I take full responsibility for
my going to hell or heaven. Some people when they wake up
in hell will be devastated. We need to tell people that every
unforgiven sin, every sin committed by every person who rejects Jesus
Christ will be justly punished by God forever in a place called
hell. Just before I came down here,
I'm late today because I was in the makeup room arguing with
somebody who was telling me how all gay people are going to hell
and now I'm going to hell with all the other gay people for
doing the show. I take full responsibility for
my going to hell or heaven. Let me put it this way. If you
reject Christ, then the moment you take your first step through
the gates of hell, the only thing you will hear is all of creation
standing to its feet and applauding and praising God because God
has rid the earth of you. Hello everyone, this is John
Henry with the Gospel of Christ and welcome back to a new video.
If this is your first time on the channel, I invite you to
subscribe and click the bell button to be notified each time
we upload a new video. So let's get right to it. you In the Bible it clearly states
that Homosexuality is wrong and I feel that you are a powerful
woman and you have done so much and if you are going to represent
Represent yourself as a Christian and then you're gonna go on the
show and say that you also support that it's it's double-standard
Well, I have a different view of Christian than you do Okay
And the God I serve, the God I serve doesn't care whether
you're tall or short or whether you were born black or Asian
or gay. And so that's just a difference
of belief. And I don't expect to change
your belief today because I have, just before I came down here,
I'm late today because I was in the makeup room arguing with
somebody who was telling me how all gay people are going to hell
and now I'm going to hell. with all the other gay people
for doing the show. I take full responsibility for
my going to hell or heaven. Some people when they wake up
in hell will be devastated. And they won't find enough water
in their eyes to satisfy their need to weep They'll be sobbing. Oh no! Not here! Oh God, please have
mercy upon me. Be the greatest disappointment
they could possibly experience to wake up in hell. But then
the other group will be there, won't be weeping a bit. They'll be gnashing their teeth.
Which is a biblical metaphor. for human fury. How dare you,
God, put me here? The anger of the damned will
know no bounds. Now, as I said, I sure don't
want to end up in hell. But one thing I know for sure,
that if I do, if I've deceived myself all these years, and if
I'm one who says, well, Lord, Lord, didn't I do this and didn't
I do that? And He looks at me and says,
please leave, I don't know you. And He sends me to hell. One thing I can promise you,
that I'll be a weeper, not a gnasher. Because if I know anything about
theology, I know that if He sent me to hell tonight, I could make
no just complaint against Him. I've been guilty of treason, cosmic treason. Every time I
have sinned, I have asserted my will over the will of my Creator. I have declared that I am sovereign, not the Lord God. I've worked
against His kingdom, not for it. I've sinned against the holy
and infinitely righteous being who owes me nothing. And if I wake up in hell, I will
realize I have only received what my life has merited. Not cruelty, not injustice, but
perfect justice. There are those who claim to
be preachers who don't ever talk about hell, wouldn't talk about
hell, avoid it at all costs, when the truth of the matter
is it ought to be the first thing that we talk about when we talk
about the gospel. This is about salvation from
hell. The doctrine of hell, the truth
of hell, the reality of hell has found its way into the thinking
of our culture. According to the latest survey
that I could find, 75% of people living in America believe in
hell. They believe there's a hell.
That's the influence of Christianity, 75%. Of those 75%, 4% believe there is any chance that
they will ever go there. So we've gotten our point across.
There is a hell. But we haven't gotten the point
across that you're headed there already. That's the issue. We live in a world where sin
is freely exploited. Sin is so much a part of our
culture that every imaginable sin is acceptable except pedophilia,
that's the last sin left. And you watch the outrage, at
least in the athletic world, if not in the Roman Catholic
Church, over the sin of pedophilia. You don't find that outrage over
adultery. We don't find that outrage over homosexuality, don't
find that outrage over lying, cheating, stealing, etc. Murder is still unacceptable
unless the person doesn't deserve to live. Murder of a child is
still an outrage. But we're very used to sinning.
and we're very comfortable with sin, and consequently society
has very few consequences that it places on people for sin.
So when people grow up in a world where things that once were defined
as sin are no longer defined as sin and behaviors have no
consequence in the society where, for example, when Junior comes
home at the age of 12 and announces to his mother that he's a homosexual,
she becomes a homosexual advocate. Absolutely no consequences to
that kind of immoral behavior. There's a warped sense of good
and evil and a distorted understanding of justice. We don't know what
sin is, except sin can never be what I do. It can be, however,
if what I do harms someone else, that would be sin. But any act
that I do, in and of itself, I'm free to do and there shouldn't
be any consequences at all. And the truth of the matter is
then, if the culture imposes no consequences and the family
imposes no consequences, the society places no stigma on people
for the kind of behaviors that are sinful behaviors. People
get so used to sinning without consequences that when you introduce
the idea that they will pay in full forever for every sin, that
is just alien to their thinking. people sin without immediate
consequences, and to try to convince them that there are somehow down
the road, decades from now if they live, deferred consequences
is a hard sell. For example, you might want to
try to convince someone of Romans 2 which says, that you are storing
up for yourself wrath in the day of wrath and the revelation
of the righteous judgment of God. You're not getting away
with anything. No act of fornication, no act
of adultery, no sin in the mind, no sin in the behavior, no sin
with the lips, no lie, no deception, no cheating. You're not going
to get away with any of it. You're just accumulating iniquities,
all of which will be confronted and judged. You are storing up
wrath. You're going to need to have
a large storehouse to contain all the wrath that's going to
break upon your head. That is a very difficult thing
to convince people about who are so used to sinning. And at
the same time, they're so used to getting away with it. They're
not only used, can I say, to getting away with it in the culture
and in the world, but professing Christians are used to getting
away with it in the so-called church. Churches are...so-called churches
are very, very reluctant to confront sin, very reluctant to do the
discipline that the Bible talks about doing, to teach people
the consequence of sin. Parents are very reluctant to
create significant consequences for the sins of their children,
which may be the most important thing apart from the gospel that
your child ever learns. that sin has immense and painful
consequences. We need to tell people that every
unforgiven sin, every sin committed by every person who rejects Jesus
Christ will be justly punished by God forever in a place called
hell. This is not new, this is what
the Bible has said. You can go back to Moses, you
can go back to the Pentateuch, the first section of books in
the Bible. In Deuteronomy 32, 22, it reads
this way in the authorized version, a fire is kindled, says God,
in my anger and burns to the lowest part of hell. The 1611 King James Version made
it clear even that early that the anger of God reached into
hell. Our Lord's first New Testament
sermon was a sermon on hell. Jesus is a hellfire preacher. I hear people say, well I don't
want to talk about hell, it's very negative. Jesus was a hellfire
preacher. Matthew 5, His first sermon as
laid out in the New Testament, Verse 22 of chapter 5 of Matthew,
I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will
be guilty before the court and whoever says to his brother,
you good for nothing, shall be guilty before the Supreme Court
and whoever says you fool shall be guilty enough to go into the
fiery hell. Here is Jesus arriving in Jerusalem
and beginning His...the first part of His ministry, then going
up to Galilee. and finishing off his ministry
and wherever he went he was a preacher of hell. The Sermon on the Mount
happens to be given on a hillside in Galilee. He speaks of the
fiery hell as if he assumed that everybody knew about it. He doesn't
have to give them a definition or a description. It was a very
well-known part of their biblical understanding. Same sermon, verse
29, if your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw
it from you. It's better for you to lose one of the parts
of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.
Verse 30, if your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off,
throw it from you. Better to lose one part of your body than
for your whole body to go into hell. In the tenth chapter of
the book of Matthew, that very familiar verse which is often
quoted, and we'll come back to it in a little bit, Matthew 10,
28, where we read this, do not fear those who kill the body
but are unable to kill the soul, our Lord says, but fear Him who
is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. In chapter 11 He talks about
hell of Matthew, chapter 18 He talks about hell. He talks about
hell in chapter 23 several times. He says that the Pharisees are
guilty of producing sons of hell and they are sons of hell themselves. Yes, Jesus was a hellfire preacher.
When we talk about salvation, the word has to be used. The
word has to be used because we're talking about rescue. Salvation
is a word that means deliverance or rescue, and the question is
from what? Contemporary kind of corrupted
Christianity would offer many psychological and even material
substitutes for hell. We would say, well, Jesus wants
to save you from loneliness, or He wants to save you from
purposelessness, or wants to save you from anxiety, or He
wants to save you from poverty, or He wants to save you from...
failure, or He wants to save you from sickness, or He wants
to save you from disappointment. No, no, He desires to save you
from hell, from the fiery hell, the lake of fire that is eternal. The message of Scripture is that
salvation is a rescue, a rescue from a real place, called hell. Jesus spoke more about hell than
anybody else in the Bible. In fact, He spoke more about
hell than everybody else in the Bible combined. And He defined
it as conscious, eternal punishment...conscious, eternal punishment. Our Lord
Jesus believed in eternal hell. We'll talk about some of the
things that he said about it in a little bit. He continually
spoke about hell and he warned sinners to escape hell because of its horrible reality.
You see, what you need to understand, well, let me put it this way,
just to cut straight to the chase. Let me tell you the most terrifying
thing that I can possibly tell you. The most terrifying truth
that I can speak to you. Are you ready? Here it is. The most terrifying thing I can
tell a man, a woman, a child, is this. God is good. I said that a few years ago over
in Europe when I was preaching at a secular university. I said,
if you want to get down to it, the most terrifying news for
man is this, God is good. And someone kind of laughed and
said basically, and what's the problem with that? The problem
with that is you're not good. Now, what does a good God do
with someone like you? That's the greatest theological
and philosophical problem in the Scriptures. God is good and
that is terrifying. A hardened criminal working for
some crime organization, if before he goes to court he is told that
the judge is corrupt, he is full of joy. The most terrifying thing
you can tell that criminal is the judge is not corrupt, he's
good. It will fill him with terror. And see, this is the greatest
problem of mankind. The greatest problem of mankind
is God is good. Don't you see that? Because you're
not. And therein lies the problem with modern day evangelical preaching.
No one tells you who God really is. They just speak in clichés. You see, the other preachers
can tell you God is good and you walk out feeling like you're
totally released from any responsibility. I want to tell you that God is
good and you ought to be terrified because you are not good. And there's the second half of
the problem. No one's telling you what that means either. What
does it mean that you're not good? How non-good or un-good are you? Let me put it this way. If you
reject Christ, then the moment you take your first step through
the gates of hell, the only thing you will hear is all of creation
standing to its feet and applauding and praising God because God
has rid the earth of you. That's how not good you are.
You say, but my sin, I'm not that big of a sinner. Adam sinned
once and threw the entire universe into total chaos and condemnation. You do not understand who this
God is. He really is good. You're not. He really is love. You are the very opposite of
that. So how can He let evil, loveless
people into fellowship with Him. Well, why can't He simply forgive? Because He's just. You see, you
were grown up in a culture where there is no justice. There's
no pastor writing books like Lex Rex, The Law of the King.
There's no one speaking about justice biblically. You see,
God is just. And the greatest theological
problem in the Bible is this, if God is just, He cannot forgive
you. Do you hear me? If He's just, He cannot forgive
you unless first His justice is satisfied. And that is what
happened on the cross. That's why the cross is everything. It is absolutely everything on
that tree. The only servant that Yahweh
has ever had. Hung there, a perfect man. And the sins of God's people
were cast upon him. And all the wrath, God's holy
hatred for evil, for sin, for the wicked, Everything that should
fall down upon your head throughout all of eternity fell down upon
the head of God's only beloved Son. Every Easter Sunday I hear people
preach about you know, nails and spheres and crowns of thorns
and go through the medical examiners interpretation of the cross.
And all that is important. It had to be a bloody death.
But what they don't understand is they haven't preached the
gospel. You're not saved if you're saved because the Romans beat
up Jesus. If you're saved, it's because
His own Father crushed Him under the full force of His wrath.
Because someone had to pay for you. It was Him! People tell me, they say, well,
you're going to preach the gospel tonight. Yes, we understand that.
No, you don't. If Ian Murray was here right
now, if I could raise Jonathan Edwards from the dead, if Charles
Spurgeon were to walk through the door, they would not profess
to know the gospel in its fullness. And yet we've reduced the gospel
down to four spiritual laws or five things God wants you to
know and you all think you know it. You will spend an eternity studying
the gospel and you will not even have reached the foothills of
the glory of the thing. It's the gospel. God reconciling
the world to Himself. God being just and not simply
being able to turn His back or look over sin. God who must deal
with the sin of His people. He must satisfy His justice in
order to appease His wrath. And He does that by the death
of His only Son, having suffered the wrath of God. And on the
third day, rising again from the dead. And that resurrection
did not make Him the Son of God, but it was God's public declaration
of several things. First of all, this is my beloved
Son and who I am well pleased. Romans 1. Then you make your
way over to Romans 4. What does it mean? That resurrection
was God's sign that He had accepted Christ's death as atonement for
the sins of His people, whereby they could be justified. Then
Peter tells all the outraged leaders of the Jewish nation,
this resurrection from the dead proves that this Jesus whom you
crucified is both Lord and Christ. And the apostolic proclamation,
the invitation for you to come to Christ, is not, would you
like to pray this prayer and ask Jesus to come here. The apostolic
proclamation is this, God commands all men everywhere to repent
and believe the gospel. And preachers will tell me, what
if you just tell them that and you don't give them something
to do, then how will you know that they are saved? Because
their life will change. I can go to most people in every
tavern around this place tonight and some of them really good
church members. I can go there and ask them, are you saved?
And they will say yes. I can go to most Southern Baptist
colleges where the kids are beer bonging and go, are you saved? And they'll say, most certainly
we are. Why? Because one time some preacher
who should not be preaching the gospel led them in a sinner's
prayer and pronounced over them that they were converted. Dealt
with their soul possibly two or three minutes. No, my dear friend. No. You are saved by repenting of
your sins. You are saved by believing the
gospel. And the evidence that you have
repented unto salvation and that you have believed unto salvation
is that you continue repenting and continue believing.