The Pilgrim Path---Mark 9: 45

“And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life lame than with two feet to be thrown into hell.”

HEAVEN OR HELL?

You do not really have to be embarrassed by the doctrine of hell. The LORD Jesus taught about it because he did not want people to fall prey to its everlasting terrors. It is a real place. The passage before us stresses the reality of dealing with sin in such a serious fashion that we do whatever is necessary in our personal walk to handle it---we are rigorous (we don’t actually chop off limbs---but we take sin and its consequences that fiercely: we struggle against the world, the flesh, and the devil). J. C. Ryle used to say that the most loving thing he could do was to tell you about the Gospel---and seek to turn you to Jesus in trusting faith---so you would not “go” to hell. He felt he had to tell you about this “place” of everlasting torment and woe. The late Baptist Preacher in Los Angeles, Dr. E. V. Hill, used to preach a sermon entitled, “You Can Go to Hell.” Rather catchy don’t you think? His point was, “You do not have to do anything other than you have been doing---just ignore God and His Holy Son Jesus. Continue to live in sin and for Sin---and You--- can go to hell. It is that simple!” So many people around us do not understand this---they need by the grace of God--- to begin to understand it.

Here is part of a sermon extract from the Rev. James M’Cready---powerfully used of God in a sweeping revival where thousands were converted in 1799-1800, in Logan County, Kentucky. This sermon was entitled, “A Guide to Hell.” His hearers were brought through a portion of Matthew chapter 7---and then asked, “Are you on your way to hell---here is some direction---IF that is the destination you prefer”----

Live as prayer-less as a beast. If you feel any impressions to pray, resist them; use every means to avoid prayer, and to silence conscience; make a jest of it, laugh at it, and make fun of all those who perform this duty. Go to every frolic, frequent vain company, sing, fiddle, and dance, obtain for yourselves all the devil, the world, and sin can give you. Get drunk, boast that you are a clever fellow, curse swear, and be as profane as your hellish nature will admit of, and there is no danger that you will fail of attaining destruction. Give a loose rein to mirth and jesting; ridicule divine and eternal things; and if you find it necessary to raise the laugh, tell a few ingenious lies. Use every effort to acquire riches, upon any terms. In horse trading, land-jobbing, and all other kinds of trade, take every advantage in your power; deviate from the truth; extol any property you wish to sell fifty times beyond its value; tell what an extravagant prices you have been offered for it, by such and such respectable and intelligent men, and never miss a good bargain for want of a solid, substantial lie. When you meet a poor man in distress, who is simple and ignorant, cheat him; and if conscience checks you; remember your bundle of excuses for sin. This man had the making of one-half the bargain; his eyes were open, and he would have cheated me if he had been as smart a fellow; and now-a-days it is every man for himself. Such reason as this will ease the qualms of conscience and give you essential assistance in the road to hell. Indulge in pride and vanity; look down with disdain upon all around you; treat all as your inferiors, and esteem yourself some great and good body; leave religion to the vulgar (unrefined)---your mind is too noble to be taken up with such trivial matters. Indulge anger, malice, and revenge, upon all occasions. Be cross and contrary as possible; delight to keep up disturbance in your neighborhood; make your family unhappy. If you receive the smallest affront, resent it---rage like a devil, curse and blaspheme, seize the fellow by the throat and knock him down. Cherish all manner of deceit; make every man believe you love him and respect him, when in his company; but when behind his back, laugh at his weakness, expose his faults, and tell a thousand lies to exaggerate them; backbite him, and endeavor secretly to ruin his character; and if he be without fault, throw out some dark, suspicious hints, that they may make men suppose that you have found him guilty of some horrible act of wickedness; when in his company, make every profession of friendship towards him, until you have possessed yourself of all his mind, and slyly let his secrets out into the world; and when he places full confidence in you, and suffers you to get his property into your power, swindle him out of his whole fortune. But, to curse and blaspheme the name of God, is, of all exercises on the broad road, the most rational that the sinner can be engaged in. This declaration may surprise you. Can it be rational to blaspheme God’s holy name? If you intend to remove to a strange country, it would be very proper to learn the language of its inhabitants; and so, as you intend to spend eternity on hell, it is fit and necessary that you should learn the dialect of the damned; for there is nothing like the disposition of the devil, that betrays so much of the temper of the fiends of the infernal pit, as this. In a word, if you intend to choose the broad road to hell, live in sin, follow every imagination of your wicked heart, despise reproof, stifle your convictions, murder conscience, resist every motion of God’s Holy Spirit, made through the red tide of a Redeemer’s blood, and press onward, regardless of God or man.”

Romans 6:23 “For the wages of sin is death, but the FREE GIFT of God is ETERNAL LIFE in Christ Jesus our LORD.”

HYMN

Just as I am, thou wilt receive,

Wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve;

Because Thy promise I Believe,

O Lamb of God, I come.

Charlotte Elliott, 1836

Grace and Peace in Jesus Christ Our Risen LORD, Pastor Jason