Thursday, November 13, 2014

Thoughts About a Tough Message

I write this blog with a heavy heart. For the next two Sundays we will be doing a short series called, “What is Next?” The series is a brief look at heaven and hell.  This Sunday we will start with hell.  I just finished my notes for Sunday, and I can say this message has been one of the more difficult messages I have ever prepared. In preparing I read some words of a theologian, Sinclair B. Ferguson that perhaps set some of the tone for my heart and mind. He wrote, “To speak of hell is to speak of things so overwhelming that it cannot be done with ease. . . . The contemplation of hell prostrated holy humanity. Our Lord never spoke of it with relish.”[i]  In light of my inner turmoil you might be wondering why we are doing this series or at least this message. Perhaps these words written by Timothy Keller express it best: “If Jesus, the Lord of Love and Author of Grace spoke about hell more often, and in a more vivid, blood-curdling manner than anyone else, it must be a crucial truth.”[ii]

I believe the wisest attitudes and actions to hold in life are attitudes and actions that align with the Lord Jesus. Hell is not an easy subject, but it is a subject that the Lord Jesus spoke about. It is something that He took seriously. That should lead us to also take it seriously. In the fall of 1939, C. S. Lewis preached a sermon, “Learning in War-Time” in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford, England. Early in the message he said concerning the Lord Jesus and our attitude to hell, “I know, too, that nearly all the references to this subject in the New Testament come from a single source. But then that source is Our Lord Himself. . . . They are not really removable from the teaching of Christ or of His Church. If we do not believe them, our presence in this church is great tomfoolery. If we do, we must sometime overcome our spiritual prudery and mention them.”[iii] Please pray for our time together on Sunday, please come on Sunday expecting for the Lord Jesus to speak to us through His Word about a tough subject.



[i] Sinclair B. Ferguson, “Pastoral Theology: The Preacher and Hell,” in Hell Under Fire, ed. Christopher W. Morgan and Robert A. Peterson (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 220.
[iii] The text of this message can be accessed by a Googling “C. S. Lewis Learning in wartime”

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