Hellfire and Brimstone

Do you remember a popular TV game Show called "Let's Make a Deal?"

On that show contestants were asked to choose between three different doors.  Some doors would have luxurious prizes behind them while others would have something humorously worthless.

But, you would have to make a choice, and usually you would not have a chance to change your mind once the door is opened.

In real life, we have two doors to choose from.  Two doors to choose from when leaving this life for eternity, and once we leave this life through one of the two doors, we will never again be able to change our choice. Unlike the game show, we are told ahead of time which door leads to heaven and which door leads to hell.

Also unlike the game show, we all make the choice that leads to hell but, if we are fortunate, we will have a brief moment in life to change our decision.

But, will you do it?

Many people try to strike a deal with God.  They want to live selfishly and sinfully.  They want to be the rulers of their lives.  God created them for a higher purpose, and God called them to trust in Him.  Yet they hope to live in sin as long as possible indulging their lust, pride, cowardice, greed and such, and if they ever think to talk about right and wrong, it is only because it can be used for selfish reasons to get what they want or avoid what they don't want.

Perhaps it is a mistake to use the word, "they".  It would be more honest and accurate to use the word, "we". 

The Bible says we all like sheep have gone astray each to his own way and that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But, the hope of many people is to put off trusting Jesus for salvation until they can do it on their own terms.  They want to live in sin and selfishness that leads to hell and then switch over and "repent" at the very last minute. 

Most people in hell never expected to go there.  In fact, I would guess it might be impossible to intend to go to hell.  Hell is just too horrible of a place.  It would be like having the ability to hold a soldiering iron or a torch to one's own underarm or being able to gouge one's own eyes out slowly with one's own fingers.  It would take intense training to be able to harm oneself that way because God has not designed us to do that to ourselves intentionally. But, we can lock ourselves in and put ourselves under the control of Satan and others who would bring harm to us later against our will.

But, some people wonder why a loving God would ever send someone to hell.  Those who ask this question do not really have a clue how things really work.  God doesn't send us to hell against our will.  He gives us freedom to choose this day who we will live for.  We choose who we will accept as our lord and king, who will rule over us.  And, those who perish into hell do so willingly and for good reason. 

God gave us freedom to choose.  We already made our choice, and we chose hell.  We did.  Every one of us chose hell.  We chose hell the very first moment we gave ourselves over to obey the temptations of sin.  We did it the minute we chose to refuse God as our Lord and chose to obey the demands of our flesh instead.

Not only that, but God came to earth in the flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, as one of us, to prove to us sin is unnecessary and to live in total obedience to God the Father proving it can be done.  He didn't cheat.  He didn't give himself special abilities we were not allowed to have.  We cannot accuse Jesus Christ of taking advantage of special abilities and excuse our guilt by reasoning we were merely unable.  He just made the choice to live sinlessly, and we didn't.

Then having lived a perfectly sinless life, Jesus was the only one qualified to die on the cross to pay for our sins and give us a chance to change our mind about which door we will go through as we leave this life.

Which door will you choose?  Your freedom to choose heaven has been bought at a great price in great love for you.  Yet God will not force you to choose the door to heaven.  Jesus is that door.  You can love Him or you can express your greatest hate for God by letting Jesus die on the cross in vain for you and making the decision that you would rather go to hell than to trust Him and receive Him as your Lord and Savior.

But, salvation will cost you something.  It will cost you everything. 

Whatever it is that sits on the throne of your life and gets your faith and obedience away from Jesus Christ must be denounced and renounced.  It is the lord of your life and it must be dethroned to make room for Jesus to take His place on the throne of lordship over your heart.

If there is only one thing in your life that you hold higher than Jesus Christ, if there is only one thing in your life that can get your trust and obedience away from Jesus Christ, then that thing is your lord, and you can be certain that it sits just outside the door to hell in your life pulling hard at your soul to drag you into hell.

The lines must be cut.  The rulership of sin must be ended over your life.  Every moment of life in which you keep those lines attached to your heart and soul is a moment in life where the devil may at once give that line a jerk and bring you through the door at the end of your life and your decision will be made final for all eternity.

Where will you spend eternity?

Here's a little test:

Who or what is the Lord of your life?

When it comes to trust and obedience, who or what get's your trust?

When you are given a choice whether to trust and obey Jesus or not, is there anything that typically derails you and gets your obedience away from Christ and serves as your Lord?

A little white lie can take a person to hell.

There are times we want to repent of a sin but cannot bring ourselves to do it. The cost is too great. We want to say, "Sorry", but we cannot let go of the benefit of that sin, or we feel we cannot.

Perhaps we hope for a better time. Correcting a lie may cost too much and of we postpone it until later, getting ourselves into heaven won't cost us so much. We're torn.

Perhaps we try to make up for our sins by doing good deeds in hopes that so many good deeds will make up for the little bad deeds. Maybe God will understand and be loving and kind and forgiving and patient.

Yet, we're still not at peace. Peace eludes us continuously. We want to be good enough but we can't and we feel that admitting this will somehow give us forgiveness and restoration in God's eyes somehow.

We preach. We minister. We help people. We give sacrificially. We sell ourselves wholeheartedly to every benevolent concern that comes our way and we're driven by guilt the moment someone calls for help. Whether the call is legitimate or not, we feel compelled and obligated to help, but we're still only trying to kill the cries of our conscience that won't go away. So we think, and everyone else thinks, that we must be very good people to have such a sensitive conscience.

But, the lie is still there. Uncorrected. Festering. Bothering us.

The lie may be adultery. It may be a use of pornography or a secret lust, an internet affair, an emotional affair. It could be a theft or a swindle that went unnoticed, something shameful, and you feel tormented inside fearing if the sin were revealed it would bring so much shame that you would lose face among your loved ones, your friends, that you would lose trust and your standing in society.

You may feel fear of incarceration for what you had done and you may feel the only reason you are on the outside of a prison instead of inside it is that you have held this secret and kept a lie for so long.

 A man commits adultery and lies to his wife. Finally the affair is found out. He divorces and remarries to make himself obligated to stay in his second marriage. The first wife waits in pain, praying, crying to God. In another part of town, the first husband of the other woman suffers similarly. Society smiles on the couple. The sin was done, and supposedly repented of, and yet the first husband and the first wife suffer and pray.  The children turn cold and distant and rebellious.

The new couple have stolen from the original spouses and their children.

The attorneys destroyed the families of little children for money.

The judges have lied and operated unconstitutionally financially incented to favor the unfaithful. 

Yet they argue vehemently they have done nothing wrong.

But, the innocent suffer and the pain remains as guilt is disguised, excused, justified, denied, swept under the carpet. The calls of the conscience persist through the nights and days. The Holy Spirit calls out to repent and is grieved away, and the conscience gets quieter and quieter.

Then life ends.

An account is required by God.

An account is given. Every excuse and justification becomes an even greater sin accusing God of lying or being unwise.  The sinner has nowhere to turn.

Next, those who defended this sinner will give an account.

Why was the sinner coddled and comforted into hell? Why was this called "loving"?

Then come those who did nothing to oppose this sin. They were busy doing other more important things. Like watching TV. Like watching R rated movies. Like hitting the slots in Vegas. Little sins. Nothing anyone would consider worthy of hell.

Just because they gave more to Satan than to the church or spent more time paying others to sin so they can watch.  Refusing to help feed the hungry or clothe the naked or help the sick could not be all that bad, as long as it isn't us who are the ones suffering.

And what harm could it do to allow people to go to hell for lack of prayer, lack of love, lack of sharing, lack of concern? Psalm 119:11 says, "Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee".

Who is our Lord anyway?  Sin?  Pride?  Lust?  Greed?  Cowardice?  If you want to know, just look at what you trust and obey.  Can anything get your trust and obedience away from Jesus Christ?  Rest assurred, that's your lord if so.

We need to dethrone every other lord over our lives and make room in our hearts for Jesus to reign and rule in our lives as Lord and Savior. We need God's grace to overcome sin. We need to let go of our sins, to turn from them.  Turn against them.  War against those sins.  Denounce them, renounce them, to refuse to justify them, refuse to make excuses.

We need to lay those sins out before God honestly and accept and admit they were seriously wrong and worthy of hell. Our sins were an injustice and an offense to our most loving and holy God. They were unkind to God. They denounced His rightful authority. Our sins took the blessings of God and turned them into vehicles for evil.

Our sins are not "rights", and we're liars if we call them such.  Our sins are wrongs, and every time we defended them we were lying to God and to mankind. So, the punishment of hell is well deserved by every one of us.

But, God's desire was not to create a human race just to send that whole race into hell forever. He created us for love, for fellowship, for family and friendship. Amazingly, knowing full well He would have to come down to earth and die for us, God created us in His image giving us freedom to love and freedom to hate, freedom to sin and freedom to live unselfishly and benevolently.

Yet we all chose sin just as Adam and Eve did. God's righteousness and integrity demand infinite punishment for infinite sin. It's the right thing to do. But, rather than have us all be lost, He came down to die on the cross and pay the price for our sins.

If we will turn from our sins, repent of them and receive Jesus as our Lord an Savior, we can receive His salvation freely.

We don't have to earn it or pay for our sins or make up for our wrongs. We couldn't if we tried. He deserves absolute sinlessness from us, total trust, and total obedience. Offering God anything less would be like offering someone dog dung for lunch or worse.  We always either surrender to God our all, or we merely surrender our refuse and try to convince Him it's good enough.  If you were asked to drink a glass of water that was 99% pure water and 1% urine, you would be quickly convinced that a heart that is 99% pure is 100% impure as well.

Unfortunately we cannot be better than perfect, so if we fall short, there is no room to make up for our sins.  We need God's forgiveness through faith in Jesus Christ.  We need Christ's sacrifice on the cross to pay for our sins.  We need God's grace to take us out from being possessed or owned by our sins, to give us our freedom to serve God.

 Jesus is Lord factually, but not everybody receives Him as Lord and Savior. Not everyone trusts and obeys Him from the heart. At the moment judgment comes and some are told to depart into the place created for the devil and his angels, they will obey, but not by choice. Those who love their sins will cling to them until they perish into hell. Those who let go of their sins and refuse to have them in their lives any longer will come into heaven clean by the grace of God received through faith in Jesus Christ.

How about you?  At this time and at every moment of your life you are choosing who your Lord is.  Is it the flesh, or is it Jesus Christ?  When we choose to follow Christ, God will bring up every thing that had owned us before and ask if we would give that up, too, and we will choose.  Some things may be found to be sitting on the throne of lordship over our lives, and Jesus will then ask us if we will continue to allow it to be our Lord or whether we will give it up and make room for Jesus to rule.

At this time is Jesus your Lord?  If this were the very moment for you to take leave of this world and stand before Jesus in heaven, were the devil to rail against you for all your sins and demand the right to take you off to hell, would Jesus be able to step in honestly and say, "Hold it…this person belongs to me"?