You Don't Have To Go!!

Read Luke 16:19-31

As you can tell, my spirit feels an urgency to remind you that we are truly living in the last days. Hell has fallen on hard times. A recent George Barna survey found that 67% of Americans do not believe in hell. That means that only 33% of Americans believe in a literal hell. Couple that idea with a rapidly declining biblical knowledge and in just a few short years there will be no hell. . . . at least in the minds of Americans.
“There has been a shift in religion from focusing on what happens in the next life to asking, ‘What is the quality of this life we’re leading now?’” said Harvey Cox Jr., an author, religious historian and professor at the Harvard Divinity School. “You can go to a whole lot of churches week after week, and you’d be startled even to hear a mention of hell.”
Despite what the popular preachers and theologians of our seminaries say about hell, they forget what the greatest preacher who ever lived had to say. The Lord Jesus Christ spoke about Hell twice as much as He did about Heaven. There was only one subject that He dealt with more and that was money. Suffice it to say, if the Lord thought it important enough to speak about hell then I too am bound by that same task.
There are four things that I would like to remind you about hell today. First, hell may be in your future even if you are prospering on earth. In biblical times, people believed that if a person was blessed with wealth, power, authority, etc. in this life that he would receive even more in the next life. How mistaken the rich man was. Second, hell is a place of eternal torment and agony. One of the torments that this passage deals with is that the rich man was able to remember his whole life. Those in hell will remember all the opportunities they had to love God. They will remember every Sunday school lesson, every sermon and song, and their memory will torment them for eternity. Third, hell is a place of unanswered prayers. You think that God is not listening sometimes in your present day; He will be even more silent in those days.
The fourth thing that I want you to know about hell is that you DO NOT HAVE TO GO. One day, when Vice President Calvin Coolidge was presiding over the Senate, one Senator angrily told another to go "straight to hell". The offended Senator complained to Coolidge as presiding officer, and Mr. Coolidge looked up from the book he had been leafing through while listening to the debate and wittily replied. "I’ve been looking through the rule book," he said. "You don’t have to go."
The same is true for everyone in this room today. You do not have to go to Hell. The rich man realizes that his fate is sealed but he also realizes that his brother’s, who are still alive, do not "have to come to this place of torment." He desires to warn them so that they will repent, which means acknowledge wrongdoing, listen to God and go in a different direction with God’s help. He understands that if a person will turn form his sinful ways and be baptized and filled with the Holy Ghost, evidenced by speaking in an unknown language they will not go to Hell.
I apologize for the length of this devotion today, but I do not apologize for its content. My prayer is that everyone that reads this today will find a place where everything is right between you and God so that we can rejoice together when we see Him face to face.

“It’s time we give hell a heaven of a day!”
- Stan Gleason