I read a news article the other day that said over 50% of society believes in a heaven, but less than 40% believe in a hell. There is a discrepancy in those numbers because everyone wants to go someplace good, and we all recognize that heaven is a good place. Likewise, we do not want to go any place bad, so we have a tendency to deny bad places exist. That seems to give us a measured, but false, peace about eternity.
And if we think we are all going to heaven anyway, then it makes it easier to deny the Christhood of Jesus. But in reality, is that the best way to think? Not if we are concerned about our eternal future, which every one of us should be.
Today, we expect our churches to be a place of refuge, comfort, and even a place where we don’t have to do anything but enjoy the temporary escape from the outside world. And I will agree, that it should be those things – to a degree.
But where I draw the line is when the congregations expect the pastor to give nice, easy listening sermons that don’t really do anything to enhance a person’s walk with Christ, as long as they are sermons we can feel good listening to. But is that the kind of message Jesus wants us to give? I don’t think so.
Now, we don’t need to always be pounding the drum of hellfire and brimstone, but we do need to give you the true and unabated word of God so that you can have the proper information to make proper decisions about your eternal future. And telling you how to handle anxiety in your workplace or on the golf course doesn’t do the trick.
Always telling you how much God wants to bless you doesn’t do it. But those messages along with messages that tell you about how to avoid sin in your life and explaining to you what the consequences of keeping sin in your life does help you have a more Godly walk – if you listen and make application to it in your life.
The father and his young son were driving home from the library one night, and the boy saw some spotlights moving about the clouds. He asked his father what they were and what they were used for.
The father told him that they were like very large flashlights, and the reason people used them was to get people’s attention. ‘They are like signs saying, ‘Come over here and see what we have!’
The father continued, ‘That is how the devil tempts people to sin. He gets their attention and they go over to see what he has, and most people end up taking it.’ When they got home, the little boy told his mom they had seen the devils signs and for her to never go near them!
Today, I’d like to talk about how the prophets of old were given specific messages from God to give to certain groups of people. Those messages were always aimed at ungodly people who needed to know what the future held in store for them.
Jonah was called by God to give a message to the people of Nineveh. He didn’t what to go, so he ran from God, hoping God would forget about him. Well, we all know God didn’t forget him but God did pursue him. To keep him from running even further, he was swallowed by a big fish and kept in the fish’s stomach for three days and was eventually expelled from the fish’s mouth on a shore near the city he was supposed to go to in the first place.
Even though Jonah started off with the wrong heart, he did go tell the city to repent or suffer God’s wrath. And God led the king and all of the citizens of that city to repent and receive the Lord God.
We don’t see Jonah giving any light and fluffy sermon here. We don’t see him trying to please the people. We see him giving the message God gave him to give. And because he gave that message, the entire city was saved.
And in every case we read about from the Old Testament, the prophets did the same. They didn’t try to tell people how to handle the anxieties of the day; the prophets didn’t put on performances or entertainment shows; they preached the unabated word of God and warned people of their sin and the consequences of that sin.
So today, I want to talk to you about something I believe God has put on my heart, and that is the subject of hell. The first thing we should know for a fact is:
1. HELL IS VERY REAL
Let me make a definitive statement here. More people will go to hell for eternity than will go to heaven. And that includes people who go to church all the time. It might even be the person sitting next to you this morning, or one of the people involved in a ministry within a church. If serving God through true worship is not the top priority in a person’s life, their future will probably be in hell.
And many will be totally surprised. They will have spent their lives in church, but their time in church will have ended up being spent doing nothing but just going through the motions unless they have a proper heart for God; a heart that worships Jesus Christ above all else and a heart that yearns to be closer to Him each day than the day before.
We only have two options of having a first priority: God and His desires for us, or ourselves and the desires we have for ourselves. What we must decide is which one means more to us.
God wants to be loved and praised, not just in words but also in every action, thought, and feeling we experience in life. He wants us to have a determined focus on our need and reliance upon Him. And we always want to focus on what we are doing, what we want, or where we are going.
Did you know that your becoming a Christian is not an accident? It is not something that just automatically happened either. Somebody was actively praying for you, and somebody actually reached out to you. Maybe they invited you to church with them, or maybe they tried to explain Jesus to you. Maybe you just saw how peaceful they were in their life and that drew you to the Lord. But very few times do people just wake up suddenly some morning with a desire to become saved. Somebody cared for you before you were saved.
Hell is an absolute reality. But the reality of hell has been watered down terribly by our society, almost to the point to where many people do not believe in it, or are not afraid to go there.
We have all heard the jokes people tell about hell: How we will shovel coal for eternity into the furnace for eternity. Or about some salesman who finally got the contract to sell air conditioners in hell. But when reality hits and people go to hell, they will quickly find there is no humor at all to be found.
I remember when Willie Nelson had a birthday special on TV. Aero Smith’s lead singer, Steven Tyler, said, ‘Happy birthday, Willie! Here’s hoping we have twice as much fun in hell as we’ve had up trying to get there!’
Adam Sandler made a movie a few years ago called, ‘Little Nikki.’ In that movie, he played the stupid and innocent son of Satan. People watched it and laughed. If they had only read their Bibles, they would have been weeping. Hell is a place of gnashing teeth and eternal torment, not a place of giggles and games.
Our society has tried to water down hell to where it is no longer a place we must run in fear from, but a place where we can go and have fun and laugh with others.
JUDE, verses 4 reads:
‘For certain men, whose condemnation was written about long ago, have secretly slipped in among you. They are godless men, who change the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus as Lord.’
Jude was the brother of Jesus. He wrote a letter to the church, warning them that false teachers had slipped in among them and their whole intent was to deny the deity of Jesus as the Son of God. He also told them that these false teachers were teaching them to lead sinful lives.
In JUDE, verse 5-7, he gave a prophetic warning to the church. He said that God would punish and destroy these teachers, just as he had punished sinners in he Old Testament.
‘Though you already know all this, I remind you that the Lord delivered his people out of Egypt, but later destroyed those who did not believe. And the angels who did not keep their positions of authority, but abandoned their own home – God has kept these angels in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great Day.’
And in JUDE, verse 15, he said the Lord and all His angels are coming:
‘To judge everyone and to convict all the ungodly of their ungodly acts, and all the harsh words the ungodly have spoken against Him.’
No matter what you might hear from others, hell is no joke, nor is it a joking matter. Hell is as real as heaven, but it is also as bad as it gets. Have you ever been so scared and so full of panic and torment that you actually gnawed your teeth together? You will experience that if you don’t live a Godly life.
So, why is hell such a well-kept secret in our society? Jude told us about men who have slipped into our churches to spread a false teaching. Did you know that some of the professors in our seminaries and bible colleges do not believe in Jesus as being the Christ?
Were you aware that there are some leaders of large denominations who espouse the view that things like the virgin birth, the resurrection, and the ascension into heaven are all ‘parables’, or stories that are not true but that are made up ‘to make a point?’
Here is an excerpt from the Los Angeles Times, printed on June 19, 2002. It quotes some of the mainstream religious leaders of the day and what they say about the popularity of hell in our current society.
··· Karl Barth: ‘Bible verses about hell are only threats from God to keep us from arriving at our destiny.’
··· Nels Ferre: ‘In the end, love will replace all the evil.’
··· Emil Brunner: ‘The punishment is only temporary.’
What does this mean to us? It means that for the last generation or so, the subject of hell has been watered down so much that it seems like a fictitious story rather than a very real fact. And now, it is no longer a deterrent to living an ungodly life, and God has ended up becoming nothing more than a God of convenience. A God we call on when we want Him to do something for us. Of course that makes Him our servant rather than our being His servant.
Hell is real and it is a place none of us want to end up. But the only, and let me repeat this; the only way to keep from going there is to believe in Jesus as the only Savior of mankind, and to live a life that is in compliance with His teachings.
There are many Bible passages that attest to the reality of hell, but to me, the most compelling reason of all to believe in hell is because Jesus taught about it.
In REVELATION 20:10, Jesus refers to hell when He says,
‘And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented there day and night, forever and ever.’
Why would Jesus talk about something that didn’t exist? The answer is simple: He wouldn’t.
Since the dawn of mankind, we have treated our fellow man with viciousness. Man has invented some of the worst possible tortures to use upon our brothers. But even the worst of these do not compare in any way to the eternal tortures hell provides.
It is a place of loneliness. You will not be visiting long lost friends in hell. It is a place of absolute darkness. You will fully understand all things about God in hell, but it will be too late to change your eternity. You will be stuck in a place that is dark, with no light whatsoever, for eternity.
Hell is a place without the love of God. In MATTHEW 25:41, we are told that on Judgment Day, those who have been judged guilty and are on Jesus’ left will be told, ‘Depart from me, you who are accursed into the eternal fire.’
LUKE 16:25, tells us that hell is a place of memory. We will remember every single time God begged us to follow Him, and we will also remember every single time we rejected God.
It is a place where you might remember a small child climbing into your lap and asking you to tell him about Jesus, and you will remember when you tried to ignore that and say you were too busy, or too tired.
It is a place of fire. In MATTHEW 13:40 Jesus tells us that those weeds that are in God’s kingdom will be “pulled up and burned in the fire”, at the end of time. Those weeds are the false teachers and ungodly men who have infiltrated the church.
I am not trying to be overly graphic here, and I don’t want anyone to be afraid to live this precious and wonderful life that God has given us. But I do want to make sure every one of you know, without any doubts, that hell is real and if we don’t live for God, we will spend our eternity there. We need to always be thinking about our personal relationship with the Lord. Always.
I pray that all of us are really saved; that Jesus is truly our Lord and Master. That when we die, we shall all go to heaven, to live with and to worship our Lord for eternity. Why do I want that so badly?
Because:
2. HEAVEN IS THE OPPOSITE OF HELL
Some people may wonder if there really is a heaven. I know there is a heaven because of the following reasons.
I believe there is a heaven because everyone, even non-believers want to go there. Whatever culture you stumble across, in whatever time period of history, you will find some sort of belief in the afterlife.
I don’t believe God would plant in the soul a universal longing like that without making some provision to fulfill it.
It’s like when the little boy was flying his kite and it got so high he couldn’t see it anymore. Someone asked him where it was and he pointed up to the sky. They asked him how he knew it was there if he couldn’t see it and he said, ‘I know it is there because I can feel it tugging at me.’
We know there is a heaven because we feel a similar tug in our souls. We have an instinctive craving to be in such a wonderful place.
I believe there is a heaven because Jesus said there is. And I would always rather take His word for it than believe those of this world who don’t know Him.
For the next few moments, I want to talk about Heaven, and why each of us should want to go there.
We have all heard the jokes about heaven, too. Like the one that says a woman died and went to heaven where she met St. Peter at the gate. He told her that she had to pass a test before she could go through the gate.
He then told her to spell the word ‘cat.’ She said, ‘C-A-T.’ He said she passed and let her in. A couple months went by and St. Peter asked her if she could take over the gate for a few minutes while he went to tell God something. She agreed.
While she was there, her husband died on earth and appeared before her. Remembering that their marriage wasn’t very happy, and that he was not a nice man to her, she told him that before he could go in, he would have to pass a test.
Then she told him to spell ‘antidisestablishment.’
In spite of all you’ve heard, there are no entrance exams to get into heaven. Your ability to enter heaven depends on only one thing: Whether or not you lived your life for Jesus on this earth. If you did, you will enter heaven for eternity. And,
3. HEAVEN WILL BE WAITING FOR YOU
There will be no lack of fruit from the tree of life; no lack of water flowing through that wonderful city; and there will be no construction signs. Heaven has been prepared for us since the beginning of the world. It is there today, waiting for our arrival. And what we will see when we get there will be much nicer than anything our minds can comprehend now.
In JOHN 14:3, Jesus Himself gives us a promise.
‘And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to it, so you will be with me.’
There is a true story of a little 5-year old boy. He was in the hospital and he was dying. His mother spent most of every day with him, cradling him in her lap and softly telling him the old, old story of Jesus.
As the days passed, that little boy started slipping away faster. His mother told him that God has already made each of us homes in heaven, and they are waiting for us to live in them. She also said that when things got really hard for him, if he would listen quietly, he would be able to hear the doorbell of his home ringing.
One day, as the mother held her very weak son, he whispered to her that he could hear somebody ringing his doorbell in heaven. He said he couldn’t wait to see who it was. He said maybe it was God, thinking he was already there.
Within minutes, the little one slipped away. The mother later said that it was the most bittersweet moment in her life. On one hand, she had just lost her little boy. On the other hand, she knew he was still talking about his heavenly home when he went.
When God calls us home, there will be no last minute rush to find us a place to dwell, because our mansion has already been prepared.
I have been many places in this world, and each place I have been to has its own special kind of beauty. The stark bareness of the deserts with the occasional lonely Saguaro Cactus standing tall against a backdrop of the colorful setting sun.
The snow topped mountains in the Colorado horizons. The beautiful fields of Oklahoma with its wild grass gently blowing in the wind, to the lush grass and trees in the southeastern part of this nation.
God loves beauty or He wouldn’t have put so much of it in this world. Who painted the butterfly’s wing with all those amazing colors and designs? From whose palette did the colors come from that gave the rose its radiant beauty? The answer is God Almighty. And He did it to give us a place of awe and wonder to live.
A little girl was taking an evening walk with her father. She looked up at the stars and exclaimed; ‘If this wrong side of heaven is so beautiful, Daddy, how pretty is the right side of heaven going to be?’
There are going to be two things in heaven that will make us perfectly happy. The first is the total lack of evil. And the second is the abundance of good. The one prevents us from feeling any more sorrow, and the other brings us the perfect fulfillment of joy.
Debbie’s mother, Dottie, will never again have difficulty breathing once she walks through heaven’s door. Don will never have to worry about whether any cancer will come back on him. There will be no sickness, no sadness, and no tears for any reason. It will be our place of restoration and peace.
D. L. Moody explained heaven this way:
‘It is a city that knows no pain of any kind. There is no darkness as the Lamb of God is the Light. The Paradise of Eden was nothing compared with heaven. The tempter stole his way into Eden and caused depravity. But nothing vile will ever enter into heaven.
‘Think of a city that is not built with hands, but with the only form of perfect love, where the buildings do not grow old with time, but more beautiful with each passing day.’
Just as hell is real, so is heaven. It is a definite place. And it has been prepared just for us. It is not ‘pie in the sky’ as some would tell you, but a place of real life.
It will be a place of reunion. Not so much with others we knew here, but a reunion with our Lord and Savior. A place where we have finally been drawn back to the Father – who has always loved us.
Heaven will be a place you will want to go. But to get there, you must live like you want to go there, and that is only by living for Jesus Christ. Heaven is ready for you; but the question remains: Are you ready for heaven?
INVITATION
