200 billion. Do we give God credit? They say it was the Big Bang. But it was this great Creator God who made all this majesty and glory.
You can imagine, then, what he’s done to create a heaven? "Eyes have not seen, ...
CT STUDD: wealthy, nationally famous athlete put it all aside to disappear into the mission field: China, India, and then Africa. Lost from sight for 13 yrs without contact. WHY? ’Some people love to dwell near church with choir and steeple bell. But I want to run a rescue station a yard from the gates of hell.’
PATRONIZING NONSENSE
Christian author C.S. Lewis said it best in his book Mere Christianity:
"I am trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about Him being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
SOURCE: C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, pp. 55-56
Heaven is close enough for souls in torment to glimpse; far enough away for them to forever miss what could have been theirs.
Based on Luke 16:19-31
HARD TIMES FOR HELL
Hell, it would seem, has fallen on rather lean times. It used to be that the vast majority of Christians, regardless of denominational affiliation, believed that Hell was a real place where the wicked and the impenitent go when they died. The very thought of the pains and torments of Hell was enough to scare sinners straight. It used to be that ministers of the Gospel would preach on the horrors of Hell to persuade reprobates to repentance. But not anymore. Most American mainline and so-called Evangelical churches stopped preaching about Hell years ago. Most mainline ministers stopped believing in Hell years before that. Hell made people uncomfortable. Hell was too “old-fashioned.” The topic of Hell was bad for the bottom line—attendance and income. Hell damaged people’s self-esteem. Hell has been retained in our modern lexicon as a convenient curse word, and as a metaphoric ...
Many people believe that traditional church music is vastly superior to the contemporary church music being written today. But the date on which a song was written does not insure it’s worth either theologically or musically. Milburn Price, a Church Music professor, gave the following example in an article he wrote called, "Tensions in Church Music":
"The bells of Hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling
For you, but not for me.
The blessed angels sing-a-ling-a-ling
Through all eternity.
"O death, where is they sting-a-ling-a-ling?
O grave, thy victory?
No ting-a-ling-a-ling, no sting-a-ling-a-ling,
But sing-a-ling-a-ling for me!"
This was a hymn sung by the church in early America. But clearly it doesn’t measure up to the great hymns of the faith written at that time. My point, just because something is old doesn’t make it good!
"Pride, the idolatrous worship of self, is the national religion of hell."
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