CHRIST IS BORN
Remember why we celebrate this night. Happy birthday Jesus.
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Love Wins?
A man named Rob Bell wrote a book called Love Wins. It's still relatively recent and also happens to relate very well to a number of the critics that have been commenting on this blog recently. Here's an excerpt from his book.
"A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better... It’s been clearly communicated to many that this belief is a central truth of the Christian faith and to reject it is, in essence, to reject Jesus... This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’s message of love, peace, forgiveness, and joy that our world desperately needs to hear."
I'm going to tell this to you as gently as I can.
I believe that Rob Bell is wrong, and is leading a great deal of people away from Christ.
People concentrate on the LOVE of Christ and the LOVE of God and how "no benevolent God could send people to Hell". The most overlooked truth of Christianity is this:
Every single human on this planet that has ever been or will ever be (except for Jesus) deserves to go to Hell.
Every single one of us deserves eternal punishment.
Not a ONE of us is "entitled" to eternal happiness and forgiveness. Nobody "deserves" Heaven.
Every. Single. Person. Sins.
God is generous enough to forgive every single one of us for the comparatively easy accomplishment of accepting him as Lord, and doing our best to live for Him. That we are forgiven and allowed into His presence is through no special quality of ours, but rather is a mark of the mercy of God.
I am a Christian. I accept God. I love God. And I deserve to go to Hell.
That's the plain truth. The fact that I believe I am not going to go to Hell has nothing to do with me. It only is because of the mercy of Him.
Trust me... I understand WHY Bell's message appeals to everyone. It appeals to so many people because it is what so many people want to hear. Christians and non-Christians alike would all love to believe that everybody gets into Heaven. But the truth is, that's not Biblical. In fact, the Bible disputes Bell's claims in multiple places.
For those that struggle on this topic, I recommend Francis Chan's book Erasing Hell. Good stuff. Here's a video by good old Mr. Chan.
"A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better... It’s been clearly communicated to many that this belief is a central truth of the Christian faith and to reject it is, in essence, to reject Jesus... This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’s message of love, peace, forgiveness, and joy that our world desperately needs to hear."
I'm going to tell this to you as gently as I can.
I believe that Rob Bell is wrong, and is leading a great deal of people away from Christ.
People concentrate on the LOVE of Christ and the LOVE of God and how "no benevolent God could send people to Hell". The most overlooked truth of Christianity is this:
Every single human on this planet that has ever been or will ever be (except for Jesus) deserves to go to Hell.
Every single one of us deserves eternal punishment.
Not a ONE of us is "entitled" to eternal happiness and forgiveness. Nobody "deserves" Heaven.
Every. Single. Person. Sins.
God is generous enough to forgive every single one of us for the comparatively easy accomplishment of accepting him as Lord, and doing our best to live for Him. That we are forgiven and allowed into His presence is through no special quality of ours, but rather is a mark of the mercy of God.
I am a Christian. I accept God. I love God. And I deserve to go to Hell.
That's the plain truth. The fact that I believe I am not going to go to Hell has nothing to do with me. It only is because of the mercy of Him.
Trust me... I understand WHY Bell's message appeals to everyone. It appeals to so many people because it is what so many people want to hear. Christians and non-Christians alike would all love to believe that everybody gets into Heaven. But the truth is, that's not Biblical. In fact, the Bible disputes Bell's claims in multiple places.
For those that struggle on this topic, I recommend Francis Chan's book Erasing Hell. Good stuff. Here's a video by good old Mr. Chan.
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