If You Think It's Hot Here...

It seems like everywhere  I go, I talk about the heat.

Even when I don't even want to, I talk about it. And if I'm not talking about it, someone else is. And soon I'm joining in.

This heat is so bad, the television news just told me that 30 people have died from it this summer.

But as miserable as it is, I've seen worse.

I used to work in an aluminum foundry. On hot summers any part of that foundry was miserable.

Heat from the mold line would fill the entire building. Even with all the doors open it was about 10 degrees hotter than outside.

To combat the heat, the company would provide us with huge coolers of iced Gatorade, and we would guzzle it with determined intensity every single break. We must have used hundreds of paper cups in a single day.

On one especially hot summer (not so hot as this one) a very snide, critical, self-assured man looked at me across the finish line and said, "If it's this hot in hell, I'm gonna start going to Sunday school!"

Bad idea.

I only had this one chance to speak to this very un-Christian man, and I took it.

I said, "Actually, hell is more like the inside of that furnace over there."

Silence. I could tell my words had hit their mark.

Because this man knew who I was and who I stood for--Jesus Christ.

Many people now don't believe hell is a real place. They think it's a myth, something invented by some ugly, sour old monk in the Middle Ages.

Actually, God came up with it. Yes, our loving God!

Jesus said that on the great day of judgment, he will tell some, "Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels." (Matthew 25:40, emphasis mine).

Hell wasn't even prepared for people! It was prepared by God to punish Satan and those angels who followed him into evil. These spiritual beings had complete knowledge of God and his incredible love, yet they still rebelled--and dragged many people down with them.

Hell is not just for murderers. Hell is for everyone who follows Satan into rejecting, dismissing and laughing at Jesus Christ.

God doesn't want us to go to hell. He sent Jesus to save us from hell.

When Jesus willingly went to a cross to take God's anger over sin, God's anger was finished! God proved it by raising Jesus from the dead.

Since that time, anyone, no matter how evil they have been, can come to Jesus for mercy and instantly receive eternal life. Jesus said in John 3:16-18, "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, so that whoever believes in him shall not perish [in hell], but have eternal life. For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son" (emphasis mine).

Jesus is the Way God provided to save us from the evil we have done. Apart from Jesus, there is no way to avoid the punishment we all deserve--hell.

When I think of this summer's oppressive heat, I can't help thinking that there is a far worse place. And every single Christian needs to make every effort to warn people against going there.

We need to take this seriously. Because Jesus did.