We've been in a sermon series, a message series, for, well, the past four weeks on what is God's plan for humanity? And simply put, God wants that everyone should be saved. He's done everything he can to make that happen. The rest is on us. And that part is just simply to receive that, to walk in, that he not only moved heaven and earth, he came down from heaven to earth to die for us.

I mentioned last week at the start of the message that I wanted to make sure that before I got into, made it too complicated, that I said something really simple. When you receive Jesus Christ as your savior, his past, his holy and righteous past, his sinless past, becomes yours. It gets put on your name or on your account. Amen. His past becomes your past.

His future becomes your future. Now, I stole that from a preacher who's a lot smarter than me. And that's why I don't mind mentioning it. You know, like, some of you that know me are like, man, where'd you come up with that? It's so simple that it's brilliant.

You know, it's like, I didn't come up with it. I heard it and I stole it. But the neat thing was that pastor also talks about stuff he steals from other pastors. So I guess as long as you cite it, it's been a long time since college, but as long as you cite your sources, you know. So anyway.

But the thing is, the past that we have so many times that we wish wasn't in our past, the things that we wish we could not remember anymore could get rid of. God offers us that by giving us the record of Jesus Christ. His holy sinless life is what God looks at when he sees us. So when we think of questions of eternity, of heaven and hell, which we will be looking at today, when we think of that, what we're looking at is, is understanding that God is not looking at our record and looking at all those sins of the past, but he's at least, if we say, if he says, why should I let you into heaven? You'll say, well, it has nothing to do with me, but everything to do with Christ, and he's my savior.

And he looks at the record of Jesus Christ and says, okay, you're in. Amen for that. Last week, I cut out on the fly. I cut out a couple parts of this, and I've got my little clicker here just because I don't want Amy to have to, like, try to follow my ramblings. So a couple scriptures that I think are really important that we didn't cover last week, but I really wanted you to see these.

First of all, in one Timothy two four, we see that it says, God, our savior, desires that all people would be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. If that's the case, God isn't willing that anyone should perish. Right? And in fact, he also says this. Jesus says this of his own father in heaven, who is our heavenly Father, Matthew 18.

He says, your father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish. The willingness of God is that no one would perish. However, God won't overstep the bounds of his righteous holiness that he has set forth. God is a God of justice. And even though he's not willing that anyone should perish, some will because they don't receive Jesus Christ and the free gift of salvation.

But God says in the Old Testament, through the prophets, not just to stick here in the New Testament, we see this throughout scripture. It's one overarching story of God reaching out to humanity. And through the prophet Ezekiel, speaking in some really hard times, God says these words, do I have any pleasure in the death of the wicked? Declares the Lord God, and not rather that the wicked would turn from their evil ways and live. You see, God isn't enjoying the destruction of the wicked.

I think I made a joke recently about, you know, when you see somebody just weaving through traffic and just taking, taking up, you know, just doing dangerous things, and you're thinking, boy, I wish they'd just kind of wrap it around the next light pole and leave us all safe, you know, safer because of that. That's not the way God is. And I confess that I shouldn't think that way. And God says, you know, God says, I don't take pleasure in their demise. I want them to live.

God wants us to live. God demonstrated this, his love for us. He demonstrated this, that while we were still sinners. In other words, before we ever knew that we needed salvation, before we ever knew what the hope was that was offered to us, this is how God demonstrated his love for us. He sent his son Christ to die for us.

Now, Christ, we see, is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, for our sins, for what was owed. Because of that debt of sin that sin had created, there was a payment that was owed, and Christ satisfied that on our behalf. It was the same way of redeeming someone from a life of slavery or servitude. It was redemption that bought them out of that, and that's what Christ did. On our behalf was free, freed us from the slavery to sin.

And not just for those who already knew Christ, or not just for the jewish people who this was written to, but also, he says, for the sins of the whole world. You see, God's family comes from every country, nation, tribe, tongue and language and ethnicity. And God's family in the church should represent that. And God's heavenly dwelling represents that. And so we ought to reflect that here on this earth.

Amen. And that results in this, that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. Amen. PAul said this when he was talking to a group of pagans that would worship just about every idol they could find. He says, in the past, God overlooked this ignorance.

God would overlook the ignorance that people had as they worshipped idols. But now he calls everyone to repent, everyone from everywhere. So today, today we have the conclusion of this series of what God's will for humanity is. We've looked at a few different things as far as what he initially had as his will for humanity, as he created them in the garden of Eden. We looked at what God's will was for the JEwiSh people that were born from the seed of ABRAhAM and what he wanted them to do, to be a holy nation, a treasured possession of God, and a kingdom of priests whose role was to present Christ or present the salvation of God to the entire world.

When they failed at that job, revocation over time, in the fullness of time, God sent his son Jesus, so that Jesus Christ would perfectly fulfill what Israel had failed to fulfill. So he is the perfect manifestation of everything God wanted out of his chosen people. And Jesus Christ is the one that not only lived it perfectly, preached it perfectly, and walked it perfectly, but he died so that his perfect life could be the propitiation for our sins, could be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. But God's grace is also a very just grace in the sense that you still have to follow one rule to get in. You have to receive the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

The atoning sacrifice has to be applied to you. And if you don't do that, Jesus will one day say, I never knew you. So today we look at heaven and hell, and we look at what that means and what some of the things to do with that are. Now, I'll tell you this. I've read more books, listen to more messages and podcasts concerning this one topic or sermon than perhaps almost any other sermon I preach.

And it leaves me both nervous because there's still so many unanswered questions I have. And I guess that's the big thing about it, is I want to be able to stand before you and lay it all out and say, here, it's clear, understand it. I hope that the work that I've done in studying scripture will help to, to put all of your questions to rest, that you'll have answers for them. One, I can't do that in one sermon. Two, I don't have all those answers.

The more I study, the more I listen, the more I learn, the more I read, the more questions we have. But I want to start with a couple things. Hell. Sometimes we wonder why. Why does it even exist?

What is the purpose of hell? Hell is God's righteous way to deal with Satan and his demons. The scriptures tell us this, and we'll look at that in a little bit, and then later, let's say, almost as an afterthought, because we'll see that hell wasn't created for people. Hell was created for Satan and his demons, but that God allows those to go there who wish not to be with God. It's his righteous way of dealing with Satan and his demons.

But then heaven is God's righteous way of, of rewarding those who have walked and received Christ's salvation. Did you know that right now when we're sitting here, if you think, if you just close your eyes and you think about the world, you can think about that as broadly as you want or shrink it down to the world we see around us in our community. Just think of all of the good things and all of the bad things. Think of all of the things that are being debated in our country, in the government levels, in the United nations, in places in the Middle east, whatever it might be. You think of all the things that we need in our community.

There's people every day that sleep on the streets. There's people that are struggling to even find enough food to eat, whatever it might be. We think of all those things, and you think of the condition of this world, and we think it's bad. And yet we also think of the things that are good. I mean, if you get focused only on the bad, you'll forget that there's so much good that's going on in this world, and there's so many good things that God has given to us and made for us.

But when we think about all that, this moment right now, right here on this earth, in this moment, this is the closest thing to heaven that some people will ever find. In other words, the people who find themselves in eternal damnation this is the closest to heaven they will have ever experienced, is right here on this earth. Conversely, there are some who, as they are, as they are walking this earth, and as bad as it seems for some of us, as dark as we see the things around us, praise God that this is the closest thing to hell that we will ever see, because God has a beautiful future in heaven for us.

I got a couple answers to the questions that you haven't asked me yet, but you might want to ask clarify one thing real quick. You don't have a soul. What I mean is this. You are a soul who has a body. When your body dies, your soul continues on.

And so this thing, when we do a memorial service, a funeral, we talk about the earthly remains of this mortal flesh. Our flesh may die, but we never die. And so we talk about things. I've counseled people when they're thinking about end of life, and they say, well, what about cremation? I don't want to destroy my body.

And I want to say, bible says that's going to happen anyway. After you die from dust, you came, to dust, you return. I'm not like, my worst subject was chemistry, so I can't tell you any of this stuff. I'm not even sure how a microwave works. But anyway, the thing is, when our body dies, it's not going to be really much of a useful thing very much longer.

Jesus raised Lazarus from the tomb after he'd been dead four days, and they were worried about how much the decomposition had already taken place. And they said, sir, he stinketh. To use the King James Bible. It was, you know, it was great. They were worried already that he was decomposing so much that his body was just gnarly.

And he says, look, I can do anything. I'm not relying on that, in other words. But God doesn't need our body to be intact. You know, if cremation is the way you want to go, praise God, that's easier and saves money. You know, if you have some other objection to it, that's fine, but God isn't going to need this body in order for you to experience heaven, okay?

See, he can give you. He will give you a new body. And there were christians in the early years, in the early church that had questions about this, and they would write to guys like the apostle Paul and say, okay, what about our body? You know, like, some of us have been killed, tortured, beheaded, harmed. Some of us have been put through the flames.

What about them? Are they going to be missing out? Are they just going to look really deformed in heaven. What's going on? They were asking those questions, and I think it's good for us to ask those questions too.

And yet, at the same time, we need to be aware that that isn't something for us to be concerned with, that God doesn't need this body to be intact in order for us to enjoy eternity. Here's another thing. What happens when you die? When this body dies, what happens to that soul? We have immediately?

If you walked with Christ, you go to the presence of Christ. We see this in scriptures. For instance, when Jesus is hanging on the cross, there's the two men, one on either side of him, and one of them is heaping insults. Well, both of them were at first, but one repented. Isn't it interesting how quickly you can turn from just absolutely railing against the son of God to repenting of your sin because you're convicted of it and say, okay, Jesus, I'm sorry for my sins.

Could you remember me when you come into your kingdom? This man hanging on a cross recognized that Jesus truly was the king, as the sign on the cross above him said he was. And Jesus said, I tell you today, today you will be with me in paradise. He was immediately there with him. In two corinthians five eight, we see that Paul also says this, to die on this earth is to be with Christ.

We don't have a lag time. We don't have a time in between where things have to catch up. When we die, we're with Christ. Another question you might have. Will we recognize each other?

You know, there's a lot of things that the scriptures explicitly talk about, and there's some things that it gives us just a little bit of an indication of, and we have to kind of read through it and figure it out. One of the things that we know is they ask Jesus about, well, in this resurrection, well, there's will there be marriages? He says no. In other words, that human intimacy that we have experienced in those relationships, it won't be the same, and yet it's replaced with a different kind of intimacy. The scriptures tell us that one day in that heavenly place, we will be fully known even as God knows us now.

In other words, we won't have these barriers between each other. That sin has created, that tension is created. The times where you feel like you want to share a message with someone or you want to bear your soul to someone, but you're worried what might happen if you're truly outright and forthcoming with them in those situations. In those cases, we recognize that our human existence, our human flesh and our human minds and bodies are corrupted in such a way. But in heaven, none of that will be there because sin won't be taking place there.

We'll have this complete openness with one another, much like it was initially in the garden of Eden. And so the intimacy we have won't be that human touch intimacy, that sexual intimacy between a husband and wife or any of those things. But we will know each other. We will have memories of what life on earth was like, and yet our heavenly bodies will be used for a different purpose. But yes, we will know each other and we will remember some things from this earth.

But just like God remembers our sins no more, I don't think we'll remember how sinful we were. We won't be going around saying, oh, God, I wish that I could just forget these things that I had done. Believe me, they're not held against you. And I don't believe we will remember them against ourselves either. I was mentioning to Amy as I realized that today we have our welcome lunch after this service, and usually when we have our Sunday school class afterwards, this is a time where we get to discuss some of these types of things and where you have questions and we can kind of talk about it.

But we don't have that opportunity today. So I don't know what to tell you. Feel free to talk with me at lunch if you'd like to. But I'm going to move on from some of those questions that you didn't ask but might have wanted to ask to one big question. This is a question that especially critics of faith will ask.

You know what it is? How can a loving God ever send anyone to hell? Maybe you've wrestled with that question.

Fair enough. You beat me to the point. But before we get to that point, what about this? Nobody ever asked the other side to that. The other side to that is, how can a just God ever allow anyone into heaven?

See, we look at it from this human point of view where we think, well, what we end up doing is we try to create God in our image. Remember, the Bible tells us we were created in the image of God, but now we see ourselves trying to make God like us. We want God to answer to us. We want God to conform to the way that we think and the way that we live and the sense of justice or righteousness that we want to have. But really, God has his justice.

Everything that God is, is what is righteous and what is just. And when we look at God's justice. Sometimes we don't think that it matches up to what we believe things should be. And so we tend to ask those questions, how could a loving God ever damn anybody to an eternity of torment in hell? When rather the question should be, how could God ever allow us into his presence in heaven?

We've already answered that question. The only way that that can happen, or does happen is because he has applied the blood of Christ to our lives. And we have been, as the songs were saying, washed whiter than snow. We have been cleaned of all of the sin, all the impurities on our lives. But God doesn't send anyone to hell.

God doesn't commit anyone to that. Rather, people have already made that decision by rejecting Jesus Christ, by saying, I don't want to live for you, I don't want to live with you, I don't want to serve you, and I don't want to follow you. By wanting nothing to do with God on earth, they've already made it clear what they want to do with him. And God isn't going to force them to be with him for eternity. The scriptures show us that God does, in fact, have a day of judgment coming, but it's a day of separating.

Jesus told us several parables about this, whether it was wheat and weeds that were growing together, but on the day of harvest, they're separated. Or Jesus in Matthew chapter 25, talks about the sheep and the goats and separating the sheep from the goats and then judging them based on, well, we look at that and we think it's on their works, but really it was on how did they receive Jesus Christ? Those who received Christ lived that out in the way that they loved others and gave to others. Master, when were you thirsty and we gave you something to drink? Hungry, and we fed you naked, and we clothed you, etcetera, etcetera.

On the other hand, those who are cast out, they had rejected Jesus. They hadn't lived for others. They acted as if Jesus wasn't important in their world, and so they rejected him. And so he says, you won't have to be with me. You get to go to the place that was created for the devil and his angels.

That's in Matthew, chapter 25, verse 41. We see that one verse he says, depart from me, you who are accursed, into the eternal fire that has been prepared for the devil and his angels. But in the same way, when those who have been chosen for heaven or those who have lived their lives where they're ready to go to heaven, they can only get there because of Jesus, not because of their works. In Ephesians, chapter two, verses eight through ten, we see this, for it's by grace. You are saved through faith.

This is not from ourselves, but it is the gift of God. It is not from works so that no one can boast. For we are as workmanship having been created in Jesus Christ for good works that God prepared beforehand so that we may do them. So I want to talk a couple things about hell itself and then talk about heaven because it's so much better. Think about this.

Who is the most loving person ever to have walked this earth? It's like you guys have been in Sunday school before. That's the Sunday school answer. In Sunday school, you know, kids, Bible classes, the answer is always Jesus. Just shout that one out and you're most of the time not going to be wrong unless you've got a trickster for a pastor who just sets you up, you know, to fail, like Lucy with the football, you know, and then pulling it away at the last second.

Jesus is the most loving person ever, and yet he talked about hell more than anyone else. Isn't that interesting? Did anybody ever grow up in church where there was somebody that talked about hell a lot? Or maybe you were in a youth rally or an adult service of some kind, and there was somebody that said, they just said, if you died tonight, where would you go? Or they talked about some type of flame torture thing, something that would hurt.

And they said, hold a lighter under your finger as long as you can and then say, okay, now can you imagine that? But a million times worse all over your whole body for all eternity. If you died tonight, where would you go? And we've had those things. We've talked about those things.

Some people, some of you might have given your life initially to Christ because of some of those things. And yet that's not how Jesus talked necessarily, but he did talk about it in a way that it was real to him. In other words, the things that Jesus believes are real, I want to believe are real as well, and I don't want to add to them, and I don't want to make up stuff that he didn't say just because it makes me feel better. CS Lewis was famous for stating at one point that if there was any doctrine in scriptures that he could erase as a human being, he would erase the doctrine of hell. But we're not the author of scriptures and we cannot do that.

Jesus, when he talked about hell, he did it in more volume and in more vivid detail than anywhere else. In scripture. And the interesting thing is, he is trying to describe something to us that we've never seen. I mean, you've never actually seen hell. We say sometimes, oh, it feels like I've been going through hell, or, you know, something like that.

People use those type of expressions, but they have no idea. So then Jesus, when he describes it, he has to describe it in a way that uses something that clicks or something that makes sense. Now, if I was to describe to you a place that I visited last year called Multnomah Falls, out in. Out near Portland, Oregon, I could try to. But if you have never seen a waterfall even, let's just say you lived your whole life here in Florida, you haven't seen a waterfall.

Okay. Not really. If there's a waterfall in Florida, please let me know. I want to go visit it. I love waterfalls.

I don't think there are any here. There's other cool stuff, like you can go into the ground, like in the springs and stuff, and go diving down there. That sounds pretty cool. You can go in some caverns, but we don't. We don't have waterfalls, not really.

But out there, there's this waterfall that's over 600ft high, and it spills down and then it levels out and it comes a little bit under a bridge that they built, and then it spills down again and cascades down. Now, I can tell you, to see it is breathtaking. There it is on the screen. It's just. It's just amazing.

But if you hadn't seen that, if you'd never witnessed even a picture of it, you can't imagine what it's like to be standing on that bridge that's there, that lower part, if you can see that little bridge with the arch holding it up, because there's still about 450 or so feet above that where this water comes crashing down, I'd have to use words like the thunderous roar, the deafening sound, the mist. And it was cold outside, and this mist is just almost attacking you and is just running off of you. But unless you are actually there, you really can't quite grasp the enormity of what that place was. To stand on that bridge and just feel it, literally feel it, the power behind it. So as Jesus is talking about hell and he's trying to describe it, he uses a word for a place that they're familiar with who lived in that area.

You've probably heard this before. You might have heard a preacher talk about it. A place called Gehenna, which was in the valley of Hinnom. And it was outside of the city of Jerusalem. It was a place that a few hundred years before the Israelites, after following their pagan neighbors, had started worshiping idols there.

Not just any idols. They worshipped a God named Moloch, who they would sacrifice their children in the fire to him. Very vile, disgusting and terrible, saddening, despicable. The very lowest that humanity can go is to sacrifice our children for our future. That's what they believed they were doing.

That is the worst thing that we can sink into as a society.

Jesus uses that to describe what hell looks like. When Jesus uses that imagery, he says, you know, here there's things, and now here's where I want to be careful, because lest we paint a picture of hell like Dante tried to do with his inferno, which he wrote a lot of stuff in there that's not scriptural, but, you know, he tries to paint a picture of hell and imagine his way into it. But really we couldn't fully grasp it because Jesus uses things. He uses contradictory terms like, you know, there's worms that are there, and yet if it's an all consuming fire, I don't think worms are going to survive. They're not exactly that hardy.

You know, he talks about this utter darkness, but he talks about these flames that don't go out. You can be in a totally dark room and just strike a match, and you can see pretty well. So flames cancel out darkness. So I think what he's doing is he's using all these different words to try to describe just how terrible this place is. The gnashing of teeth from the regret and the pain of being there.

So it's hard to paint an actual picture of hell just based on the things that Jesus said, because he was actually perhaps even looking at a place that was a real place right there. Now, there have been some bible biblical, some preachers who have tried to say that hell isn't real because Jesus was actually talking about a real place. So he's actually talking about the hells that are on our earth right now. And that's what Jesus is talking about. And I have to believe that Jesus wouldn't say about eternity in hell the same as he talks about eternity in heaven, unless he meant that there is an actual place that people will end up that is like that.

But he used imagery to describe it at minimum. What hell is this thing we can be sure of? It's a place of eternal separation from God and God's perfect love, the utter agony of hell, because God has removed his hand from that place, the presence of God, the grace of God is not there in any way, shape, or form because of that is what really makes it hell. And so we think of things like yesterday, if you were around here, it rained. Now we haven't had rain in weeks.

And everybody will benefit from that rain. The righteous people, the wicked people, everyone in between, everyone will benefit from that reign. God has given that as his gift, as his grace. We will all have our life sustained in ways because of a healthy cycle of nature, where crops grow, where animals thrive, where all these things happen. And yet God gives that both to the righteous and the wicked.

But hell is the, the total removal of God's hand and God's presence and God's grace from where these people are when people no longer have the constraints of anything from the spirit of God, giving them boundaries for how human beings should live. And I think in our world, especially in our country today, we're starting to see us bump up against a few of those. We're maybe as bad as some of the things are. We're not as utterly depraved as people were in some of the biblical times of the Old Testament or some of the cities of the New Testament, where Jesus said, I'll build my church there and the gates of hell won't be able to stand against it. Amen.

And so Jesus, some of those places, even around where Jesus lived, I believe, were a lot worse than where we live. But eventually a society bumps up against a guardrail that God has set in place. And he says, if you go beyond this, it's utter destruction for your civilization. And we can see that looking historically at some of these rises and falls of empires, I don't know what that means for America. I don't know what that means for the western world.

But I do believe that we have a crisis moment that we have to address. We have to both elect people and call on leaders and even call on our preachers to remain faithful to the word of God and to declare what God wants us to do, the boundaries that he wants us to live within. But then there's heaven. Praise God for that. You see, I know that it'd be easy to preach a sermon that's just on hell or a sermon that's just on heaven.

I don't want to do that. I want to cover both of these things and to talk about heaven again, just like hell. There's not exactly a clear painted picture of what it looks like. And you could say, oh, well, Pastor Nick, I read the part where it talks about the twelve, you know, 144 and this and this and this and streets of gold and all these things and all the stones and all that. Yeah.

I can also read the part about where it says that it's a new Jerusalem coming down from the heavens down, meeting earth. And the dwelling place of God is there. And that there's a river flowing through the middle, and there's a tree or a type of tree growing, and it grows fruit every, every month, twelve months out of the year. And the leaves are for the healing of the nations, and the lion will lay down with the lamb. You see, we can talk about different parts of scripture that tend to paint different imagery and different pictures of what heaven is in the same way with hell, where we're not 100% sure.

We are 100% sure of one thing. God promises us that the presence of his son, that the presence of the father are there in that city, that God dwells among his people. The spirit of God is around us there. And that because of God's presence there, heaven is such a beautiful place. Can I tell you?

It doesn't matter if your Bible translation says a mansion or a shack, because it really just says a dwelling place, and it never says a mansion. We just like that word because it makes us feel pretty good. I'm getting a mansion. Maybe you might get a tent, you know, I don't know, but rather a tent in the presence of God than a mansion in hell. And you see, the beautiful thing about heaven is, in the same way that hell is a total removal of the presence of God.

Heaven is the complete presence of God, the presence of God that Moses wanted to see when he says, God, show me your glory. And yet God says, you cannot see my glory and live. Moses, you're still as good as you might be. Moses, you are still a sinner. Moses, you still.

If you see my face, you'll just immediately be wiped away. You'll immediately be gone. In the way that Moses wanted to see the presence of God and to dwell with him there. We get that in heaven. The way is through Christ.

The way is because Christ has already died for us and we don't have to do any works. However, the scriptures are quite clear. Works will follow. In other words, we will do things because of our faith and love in God, because of that salvation. I don't know.

Churches used to preach a lot about this stuff, and maybe it's good that we don't have quite the fixation on it that we once had. It takes the whole scripture to really make us, the whole people that God wants us to be, and yet we can't avoid these things either. Somewhere in the middle is a healthy level of discussion about this, and yet we don't only want our words towards others to be about hell. You know, maybe you've seen gospel tracts, there's a lot of them where it used to just be basically just talking about hell and how to get out of hell. And it didn't focus much on having a relationship with God.

I hate those things. I really do. That's not how Jesus talked about it. That's not the overwhelming tenor of the scriptures. And when I see one of those, I take it so that somebody else doesn't get it.

But, man, I love the ones that start out about the love and grace of God because that's how our story starts and that's how our story ends from COVID to cover. And the parts that are in there that are very real about hell are only there to remind us that God has done everything to snatch us out of there. Amen. It's important that we, you and me, that we are aware of eternity. So many times we get so wrapped up in whatever the media, the news, the social media sites, whatever it is on what they're saying is going on in the world today.

But God wants us to know. He wants us to be aware of eternity, because we need to be aware of those who are headed down the wrong path. Jesus did say that path is a really wide one, but the path through eternity and heaven is a narrow one, and the gate is narrow and few enter into it. That's not the will of God. That's just the simple reality.

But we want to think that God will save everyone, that somehow everyone will be redeemed in the end. And look, I don't know what cards God has up his sleeve on that one, but I do know what his word has said. And I do know that time is precious and that you and I have the responsibility, the pleasure and the joy of sharing this hope with others. And that if anybody ever says, I don't know if hell is real, I say this. Jesus believed and taught as if it were real, and we should live that way, too.

We need to live that way both in our own lives. To say, God, I want to live for you. I don't just want to serve you and do the things that show that I'm living for you. I want to live with you in my heart. If you've never received Christ into your heart, today is the day to do that.

If you've walked away from God, today is the day to renew that relationship with him. But if you know people who don't know Jesus Christ and they're walking down that path, if it was a sidewalk that just dropped off into a pit, you would warn them about that. We would say, hey, you don't want to walk down that sidewalk. I remember a joke or a guy had a sign that said, the end is near. And the cartoon, you know, whoever was going past him said, ha, crazy religious nut.

And then there was like a bridge that had broken off, and the guy drove his car over it. You know, maybe the sign should have been a little more clear. Not just the end is near, but the road that you're on does not lead to a good place, and it does not lead to the place where you want it to go. We should snatch people off of that road and call them to live for Christ. So today, I implore you, I encourage you to have an awareness of eternity, to be sure of the path that you're on, and to bring others to the path of righteousness.