Introduction
For the next few weeks I will be bringing a series of messages that will deal with salvation, personal evangelism and missions. Many things have prompted this series, first and foremost being the general lack of interest among believers concerning the eternal destiny of those to whom we minister. Most people just don’t bother to share their faith; not Sunday School teachers, not Discovery teachers, not deacons, not preachers. I read that the national average today is that it takes 85 church members just to reach one person for Christ in America.
It is not just a teacher problem. I am just as guilty as the next person. Just because our church is growing does not mean that the kingdom of God is growing. Most church growth comes from transfer growth. Our church has grown because of people coming from other churches, but what about the lost? I realize that talking about our faith makes many of you uncomfortable, but if we are really serious about doing what we were left here to do, then we must talk about our faith. We must talk about our Savior, and we must tell folk they need to be saved. In Luke 16, we find what may be a very familiar account to you about a rich man and a beggar named Lazarus. This account is one of many stories that Jesus told one day as He tried to get the attention of the Pharisees and His disciples.
From Luke 14, we learn that Jesus had been invited to breakfast at one of the Pharisees’ homes. It was a custom in those days to invite rich and influential people to your home for these social breakfasts, with hopes that you in return would be invited to someone else’s breakfast. They used one another to boost egos and stroke their pride. When Jesus arrived, instead of eating, He criticized them for their hypocrisy and piety, saying that instead of what they were doing they ought to be inviting the poor and lame and sick, people who could really benefit from their free meals. He said that they were only interested in helping those who could return the favor, but if they were really as righteous as they thought themselves to be, then they’d try to help those from whom they had nothing to gain. Jesus left their breakfast, went and found a group of publicans and prostitutes to have lunch with. This greatly angered the Pharisees, and they blasted Him for it, saying "this man eats with sinners."
By now, Jesus was surrounded by the Pharisees and scribes on one side, the publicans and prostitutes on the other, and the disciples by His side as well, so He continued His evaluation of these so-called religious elite by telling a story about a shepherd who left ninety-nine sheep just to find one, about a woman who swept the floor to find one coin when she already had nine, about a prodigal son and a self-righteous son and about a poor steward. In all of these stories and the one we will read this morning, He was driving home a point that needs to be received by us, that if they weren’t interested in what He came to offer, then He would move on to those who were. Jesus won’t beg you to accept Him - He offer stands good, but it is up to you whether you receive it or not. Let’s read our text in Luke 16:19-31.
"There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day: and there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores. And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried; and in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame. But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst they good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented. And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence. Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father’s house: for I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment. Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. And he said, Nay father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent. And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead."
There are four lessons every lost person needs to hear today from our text, and after we cover them, I am going to share with those of you who are saved a lesson we need to heed. What is a lost person? I suppose that "lost" is one of those church terms we use that is kind of vague. Lost? I know where I am. I know how I got here; I’m not lost. The Bible teaches us that any person who has never repented of their sin, confessed it to God and placed their faith in Him is lost. You can believe that Jesus is the Son of God and be lost. You can believe that God created and be lost. You can believe that Jesus died on the cross for our sins and that He rose from the dead and be lost. So, perhaps today you believe all of that, but you’ve never admitted to God in prayer that you’re a sinner, dirty and good for nothing in His sight. You’ve never told Him you’re sorry for all of that, and you’ve never asked Jesus to forgive you, you need to do that. But you can do that and still be lost. You need to place your faith in Him for your salvation. Ask Him to save you, and He will. "Whosoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved!" Now, what are these four lessons from hell that we need to learn?
WHEN IT COMES TO THE NEED FOR SALVATION, GOD SEES ALL OF MANKIND THE SAME.
The Jews had some wrong ideas about salvation, just like people today have a lot of mixed up ideas about it. There were three things they thought gave them a guaranteed free pass into heaven, but they were wrong. They thought that they went to heaven…
· Because they were the keepers of God’s Word. I don’t mean that they obeyed it, but because they possessed it. The Jews received God’s Word and they were proud of it. God didn’t give to anybody else but them, so that made them special.
· Because they were circumcised. They believed that because they kept this ritual that had been practiced by God’s people through the ages they were guaranteed heaven.
· Because they were children of Abraham. We’d have to go to some other passages to show you the first two, but we can catch a glimpse of this thinking in our text. Notice that the rich man recognized the place of Abraham’s bosom in verse 22, and in verse 23 he recognized Abraham, and in verse 24 he addressed him as Father Abraham. In verse 25, Abraham says, "Son…" You see, they placed their trust not in Christ but in their lineage, thinking that their ancestry would save them. When Jesus told the Pharisees in John 8 that they needed to be saved, they said to Jesus, "We be Abraham’s seed [we don’t need to be saved]."
Listen, when it comes to salvation, it doesn’t matter whether you have the Word of God, how many Bibles you own, what rituals you practice or what family you belong to, you still can’t be saved until you place your faith in Christ. In verse 19, this man was rich. He dressed in the most expensive clothes available and he was living large every day. This guy had no need for anything. He ate all he wanted, went where he wanted, did what he wanted and enjoyed life in every way. He was somebody! He was a Jew, and because he was so richly blessed in this life he believed that God’s favor was upon him. He also thought that because Lazarus was a beggar that God’s favor surely wasn’t on him. He was a worthless nobody. I can imagine him starved and half naked. As he lay in the street sleeping and begging dogs would come by and lick the open sores on his body.
Here’s what you need to see: the external things of your life have nothing to do with whether you’re saved or not; salvation is a matter of the heart and mind - its about what you are trusting. You can go to church all you want. You can sit in Sunday School and memorize John 3:16 and teach and preach and dress up and entertain missionaries till Jesus comes back. You can belong to the Baptist Church, the Methodist Church, the Church of Christ or any other place you want to join and still go to hell. You’re momma can play the piano and your daddy can be a deacon. You’re grandpa might have been a preacher and your great aunt may have sung in the choir. You can take the Lord’s Supper till Jesus comes back, get dunked in the baptistry every week if you want, but if those are the things you trust for your salvation, then you’ll spend eternity in hell.
When God looks at mankind concerning salvation, all He sees is lost and saved. That’s it. You’re either saved or you’re not. You’ve either placed your faith in Christ’s atoning work or you haven’t. You may not be a drunken murderer. You may not be a whoremonger drug addict. You may not have ever stole anything or even cheated on your taxes, but if you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior then you’re just as lost as those kind of folk are. I want you to turn to Romans 3:9 and read with me God’s picture of you as a lost person.
"What then? Are we better than they? No, in no wise: for we have before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin; as it is written, there is none righteous, no, not one: there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one. Their throat is an open sepulcher; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips: whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness: their feet are swift to shed blood: destruction and misery are in their ways: and the way of peace have they not known: there is no fear of God before their eyes. Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin."
Now you may think you’re an all right person, but so far as God is concerned there’s nothing good in you and you stand guilty and condemned before Him the righteous Judge. Jesus told Nicodemus,
"For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved." (John 3:17-21)
Lost or saved? Which are you? It’s the most important question you’ll ever answer. You’ll never be so good that you don’t need to be saved, and no one is ever so bad that they can’t be saved. Place your faith in Christ today.
THE TIME TO DETERMINE WHERE YOU WILL SPEND ETERNITY IS NOW.
Notice in verse 22 that both the beggar and the rich man died, and after they died they parted ways. When the beggar died, he was escorted to a placed called Abraham’s bosom by the angels of God. When the rich man died he lifted up his eyes in hell. What determined where they went? It was a decision they made beforehand. For the child of God, the Bible says "to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord." The very instant your body dies your spirit either goes to heaven or hell based on what you did with Christ. Jesus said,
"He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him." (John 3:36)
He said,
"I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever." (John 6:51)
Jesus told Martha in John 11:25-26,
"I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, thou he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die."
Somebody asks, Preacher, what do I have to do to go to heaven? You need to repent and believe. Well what do I have to do to go to hell? Nothing! You don’t have to do anything, and that’s just what the devil would have you do - absolutely nothing. You’re born in sin, and because you’re born in sin you’re a sinner and because you’re a sinner the wrath of God abides on you right now. Not tomorrow, not when you die, not in the judgment, but today. That’s why the Bible says that "today is the day of salvation!"
THE PEOPLE IN HELL ARE PLEADING FOR YOUR SALVATION.
What happened when the rich man lifted up his eyes in hell? Verse 23 says that he was in torments and he cried out for mercy and for a drink to quench his thirst. He said "Send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame."
I want you to know something. Hell is not a place you want to be. I don’t know a lot about heaven. I know it must be pretty awesome. I know it must be glorious. I know it is where Jesus is and I know I have a home there with my name already on it, but I don’t know much more than that about it, but I do know this-it’s a whole lot better than hell. The Bible says that…
· There’s burning in hell (Deuteronomy 32:22)
· There’s sorrow in hell (2 Samuel 22:6)
· The wicked are going to hell (Psalm 9:17)
· There’s pains and trouble in hell (Psalm 116:3)
· There’s fire in hell (James 3:6)
· There’s torment in hell (Luke 16:28)
· There’s no rest day or night in hell (Revelation 14:11)
· There’s weeping and gnashing of teeth in hell (Matthew 8:12)
· There’s fire and brimstone in hell (Revelation 21:8)
Isaiah describes it as a place where the worm dies not, where the fire will not be quenched, and where all flesh is abhorring to behold. Listen, you can deny that hell is real all you want, but one day you’ll be a believer just like this rich man was and it will be too late.
Now I said that the people in hell are pleading for your salvation. This rich man in verse 27 said, "I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father’s house: for I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment." If you knew what the people in hell know today you’d get real concerned about your salvation. Have you ever for a moment wondered what’s keeping you out of hell?
The psalmist wrote in Psalm 73:18, "Surely thou didst set them in slippery places: thou castedst them down into destruction." There is nothing that keeps a lost person at any one moment out of hell but the sovereign will and mercy of God. Does God have the power to cast the lost person into hell? You’d better believe it! When God gets ready to act, there’s not one thing you can do to stop Him. The strongest man on earth is but a weakling in God’s hand. The smartest man on earth is a fool in God’s sight. Not only can God cast men into hell, He can most easily do it. The God who created, the God who parted seas and rivers, who opened the earth and swallowed up wicked men before can just as easily snatch the very life from under you and it will be too late.
In the 1700’s, Jonathan Edwards described the scene like this:
"The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you were suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose this morning, but that God’s hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.
O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide an bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell. You hang by a slender thread…" (Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God)
I promise you with all that I am - you don’t want to go to hell. How merciful God has been to allow you opportunity after opportunity to be saved. 2 Peter 3:9 says "The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some men count slackness, but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance."
God wants you to be saved today. The people in hell want you to be saved today. I want you to be saved today, and I hope and pray that if you are lost that you want to be saved today.
YOU’VE GOT ALL THE INFORMATION YOU’RE GOING TO GET IN ORDER FOR YOU TO BE SAVED.
When the rich man asked Abraham to send Lazarus back to warn his brothers, notice what Abraham said. "Your brothers have all the information they’re going to get." They had Moses and the prophets. All they had to do was be willing to pay attention to the information they already had. The same is true today. People are always asking questions about things that don’t really matter as though to say, If I just knew the truth about this or that, then I would believe.
If I knew who Cain married…if I knew about dinosaurs…if I could just see Noah’s ark…if they could just find the Ark of the Covenant…if, if, if… Listen, God has said all He’s going to say. John 20:30-31 tells us that Jesus did so many things they just couldn’t all be recorded for us, "But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name."
If you can read all the Bible has to say and still not believe, there’s nothing else that will do it either. You see, it’s a matter of faith. Will you believe? You know, I’ve been studying this Bible for 12 years now, have been preaching it for about 2 now, and I still don’t know the answers to a lot of questions. In fact, I have more questions now than I did when I started, but I don’t have to know all the answers to understand that if I had died without having placed my faith and trust in Jesus Christ, I would be lost and condemned to hell. What do I have to do or say to convince you that today is your day of salvation?
Before I finish, let me address those of you who are saved today.
If we knew what they know we’d be too bothered not to share our faith.
I believe that. What we as God’s children need is a fresh glimpse of the torments of hell. I am thankful today that Luke 16 is about as close to hell as I’ll get from now on. It didn’t used to be that way. I too once hung by that slender thread, and by God’s grace I responded to His invitation to accept His Son as the ransom for my sin debt. Every one of us knows someone who has never been saved. It may be a mother or father, a brother or sister, a son or daughter. It may be a friend; it may even be an enemy. Regardless of who it is, that person needs to be saved, and our responsibility is to tell them how.
That rich man had no one to blame for being in hell but himself. He knew that. You notice he didn’t plead for a second chance. He didn’t cry out injustice, he pled for the salvation of those who we live among today. No one is coming back from the dead to share their faith, its up to you and me.
Conclusion
Have you ever accepted Christ as your personal Savior? Have you repented of your sin and asked Him to save you? If you can look back over your life and not remember a time when you did that, you need to settle it today. You need to be saved. Don’t count on having more time. If you are lost today, whether you’re young or old, man or woman, a child, middle-aged or a senior citizen, rich or poor, good or bad, answer the loud calls of God today. He is pleading with you. He is tugging at your heart; will you let go and trust Him? Will you give in and be saved? Will you come to Him in simple child-like faith, trusting, believing in what He has done for you?
