Just Three Reasons

Just Three Reasons

Psalm 73:1-15 Luke 16:19-31 Revelations 20:7-15

Suppose you had a 16 year old son who came home and told you that he had received a great job offer. He could set his own hours, make a lot of money quickly, and have enough money to be rich by the time he was 30. The group he would be working with would always have his back. All he would be doing, would be selling drugs. How many of you would say, “well wow that’s just great., Son, when do you start? How many of you are thinking, “Boy, have you lost every brain in your body.”

Your 16 year old has come up with the perfect dream job in his mind, but he fails to consider there is something much bigger than him that is going to crush his dream job. It’s called the legal justice system. He thinks by pretending it does not exist it can be pushed out of his life, or he thinks he’s so clever, he will never get caught. You can immediately see through this faulty way of thinking. We can’t remove the reality of something, simply through belief.

Our society is in confusion over this issue of the power of belief. If I am a boy but believe I am a girl, then it makes me a girl. Not only can I believe it, but you too must now believe it and accept the reality of me being a girl or you or some kind of mean hearted, discriminating bigot. But you can look at me and see the reality that my belief did not change the reality of my physical body.

But now we take it a step further, and undergo sex changes with our bodies so that our body conforms to our beliefs. The reality is, no matter how much surgery you do, that new woman is not going to be able to give birth and that new man is not going to father a child. But for me to point this out is being unloving and confused.

We forget that though we are all created in the image of God, when sin entered the world, it affected every area of our being There will be attempts to deviate from the ideal that God made in every aspect of our lives. Sexuality is no different from all the other parts of human nature that must be willing to yield itself in obedience to the love of God. We think that by believing something is okay, then it must be okay.

We are in a society that believes it can remove God from it, simply by believing God no longer exists or by yelling the words “separation of church and state.” If the idea of creating a state came from God, how can there truly be a separation of God from the state. God is everywhere, at all times, in all places, with all power whether we recognize it or not. God is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. That is the very nature of God.

The tragedy is not that the world does not believe it, but that parts of the church does not believe it. How many of us act as though God watches us carefully on Sundays, but closes his eyes to what we are doing the rest of the week. We even believe that we can get rid of the clear teachings of Scripture by not believing that they are true. A little girl playing hide and seek with her dad, thought her dad could not see her as long as she closed her eyes. We act as though the word of God stops being valid simply by us declaring it no longer to be relevant to our modern times.

I can remember as a little boy, that the last thing we wanted our mother to hear, were the words coming out of mouths telling somebody, “go to hell.” That was a guaranteed whipping and a loss of all privileges. Our society has able to get rid of hell by putting the devil in a red suit with a pitchfork and putting horns on his head. It then added demons, some with nice fat bellies, in red suits with pitchforks as his second in command. Together they ran around hell, sticking people in the butt and throwing them into hotter flames while the demons laughed and joked at what they were doing.

As this image was lifted up, it became foolish and stupid to believe that hell could possibly be a real place. Anybody holding views of hell, were obviously not educated and did not truly understand the love of God. Hell became something you go through while you’re in this life. People may say, “I’m going through hell” but actually all they are doing is going through the trials and the tribulations of this life. Hell is a one way trip.