Let God decide whether you have already had enough proof or not. Your demand for proof appears nothing but a meaningless endless loop and an insincere waste of time. If you would protect yourself and your family and friends from hell, you should ask for proof that there is no hell, especially if there is evidence that a just God would be morally obligated to find you guilty and send you into hell for all eternity just as He would be required to do for any of us given we have all chosen to thwart God’s authority with our sin, given we have all selfishly considered the lusts of our flesh and our own personal fears and we have all chosen to turn against the greatest good of God and the universe to gain a momentary comfort for ourselves.
Why should anyone labor and cry and pray and work to find proofs to save a person who won’t be saved, a person who reviles against God, who rails against the Word of God, who fights to turn people against God? What right does such a person have to demand love and respect and concern and commitment? What right do people like you have to come to preachers and demand we burn up all our energy and time and resources trying to save you when there are countless others who would fight and pray to know how they might be saved or how they might save their children or their parents or their siblings or their friends or their loved ones?
Who knows whether burning up this time fighting for your soul will not cost a million others their souls? And you sit there demanding proof. “Prove to me God is worth respecting. Prove to me that the blood of Jesus Christ was really shed for my sins. Prove to me there is a hell, that justice is real, that a loving God can sacrifice an unrepentant sinner for the good of the universe, and that justice may demand it.” “I won’t seek it, and I’ll throw all your proofs in the trash, but come and waste your time on me once more. I’ll perish with the countless fools before me who were wise in their eyes in their mockery and I will join the throng of broken hammers before the anvil of the Word of God destroyed just like them, but prove it to me. Entertain me. Make me smile.”
Oh, but my how unchristian it is of me to say such things. Shouldn’t the love of God be more kind and respectful rather than censorious? If I’m going to spend time praying and writing these words, I don’t want them to be forgotten. If you perish into hell, I don’t want you to have a reason to complain you were not warned sufficiently. But neither will I let you run the course of what I say. I’m not here to be the brunt of your very predictable jokes that atheists have been using for years. I’m not interested in debates. I don’t care whether you mock. I don’t care what things you throw up as excuses to reject God. You will stand before God and you won’t stop Him from making His judgment about you or anyone else. And either you will be ready or you will not.
And right now, there is enough to be concerned about within the church. There is enough hardness of spirit and hardness of heart and soul within the church to send more people to hell than every atheist in the world combined. Have we come to the place where sin has so filled our churches that we can fight to the death in defense of sin against a God we pretend to worship? We have pedophiles in the pulpit, and how can we say it is any wonder when we have hypocrites in the pews fighting to protect everything that promotes pedophilia? Yes. I’m talking to the Christian here. How many Christians fight harder to bring people into heaven than into hell? Few. Precious few. We blather on about social this and that and fight over whether Christians should be Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives, Calvinists or Arminiasts, premillennialists or amillennialists or panmillennialists. When old Christians show new Christians the ropes or help them become “mature”, we teach them to stop being so sincere, so honest, so adverse to sin, and we teach them to be the child of hell and hypocrisy that we have become. We become the very demonic birds that snatch the seed from the hardened soil and we won’t obey God and break up the fallow ground. We cry, “Judge not! Judge not!” In our arrogance we feign humility as if to boast and brag of our humility as we insult the great work of God in creating us rather than taking responsibility for our betrayal of God with any kind of integrity or backbone. We defend our socially acceptable sins as our love for sin causes us to press our church for social acceptance for the sins we love while we judge with bitter unforgiveness those who merely offend God. After all, so we think, God won’t be concerned about the “little sin” that merely hurts God’s feelings and denounces His authority over us and over the universe.
I want to be careful because in reality, the Church of God is nothing like this. Jesus is returning for a spotless Bride, not the whore of Babylon with the name “church” plastered on the front sign. If we are the church of Laodicea, we will be proud and defensive of our sins claiming to be rich, claiming to be in need of nothing, but God will find us so repulsive He will vomit us right out of his mouth.
So, within the church we have fools who will not accept the searching of God who will not endure the light of scripture who will fight to make sure the Bride of Christ has no right to live anywhere let alone in the midst of their church. They will throw pastors out onto the street and seek entertainment, coolness, even if they have to get a whoremonger into the pew to do it. But will God search this world and find people willing to pray? Willing to weep and agonize? Willing to surrender all to Christ? Would it ever be possible for people to fear taking communion unworthy? Would we ever see the time when the church will sing, “I Surrender All” and people would abstain for fear of being taken out as were Ananias and Sapphira for lying to God?”
If you want proof there is a God, it won’t happen until there is faith in the church, and that means faith in God and not in all the frilly phony excitements of the moment. Faith is the evidence of things unseen–not feeble attempts at intelligent arguments. Faith is the substance of things hoped for. It’s what salvation is made of. It is what everything that pleases God is made of for without faith nobody can please God. But, will God find faith among us? Or excuses, lies, and defenses of sin?
“Oh, please don’t judge!” How about judging God unworthy of love, respect, courage, integrity, and faithfulness? How about judging God unworthy of faith and obedience? Can you stop judging God that way? Are you so fierce in your defense of sin that you cannot give it up for the love of God? Would you turn the blood of Christ into a sacrifice for a license for sin? Would you turn God into a lover of sin rather than a lover of man? Would you kiss the very gun that assinates the souls of those Jesus died to save? Would you thwart the purpose and sacrifice of Christ given the chance?
Would you love sin more than you love Christ? Would you?
If so, you are probably an ordinary christian in an ordinary church today. And if not, you are on Satan’s hit list, and you had better pray for protection for you and others like you because only the faithful are among those Satan cares about in the least. The rest are none of his concern. They’re going to hell and that’s where Satan wants them. They are the proverbial fool who has said in his heart there is no God, if you will notice the Bible did not say the fool hath said in his mouth there is no God.
But, if we would love God with sincerity, or if we would love man with sincerity, if we would love our children with sincerity, if we would love our nation and our society and our church with sincerity, we must dispense with sin, reject sin, and this repentence from sin is no trite rattling off of a sinner’s prayer with all eyes closed and heads bowed. It is an agonizing event. We take up our sins and ask God to bring memory to us about each one as we ask ourselves whether we love that sin more than we love God and whether we would give up that sin or hold to it if that meant giving up Jesus.
And if there be one sin, any sin that we would cherish too much to surrender to Christ, then we can know with absolute certainty that if we have any Christianity at all within us, it is a patronizing, insulting lie to God and has nothing to do with saving faith in the shed blood of Jesus Christ for the love of our souls an for payment for our sin. Jesus comes with the ransom for our souls purchased with His own precious blood, and we stand there saying, “No Jesus, I would not have you as my Lord because I love my sin so much more than you that I would never give it up for you even with your blood shed for my freedom from this sin. I would have this sin to be my lord, to possess me, to own me to rule over me to require obedience from me and I will not obey you, Jesus even if I have to perish into hell for ever to be apart from you and together with my sin.”
So, today, at this time, at this moment without going one step further in any direction, will you make a decision whether to follow hard after Christ or follow hard after sin?
You cannot love both God and sin. You cannot pursue Mammon and God. You must choose one or the other. Will you patronize God and pretend to follow God and lie to Him in hopes of bluffing Him and swindling some bit of heaven from Him while living for your sin? Will you hope He will not notice? His tears will fall, and with tears He will say, “Depart from me”. Can you be satisfied with that? Will you be satisfied to go back to “christianity as usual”? Will you let the people in your church perish sheltering them from ever hearing the hard words of this message? Will you? Will you let your family perish unwarned? Or will you give your life and your prayer and your effort to have them truly saved?
Where will you stand? At this time, God sees where you stand. He knows your words and He knows your life and your heart. What does God see at this time? Does heaven weep for your soul? Does heaven rejoice and encourage you on? Will you go expecting God to come into league with you as you defend sin or as you call yourself first to give it up and labor to give it up and plea for God’s grace, forgiveness, and salvation so you can be free from sin and have the right to minister?
As you leave the reading of this message where will the trajectory of your life lead? Toward God or toward hypocrisy? You cannot have both. Will you seek Him with all your heart, mind, soul, everything within you and everything you are?
Earlier this morning I came to wonder if the best test for the coldness of the lost spirit might be what burning teaching a person can hear without being moved to change. I fear greatly this is the greatest danger that can ever exist in the entire universe and that most people sleep right through that danger every day of their lives.
Will you? Will I? I cannot bear to accept this as inevitable. We must fight to keep that from happening. But, will you? Will I? We must or be lost forever with our loved ones.
