Hell? Yes! Hell? No! // Talking Elephants & Tipping Cows // Read

You know those topics that are taboo? The topics that polite conversations avoid? The topics that we’re all thinking about it, but we’re not talking about—especially at church? Yeah...we’re going there. Politics, sex, alcohol, suicide, hell, suffering. We’re talking about all of these “Elephants in the Room” and we might even tip some “Sacred Cows” that have been built up in the process. Now you might be thinking: “This is going to be uncomfortable.” You’re right. It’s going to be uncomfortable...and eye-opening, healing, necessary. There is no better, safer place to discuss these topics than church. So with that in mind...can we talk?

Thanks to AC/DC, hopping on the “Highway to Hell” after you die has become a trendy option for the afterlife. But that’s just because lots of people don’t truly believe in Hell—no one would want to go there if it’s really how the Bible describes it. I mean, is there even a “there” to go to? Is Hell a real place? Where people will be forever? Punished for all eternity? I mean...really?

Well, hey, Cornerstone Church family, it is so good to worship with you guys today. Man, I hate that I'm not there in person, right? I hate that I'm out there in person I am right now currently in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I'm getting my tan on getting nice and crispy eating seafood. But I do. I do gotta say this.

I miss you guys. I miss you guys. I'm working with you in spirit. today. I will be back next week in person as we continue this series. But can we first just give a real quick thank you to pastor Donnie for how well he preached last week, and we give it up for pasture night. Let's make him blush. Let's just make him blush, whatever surface he is in. But he did a fantastic job last week kicking off this brand new series for us talking elephants and tipping cows. And basically, what we're doing, we're having some discussions on some really hard topics throughout the six-week series. That's why we have this setup. We want to help you envision the idea that you are up here with us on stage. You're sitting here, and we're not preaching at you. We're talking with you. We're having a discussion up here talking about some pretty, pretty tough topics, some things that can be pretty hard to talk about, some elephants in the room. So last week, Pastor Donnie kicked us off by talking about politics in the pews, talking about how Christians are to handle and engage and be a part of politics in our world, which, man that, is a tough, tough topic to talk about one that churches usually avoid, right. But we want to talk about it. We want to talk about those tough issues. And that's exactly what we're going to continue doing today. As we jump into another tough topic, namely, the topic of Hell, hell, right. Hell is something that we think we know a lot about in the church that we know a lot about in the Christian world. There's a lot on the topic, right? If you go to Wikipedia and look up Hell's Wikipedia page, your thumb will be sore from scrolling and scrolling. There's so much information and so much content. And that's because there are so many opinions on Hell, right? music, poetry, culture, art, movies, of this, all of these different things have given different views and opinions, and that has influenced our view of what Hell really is and what it looks like. But the funny thing is if we really take a step back and we look at the average person's view of Hell, it more closely resembles Dante's Inferno than the Bible, right? Like it more closely looks like things that you would see out in the world, like the world's depiction of what Hell is, rather than what Scripture actually tells us. Hell is, and we don't want that to be the case, right? We want to make sure that we think biblically that Cornerstone we are a biblical church that thinks about things in the proper way. So what we're going to do today is we're going to try to be very clear about the things that Scripture is clear about when it comes to Hell, and on some of the things that are just more kind of, we don't know, they're unknown. We're gonna leave them unresolved. Right? Um, so today, kind of how I thought we would format this is kind of like a q&a, right. So I've looked up and researched some of the biggest questions that people have around the topic of Hell. And so basically, what we're gonna do, we're just going to walk through the top 10 questions that people have about Hell because we want to get some kind of clarity on this, see what Scripture says about this really, really tough topic, this thing that maybe we don't like to think about or talk about that much. So we can have clarity. Now, just a quick reminder before we go any further into today, and this wasn't just true for last week when Pastor Donnie preached. And it's not just true for this week, and it's true for every week of this series. What we are doing is we're having a conversation. We're not building a platform. Okay? So if you're coming into these weeks being like, Oh, great, I'm going to learn Cornerstone stance on politics, I'm going to learn Cornerstone stance on Hell, or on sex or on suicide, that that's not what we're doing full stop. That's not what we're doing. What we're doing is having a discussion, we're having a discussion with each other, we're not building a platform, we're not letting the world know where we stand on all these things. We just want to talk it out. Because what we believe is that the church should be the place more than any other place where we can talk about difficult, hard, tough topics. The church should be a place where we can talk about the elephant in the room safely and freely. And so that's what we're going to do every week of the series as we look at these difficult topics as we look at these elephants in the room, and we're going to handle them the way that we should. We're going to handle them the way that Christians should. I love Matthew 20:26. When Jesus is talking to his disciples, He says, but among you, but among my followers, things will be different. Now Jesus is talking about the way that we relate to power, But that's also applicable, and almost every way that a follower of Jesus relates to things, it's supposed to be different among you, it will be different. So things are going to be different. Whenever we talk about tense topics in the church, we're not going to be like the world, and we're not going to be like other people who let this kind of stuff divide us. No, we're going to rally around the fact that we all love each other, that we're all safe in church, and that we can have these difficult conversations in a healthy, healthy way. So let's do that. Let's hop in on this topic of Hell. Now, basically, I have kind of separated this into two halves. So the first half of the questions we're going to be looking at are just kind of like the basics of Hell, the basic information that you may wonder about Hell or had questions about, and then the second half of today's sermon is going to be looking at more personal questions that relate to the topic of Hell. So let's get going. Let's start with question. Number one, does Hell really even exist? Is there really even a hell? Well, let me just say, yes, there is. Otherwise, this would be a really, really short sermon, right? Like, no, no, hell, let's pack it up. Let's get out of here. Know that that's not the case. There is a hell we know that to be the case. Because Scripture affirms that over and over again, you may not like it, you may feel like, oh, that's hard for me to reconcile. It's hard for me to deal with. But it is the case we can't deny that Hell, from what we see in Scripture, is a real place. In fact, we can't deny that Hell is a real place because Scripture talks about Hell in the same kind of terms that it talks about heaven.

So if we want to believe and have confidence in the future and in the hope of heaven, we can't deny the reality of health scripture talks about them in the same kind of way in the same kind of terms. And not just that, Jesus, who we've talked about over and over and over again here at Cornerstone, how he is our authority. Jesus, Himself references Hell 11 times, like he talks about it quite a bit in his ministry throughout the four different gospels. So again, we can't, we can't logically say that there is not a hell. There is a scripture that seems to affirm that idea over and over and over again. So that's question number one. Does Hell exist? Yes, it does. Now, question number two is a question that a lot of people want to know. Where is Hell located? Like, where do you find Hell? I'm sure there'd be a lot of people who are watching today who would say, I know where Hell is. It's my local DMV office. Right? Can I get an amen on that?

If have you ever spent any time waiting in the DMV line? Kidding, obviously, but look, Scripture actually doesn't specify, like, an exact location of Hell, right? I know that we may think, well, it's below, right? Isn't Hell-like, it's, it's there. I can't really put it in other words, other than Hell is there, and heaven is there, right? Isn't that what Scripture says? Well, Scripture does have a few different verses that kind of give an idea of Hell being below, like Ephesians, four, nine talks about Jesus descending below to the lower parts of the earth after His crucifixion. So there are things like that kind of give an illusion that Hell is below us. But honestly, what a lot of theologians believe and agree on this is that that's not actually like the physical location of Hell, that it's below us. It's more of a metaphor, right? It's speaking more in a metaphor, the same kind of thing with heaven. Whenever we talk about heaven being above us, we don't literally mean heavens, like, right up here. It's, it's more speaking in metaphorical terms. And in all honesty, we just got to stop thinking about something. So literally, in Scripture, like in the book of Revelation, whenever it talks about, you know, the streets made of gold, we instantly started thinking of like gold bars, lining the streets, whenever, in actuality, what a lot of theologians believe is that John was really just trying to articulate what he was seeing as best he could. And because the streets were so beautiful and so shiny, he's like, man, that, I mean, they look like gold, right? But we think of things so literally, and so whenever it comes to the location of Hell, we're like, oh, it's, it's at the center of the Earth, right? It's below us. If we dug deep enough, we would be able to find Hell. But the fact is, we don't have any specification on where Hell is located in Scripture. Anything beyond that is just us guessing. So that's question number two. Question number three. Is Hal a place of literal fire is held a place of literal fire? This is one that we hear a lot about. And there are a lot of verses in Scripture that talk about the idea that Hell is a lake of fire. It's a consuming fire, and this is Jesus talking to Mark 943. He says, If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It's better to enter eternal life with only one hand than to go into the unquenchable fires of Hell with two hands. So Jesus refers to Hell as a place of fire. But really, whenever we see in the New Testament, whenever Jesus or anyone else refers to Hell, what they're referring to the word used there is Ghana, Ghana, and Ghana is a valley in that area, just outside of Jerusalem. It's a valley that has a long history. At one point in Israel, this valley was a place where the Israelites and one of their most audacious ways that they walked away from God actually performed, performed child sacrifice in this valley. They would burn children in this valley as an offering to the false God Molek. And so, this valley of Ghana had a terrible history. It was deemed ceremonially unclean because of these awful things that had happened here in the past. And so, by the time Jesus came along, this valley was actually used as a refuse heap. It's where they would. It was basically like the local dump, right. And so they would have a fire constantly going there to burn up the refuse from the city, from the city. So when Jesus was talking about this place, he was talking about Gahanna. It was giving people this idea of what Hell would be like. Oh, it's this place of fire. It's this place of separation. And that's actually the most important thing that we take away from Jesus referring to Gahanna. And using that as a metaphor for Hell, the fire, sure that's important. That's important. But the most important thing that Jesus was trying to symbolize by the idea of referring to Ghana as Hell is this place where we go if we refuse God, the most important thing wasn't the fire. It's the separation. That's really what Jesus was trying to hit on, throughout his ministry, throughout his teaching, is not fire so much as separation. And so whenever we think about it from that lens, and again, this is something that I saw through a lot of my study and research on this sermon. So whenever we think about that, whenever we think about the fact that Hell is really all about separation from God, I want to ask you just think about some of the worst decisions you've made in your life. Some of the worst decisions, maybe it was a relationship, was a job. It was a move, something like that, a career move, a physical move to a new home, a new area, just a decision that you made that ended up being just absolutely awful. And I'm not just talking about a little bad decision. I mean, a terrible, terrible decision. How did you feel afterward?

Right, in the aftermath of that decision, you felt awful. You felt terrible. If you've ever made a bad decision, like I've made a bad decision, I can think of those exact moments, those exact feelings. And it feels like your heart is going to explode, right? You just feel awful, you feel tense, you feel nervous, anxious, all these awful, awful feelings. And it borderline is like your emotions, and your feelings are on fire. Right? Like you're burning with the stress and anxiety of the decision you've made. Now think about that decision, whatever decision you're you're thinking of, and how bad it was. Now imagine you've made the decision to eternally separate yourself from God's presence, God's love, God's mercy. How are you going to feel in the aftermath of that? Exactly. Awful.

You want to talk about feeling like you're, you're on fire, and your heart's about to explode from making a bad decision in this life. Imagine making the ultimate bad decision of rejecting God's love in God's presence. And so it could be that a lot of times when Scripture was referring to fire, that this is more what it means. But what we do know Hell could be a literal place of fire. But what we do know is that it is a place where we are eternally separated from God, we're separated from his presence, and that would rightfully burn us up that would rightfully burn up our emotions and our feelings and our stress and our anxiety of realizing the absolute trauma of the decision that we have made. So that's question number three, kind of a tricky one with not a lot of definite answers on that one right now, and a lot of definite answers. Question number four. Are there different levels of Hell, depending on your sin? This is one that I've actually had people ask me before, a lot like, Are there varying levels of punishment? Are there varying levels of sin, almost as if, like, Hell has a VIP spot where like you were one of the worst sinners in all history. You got like a special room just dedicated to you. So are there different levels of Hell depending on your sin? This, again, is something that we mostly pick up from culture, from art, from media rather than from Scripture, Dante's Inferno, that poem or that story, hits on this idea that as you get closer and closer through the circles of Hell, the closer you get to The middle is where things really, really get bad, and the worst of the worst are punished. So that's really where that idea comes from. The Bible does, every now and then, hint at the idea that we'll be judged specifically over things that we did. For example, Revelation 2012 says, I saw the dead, both great and small, standing before God's throne. And the books were open, including the book of life. And the dead were judged according to what they had done, as recorded in the book. So some people read that the dead will be judged according to what they've done. And they take that in, they go, Well, you know, then that means that some people will be judged more harshly in Hell than other people. Right? I mean, I guess you could say that. But honestly, it's another one of those things where we just don't know. And if you're following, you're seeing that's kind of a recurring theme, that there are so many things whenever it comes to Hell that we just don't really have a super clear picture on. It's a lot of metaphor. It's a lot of illustrations, a lot of word pictures. And we just don't know, and we're just not sure. And let me tell you, that's a liberating thing to be able to just say, I don't know, I don't know. And that's another area where we don't know. So let's move on. Question. Number five, is the devil the ruler of Hell is, is the devil, the ruler of Hell like is that his domain and heaven is God's domain and the devil rules down here and he rules up there. Despite what we would see in the cartoons. This this is one of those things where we can unequivocally say no, the devil is not the ruler of Hell, he's not the boss of Hell, that's not his domain or anything like that. Again, this is another idea we get from Dante's Inferno. Jesus, we talked about this back during our Easter series. Jesus is King over all, including Hell. Jesus is King there, there is no Jesus's King, but Jesus king, well, no, Jesus is King. Jesus is Lord over everything, including Hell. The devil is not the ruler of Hell. Listen to what Jesus says. This is from the book of Revelation, this is chapter one, verse 18, Jesus says, I am the living one, I died. But look, I am alive forever and ever. And I hold the keys of death, and the grave some translations say I hold the keys of death, and Hades, Jesus is King and his Lord, overall, that means our enemy, the devil, he's not the boss of Hell, he's not the ruler of Hell. And this is something we need to make sure we understand. Just in general, the devil is not the ruler of any area of life. He doesn't get to rule over Hell, and he doesn't get to roll over you. He doesn't get to rule over your addictions. Your past your insecurities. He doesn't get to rule over anything. I'll tell you the only place, the only place that the devil is the boss, the only place that the devil rules, the only place that is the devil's domain, that place is the place that you allow him to be. That's it. The only place that he gets to rules, only places he gets to have his say-so, is where you allow him to have said so. So now, the devil is not the ruler of Hell. Alright, question number six. And this will be the last of kind of the basic questions about how question number six, is Hell eternal? Or does it end at some point? Now? Honestly, this could be its own sermon? Because this is a really deep question. With a lot of disagreement. There's, you know, the main line historic church believes, yes, Hell is eternal, eternal, suffering eternal punishment, right? That's what it is. But there are people, and there's a growing number of people who kind of fall on what's called the annihilationism side. Basically, what that says it's this idea that they believe that at some point, all of the people who have rejected God in this life will just cease to exist. Hence the term annihilation ism, there'll be annihilated. They just will cease to exist anymore. And where were they kind of get this idea from? There are quite a few scriptures from that you can get this idea. This is one of them. Second, Thessalonians, one nine, says they will be punished with eternal destruction, eternal destruction forever separated from the Lord and his glorious power. And so, people who are annihilationists see this common theme of people who reject God facing destruction or being destroyed or utterly being destroyed. And they read these, and they go okay, well, for something to be destroyed means that it just doesn't exist anymore. It's gone, right? It's done. And they'll use the example of how Scripture will take say that people be burned up like wheat, right becoming chaff becoming fine becoming nothingness, and they'll say, Well, that's what Scripture thing is that people will become nothing right that people become nothing, they'll, after a certain time, God will just cause them to cease to exist. Now, that could be the case. But there are other verses, plenty of verses that talk about. No, this is something that's eternal. This is not something that will have an end or a final point. This is what Jesus says in Matthew 25, verse 41, that the King will turn to those on his left and say, Away with you, you cursed ones, into the eternal fire, the eternal fire. And so people read that and say, Well, you know, Jesus seems to be pretty clear there that HAL is not something that only lasts for a finite period of time. No, it's eternal. It's an ongoing, eternal separation from God. So that's another one of those ones, where maybe it leans a little bit more clear on it being eternal. But there is some disagreement with people who are really faithful Christians who take the Bible very seriously. What I will say about that issue in particular, and all of the ones really that we've talked about so far, none of these are issues of salvation. Like if any of these things I've been reading and we've been going through these questions on, Is Hell a place of literal fire? Where is it located? Are there different levels of health depending on your sin, man? None of these are salvation issues. None of these are essential core doctrines of the Christian faiths, so there is nothing for us to fight with one another over if we have different agreements or disagreements on these things. Again, we're having a conversation, and we're not building a platform. So that's it for the more basics of Hell, okay. So like I said earlier today, today is a lot more of a teaching than preaching. We're just kind of looking at this idea of Hell and trying to get some handles on it. So we can talk about it articularly And kind of know what's going on here. So there's, there are your basics, so you can kind of feel like you know, what's going on with Hell. But now we're going to move into some of the more personal stuff, the more personal questions we may have about Hell. So here we go. Question number seven, do people who have never heard of Jesus go to Hell? Now, this is a big question. This is one that has a lot of debates on it. So basically, I'm gonna give you my belief.

This is my belief from the study I've done from the research, I've done the scripture reading I've done will someone goes to Hell if they've never heard of Jesus? Not necessarily. That's when I would say not necessarily. It kind of goes to this, whenever we say people will go to Hell if they've never heard of Jesus, then basically, basically, what we're saying is that we don't really believe the Holy Spirit is real. Right? If someone has to be handed a Bible and be able to read it, and that's the only way that they'll be able to hear about Jesus or be able to sit in a church and hear about Jesus if that's the only way that what we're basically saying is that the Holy Spirit isn't actually real, that he can't speak to someone's heart on his own, that he can't draw people close to him on his own. And I believe that is the case. I believe that is the case. I believe there are plenty of people in the world. Think about this right now. There are over 500, and there's an estimated number of over 500 million people living in the world today who do not have access to a Bible in their language. Think about that 500 million people were just so used to and accustomed to having Scripture that we can't even really think about that way. But there are 500 million people who have no chance to ever hear about Jesus in the way that you heard about Jesus. But you see, I believe that God is faithful. And that God reveals Himself to people through the power of the Holy Spirit, in very real, very tangible ways is what the book of Romans tells us, Romans one, verse 20, forever since the world was created, people have seen the earth in the sky. Through everything God has made, they can clearly see God's invisible qualities, His eternal power, and His divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God. You see, God reveals Himself, He reveals Himself to people, and God is faithful. He's faithful, and He will search people out, even if they don't know the name of Jesus, even if they can't articulate it that way, God will seek people out. I remember reading this story a few years ago, and I looked it up this week just to make sure I remembered it correctly. Of tribe in the Amazon. That's like an untouched tribe, one of these tribes that like they've had such crazy limited contact with the outside world. Never heard of Jesus, never heard of God in the Bible or anything like that. So this group of missionaries wants to go in and wants to reach these people. For Jesus, so they learn the language, right, they study, they do all this stuff. They finally are able to make the trek into this village. They start contacting one of the women there, and they're there. They're talking with her. And they're through the broken language, right? They're trying to talk with her. And they're trying to say, hey, look, we're, we want to tell you why we're here. We're here to love on you to try to help you in any way we can want to build you School, where it teaches some things. And we want to also, if you would be okay with it, share with you about Jesus, the Son of the Creator, God who made everything we want to tell you about him. And as this missionary is telling it to this woman who lives in this tribe, it's pretty much untouched. She starts freaking out, and she tells someone to go get her Son and her husband for them to come. And so they come over, and then they eventually find out. They will they start talking, they say the missionary woman come with us, we want to show you to your hut. And she's like my huts, like what do you mean? Like, yeah, we built this for you. So you built it for me. So they walk over, and they show this missionary and her friends this hut that they built for him. And they explained to her, they said, We had heard on the radio, they had this one radio in the town, we had heard on this on our radio about the Creator God who loves us and His Son, Jesus, we didn't know what to make of it. We don't know what to think of it. But we prayed that if this was true, God would send people to help us. And then here one summer later, here you guys come to see us help us. And so I say all that to say this, people who have never heard of Jesus before, God is faithful, God is faithful, we can trust their future and their eternity to his hands and us as His church. We just have to keep doing our job of telling as many people about Jesus as we possibly can and trust that God is faithful with the rest. So the next two questions, questions eight and nine.

These ones are kind of similar. So I'm going to kind of join them together for us to talk about him again, these are very personal, very hard questions for us to deal with. This is what question eight is, is Hell really a just punishment for centers? Is Hell really a just punishment for centers? And then question number nine is very much similar to it. Why would a loving God send people to Hell? Again, very, very big questions. Very, very big issues. To talk about the right elephants in the room? Is Hell a just punishment? Let me put it this way. I think it all comes down to how do you view sin? How do you view sin? Do you see sin as something that has to be punished? Or something that has natural consequences to it? Right? I think how you answer that question says a lot about if you see Hell as being a just punishment or not. See what I believe? I believe in sin; this is what I see in Scripture. Sin has built-in consequences, right? That whenever God, because God is a good father when God tells us to avoid sin, he's not doing it because he's saying, Well, you know what, there's actually nothing wrong with that activity, or that thing, or that way that you talk, there's nothing wrong with it at all. I just arbitrarily am calling it to sin and going to punish you if you do wrong, right. And so a lot of us think it's a lot of us act about sin. But I don't. I don't see that in Scripture at all. What I see in Scripture is God saying, hey, look, I made you, I know you, I know how you best function, and how you function. When you function up to your best, it brings me glory, and it brings me happiness because I know that my loved child is living the way that they should live. And when you break that, when you go against that, there are natural consequences that are just going to happen as a result of you breaking away from the natural order of how you are supposed to live and how you're supposed to act. So I think about that, and I think about CS Lewis, the great Christian author and theologian, who, whenever he described Hell, said that Hell is a place where the doors are locked on the inside. That Hell is a place of choice. No one is sent there. We select to go there. And so if that's true if sin leads to the natural consequences of things, and if Hell is a place that we choose to go, then yes, I can say that Hell is a just thing because Hell is a selected destination. It's a place that we choose to go to or choose to avoid. Hell is a selected separation. We can either choose to reject God or choose to accept him. We neither choose to be in his presence nor choose to be separated from his presence. So in that sense, yes, it is just because God is leaving it up to us because, again, I believe God is faithful, and everybody will have an opportunity at some point to either accept God's presence or reject it. God's presence to either be with him or to be separated. This leads us to the other question, question nine. Why would a loving God send people to Hell? As I said, the questions are very similar. So the answers are very similar. I don't believe that God sends people to Hell. I believe people select to go to Hell, and they don't say it that way. But rejecting God's presence is accepting separation from God. And so it's not so much God sending people as people choosing themselves again. As CS Lewis says, Hell's doors are locked on the inside. I know this is heavy stuff, man, and this is heavy stuff. This is a tough topic. As we said, it's the elephant in the room. There are some hard things for us to deal with. On this topic. The hardest is this final question, I'm going to ask the worship team if they will get ready to come back up on the stage as we go over this last question. And this last question, the reason I saved this for last is that really, I think this is the question behind all the other questions. We've talked about all the other ones. If we really get down to it, this is the question that we all want to know. Question. Number 10. Is my loved one really in Hell right now?

Chances are, you've got someone in your life I know I do. You've got someone in your life who has passed on. And you cannot say with any kind of confidence what their relationship with God was like. You just, you just don't know. And so all these other questions, honestly, they're window dressing. You don't really care where Hell is located, you know, Is Hell a place of literal fires the devil the ruler of Hell, it's kind of more interesting doctrine and theology things to kind of toss around and thinks about, but really the nuts and bolts of it. Do you want to know, hey, my cousin, my brother, my best friend? I don't know where they were with God. Are they really? In Hell today? I don't know. I don't know. And here's what I would say. You don't know either. In fact, only one person knows. God knows. God's the only one who would have that information. This is what I would say to you, though, if you are someone who has a loved one who has a questionable faith walk, you don't know where it's at. This is what I would tell you. And I promise you this is not me sugarcoating or anything like that. This is the biblical truth of the matter. This is what I do know to be the case. God is faithful. And he was chasing them to the very end. I don't know who that person is in your life. But I know that God loves them more than you love them. That God created them with purpose and potential, and he loves them. And he wants to give them the same kind of grace and mercy that he has given you. So no, we can't know for certain the eternal state of some of these people in our lives where it just felt kind of iffy. We can't know. But what we can know is that God is faithful. Listen to what it says in John 317, God sent His Son into the world not to judge the world but to save the world through him. That's what God wants to do. He doesn't want to see anyone in Paris, and he doesn't want to see anyone choose eternal separation. And so what he is going to do is throw every opportunity and every chance that he can look at people to accept him to accept his gift of forgiveness, freedom, and purpose. So what I would tell you today is the assurance you can have not of where someone is today but how much God loves them. And that that is never in question. And that's the one thing that you can have complete confidence in. Jesus chases after all of us in the same way he chased after you. He chased after the people in your life that you love. And that's the assurance that you can have today. I know this was heavy talk, right? This is a big, big topic, one that a lot of us would care to avoid ever discussing that we would care to never have to think about. But whenever we realize the love of the Father, whenever we realize the love of the Son, we can think about a topic like Hell can talk about a topic, like how knowing that you know what, the only way anyone ever ends up there is by their own choice, because God is faithful and He chases us down to the very end. That's the assurance we can have. Can I pray with you real quick? Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for your love for us, for your grace for us, for your Mercy for us. We thank you for the fact that you love us so much and that you wanted a relationship with us so much. You didn't just create mindless robots that had no choice but to worship you and to love You and to choose to be in your presence. Now you built us with the capacity for love, with the capacity for free will, with the capacity for choice. And so God, even as we talk about such a difficult topic today that so many people look at and see. And try to say that you are unloving because there is a hell. Honestly, God, we can look at Hell and see how much you do love because you have given us a choice. You don't want to force yourself on anyone. And so we have the choice, to be in your presence or to choose to be separated from you. God, what I asked today is that all of us would choose you so that we would realize there is no greater, no fuller life than the life that's dedicated to following you and living and abiding in your presence. God, I also pray for us today. And for all the people who have loved ones or friends or family who they're unsure of their eternal fate. They're not sure where their walk with you was, if there even was a walk.

God help us today to just trust those people to you. That even though we didn't know exactly what was going on between them and you, you knew and that you were chasing after them and running after them. And that even in their final moments. The last voice that was calling out to them wasn't any voice here, but it was your voice, calling out for them to choose you and to choose life. Help us to remember that God helps us to remember our own assurance that you have saved us, that we have a blessed assurance, and we have a wonderful assurance that we have amazing confidence in the work that you have done that has saved us so that we don't have to just limit ourselves to living in your presence right here and right now, but that we can do it for all eternity. We love you, Father, and we're thankful for you. It's in your name that we pray. Amen.