Truth Is, You Have A Choice

Truth is, You Have a Choice

It is an honor to be called on to pastor and lead this church in this community. Whiting Community Church, also known as The Baptist Meeting House, the Whiting Meeting House, and the Old White Meeting House, has a rich history of culture and spiritual influence. After the town of Whiting was founded, the first cooperative project that the towns’ people attempted was to build this building so that they would have a place to worship God. There has only been a hand full of years throughout the 200-year-old history of this church that the doors were not open. For the majority of the time there has been someone behind this pulpit proclaiming truth.

Truth. What is it? Some say that there is no such thing. Some say that truth differs for different people. That it depends on how you were raised or what country you grew up in. They say it depends on what religion you were taught as a child. Truth is what I want to talk to you about this morning. As the pastor of this church, my main job is to tell the truth from this pulpit.

The Truth is that God loves this town very much. But more importantly, He loves you. He loves me. John 3:16 says that “For God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten Son, that whosever believeth in Him, should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Did you know that is one of the reasons that God created you? So that He could love you and that you would love Him.

The Truth is however, that because of the sin that Adam committed in the garden of Eden, we have a thing called a sin nature. This sin nature makes us not want to love God, but it makes us love ourselves instead. That is what sin is. Sin is loving yourself more than you love God. That is why we do things that are outside of the laws of God. That is why there is murder, and rape, and theft, liars and every other evil in the world. Because people love themselves more than they love God and his Guidelines for life.

The Bible says in Romans 3:23 that every single person in the world is a sinner. That means that everyone here this morning is a sinner. We have all sinned.

The truth is, God cannot be in the presence of sin. God is Holy, He is perfect, He is pure. Trying to have God and sin reside in the same place is like trying to have darkness stay in a room when you turn on your 120 watt light. Light and darkness cannot dwell together and neither can God dwell with a sinner. Because of this, as sinners, when we die we are useless to God. What do you do with worthless stuff? You throw it away. You take trash and put in the garbage. Here in the past two weeks, the members of this church have been on a cleaning spree. They have gathered up nearly 2000 lbs of garbage and useless items, broken items and taken them to the place where you dispose of garbage. The dump, the refuse pit.

You see, the Bible tells us in Romans 6:32 that the price of sin is death. There are two kinds of death. There is a physical death and a spiritual death. Unless the rapture occurs we will all experience a physical death. The Bible says that we all have been given an appointment with death. We do not know when that is, but God has assigned us a check out date.

Spiritual death is something very different. Spiritual death put simply is an eternity without God. You see in God’s eyes, when we are filled with sin we are of no use to Him. We cannot be in His presence. Therefore he cannot use us in His Kingdom. The only place He can put us after we die is the place that he prepared for Satan. Hell is a garbage pit. It is the Spiritual dump. A place where God puts those who have rejected Him, people who have placed themselves more important than God, people who live their life according to their plan instead of God’s plan.

The Truth is that the price of having sin in one’s life is spiritual death and an eternity in Hell. The Truth is Hell is a real place. It is not fake, it is not imagined, it is not a story or a fable, or a fairytale. The fire is hot and the worms squirm and the darkness is DARK. It is a real place that God created to punish Satan and the angels that rebelled against him that we know today as demons.