A Life Ablaze by Rick Renner

Author:Rick Renner
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781680314243
Publisher: Harrison House Publishers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

HELL IS A REAL PLACE

One very real problem is that many Christians today don’t really believe in hell. Oh, sure, if you ask most Christians if they believe in hell, they will invariably answer, “Yes, of course, I believe in hell. The Bible teaches it.” But if you examine their actions, it will lead you to the conclusion that they don’t truly believe that their unsaved family members, friends, and acquaintances who haven’t been born again are going to hell. If they did, wouldn’t it affect them so deeply that they would at least do everything within their power to try to stop them from going there?

If a Christian really believes in hell but does nothing to tell unsaved people he or she encounters in life about the saving power of Jesus to keep them from going there, what does this lack of action say about that Christian? It says that the revelation of the reality of hell is still missing from his or her life.

If believers truly believed in hell, the mere thought of a friend, relative, coworker, or acquaintance going there would motivate them to do something to prevent those individuals from that eternal fate. This is why it’s so imperative that the doctrine of hell be taught and preached from the pulpit. A revelation of hell puts a fire in believers’ hearts to pray for the salvation of the unsaved and to ask God for opportunities to share the Gospel with them.

William Booth, Methodist preacher and founder of the Salvation Army, said, “Most Christian ministries would like to send their recruits to Bible college for five years. I would like to send our recruits to hell for five minutes. That would do more than anything else to prepare them for a lifetime of compassionate ministry.”63 J. Hudson Taylor, the great missionary to China, said, “Would that God would make hell so real to us that we cannot rest…”64

People would rather talk about Heaven than hell because thoughts about Heaven are much more pleasant to contemplate. But Jesus was so convinced of the need to convey hell’s reality to the people that He spoke about it in the four gospels three times more than He spoke about Heaven! And His apostles, after learning about hell from Jesus, passed on this painful truth to others as the Church was being established. As a result, the doctrine of hell is one of the central tenets of the earliest creeds of the Church.

Jesus taught so plainly about hell that this became a driving force motivating early Christians to reach others with the life-changing message of the Gospel. Their belief in hell was deeply embedded in their hearts because Christ Himself planted it there. And as a result of Jesus’ profound and revelatory teaching on hell, the early believers embraced a responsibility to “go” with the Gospel to rescue the unsaved — to do all they could to keep them from passing into eternity in a lost state. They burned passionately with the desire to see people saved.

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