Recently, I read Francis Chan’s newest book, Erasing Hell. It took me all of one day to read the whole thing, because I could not put the book down. Except for when I was working, of course.

The book is a refutation of sorts to Rob Bell’s book, Love Wins. Francis Chan and Preston Sprinkle do an effective job of presenting what the Bible really says about hell, not what we want it to say. It may not be popular to believe in hell, but it is biblical, and that’s what matters in the end.

I had two takeaways from this book (other than hell is real, of course). One is that I need to approach any doctrine or Bible passage with deep humility. I need to realize that unless the Spirit of God illuminates my mind, I can’t understand the things of God. Furthermore, these are not abstract doctrines written down for the sole purpose of debate and knowledge.

These truths, especially the ones about hell, concern real people made in the image of God and their eternal destiny. To be arrogant in my beliefs and to gloat over those who will spend a Christ-less eternity in hell is not only blatantly unloving, it is far removed from what God is like.

Also, God is God. His ways are much higher and better than my ways. He’s the potter and I am the clay. How could I scrutinize God’s words and actions as revealed in Scripture and subject them to my own standard? Does the clay tell the Potter whether or not He does well?

As Francis Chan states in the book, there are several parts of the Bible (especially in the Old Testament), where God does and says things I would never do or say. To say in my heart that a loving God could never do what I wouldn’t do is to put myself above God. God is loving not by our standards, but by His own standard, which is perfect.

I strongly urge you to read this book. But I also urge you to consider how you have possibly judged God by your own ideas of what is right and wrong and fair. Maybe you and I will need to repent and to acknowledge that God doesn’t ask for us to figure out if what He is doing is right in our eyes, but to submit to Him and trust that whatever He does is good and right by Heaven’s standards.

Last of all, any doctrine or belief or conviction shouldn’t be used to condemn or beat up other people. It should lead us to a place of deep humility. It should cause us to thank the God Who made it possible for us to know Truth. After all, what matters isn’t how you’ve got every doctrine systemized and categorized and everything and everyone figured out, but that you know that you are a broken sinner whom God so loved that He gave everything to win your heart.

The reality of hell shouldn’t make you or me want to gloat. It should make us weep that so many we know and love are headed there. It should make us want to do everything in our power to ensure that those we love won’t have to go there. And most of all, it should make us thankful above all things for the Cross where the mercy and the justice of God melded perfectly and God’s wrath was perfectly satisfied and we were saved, not just from hell but to an eternity with Him.

Amen.

Secondly,

For me, comfort comes from things like chocolate and fleece and old episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That may not be comforting for everyone, but it works for me.

I also had a comforting thought about God. It doesn’t start out comforting, but keep reading and you will (hopefully) see the comforting part.

God has the power to wipe me off the face of the earth. He has the power to condemn me. He even has the right, if you look at my history of broken promises and failed attempts at obedience, not to mention a long list of sins great and small.

The part I like is while God has the power and the right to destroy me, He won’t. He has made an oath and sworn by Himself that He won’t. If you’re in Christ, the same goes for you.

And if He won’t, who’s left that can? Is there anything or anyone even close to having that kind of authority in our lives? Can anything or anyone else do what God said He wouldn’t. Simply, no.

There’s a verse that says not to fear the one who can destroy your body. That is, don’t fear someone who can merely kill you. Fear the one who can destroy both body and soul. That’s God.

I heard that fearing something is giving it authority over you. If you fear something, you give it power over you to control you. If you fear God– have a healthy respect and reverential awe– you won’t need to fear anything else.

If you give all your authority to God, you have nothing left to give to anything else. Not the dark, not the boogeyman, not anything that goes bump in the night.

God, the same one who has the power to destroy you completely, is for you. Not only will He relent from condemning you, He will be on your side and in your corner. Forever.

I love the fact that my Abba is for me, with me, and in me. I love the fact that He delights in me and rejoices over me with loud singing. He does the same for you, too.

Think on those things. And while you’re up, would you mind grabbing me something chocolaty? And maybe a fleece blanket, too.

Cows are content. At least I’d like to think they are. Maybe they’re all hiding uzis in their udders and one day they will finally be revenged for all those Big Macs and Whoppers they had to die for. Maybe.

I do know that this society thrives on discontent. Our economy is based on the idea that you’re not content until you have one more gadget or more insurance or a better car or a better home . . . well, you get the idea. Contentment is the most counter-cultural way you can live these days.

Commercials will tell you that you need to lose weight, change your hair color, buy this brand of clothes, drive this car, wear this deoderant, or take these pills to be really happy and content. I’ve yet to see a commercial that says, “You don’t really need this, but if you want it, here’s how to order it.”

I know I have almost been mesmorized by all those sham-wow commercials. I mean you don’t just get one. You get two! And a free set of ginzu knives thrown in. Cause I just have all those tomatoes and empty cans sitting around waiting to be sliced in half.

Really, who do you know that is really content? Who is really satisfied with who they are and what they have and can say, “No thanks. I have enough”? Not many that I know of.

Contentment comes with trusting God and taking Him at His word. It says, “God, You are enough. You really are good and You really are for me and You’ll alway take care of me.”

Contentment not only is counter-cultural, but it’s also counter-intuitive and anti-human nature. Our default setting is to want more than what we have and to compare ourselves with those we perceive to be ahead of us.

But I have been learning that God is enough. I’ve learned that the gadget you buy is good until the improved version comes out. Whatever you buy will bring a fleeting happiness, but then the old craving comes back to buy more.

One writer said  that God made us for Himself and we’re restless trying to fill the God-sized hole in our hearts with anything else, because nothing else will fit.

So I invite you to be a rebel and a radical and do one of the the most counter-cultural things imaginable these days. Just learn to be content with God and His provision and learn to say, “No thanks. I have everything I need.”

Now back to that sham-wow infomercial.

Yes, I am a fan of freedom. That is, whenever I think about it. But honestly, most of the time I take my freedoms for granted and assume that I will always be free as I am now. I think most people do. And that’s dangerous.

If you take something for granted, you begin to be careless with it, and before long, you’ve lost it. I think we as Americans are in danger of losing our freedoms not through any socialist agenda or enemy coercion, but through our own apathy. I mean, have you really paid attention to how few people actually vote anymore? It’s frightening.

But freedom is also recognizing that my truest allegiance is to a far country that is a kingdom rather than a democracy and has a King rather than a President. This Kingdom will last far beyond the administration of Barack Obama and even far beyond the rise and fall of this country.

We’re pilgrims and strangers here, citizens of a Heavenly Kingdom that cannot be shaken. There’s where our true freedom comes from. A Kingdom built on the blood of the God-Man, where we die to live and are blessed if we are poor, meek, mournful, and persecuted, among others.

I’m beginning to see that freedom means putting myself under the authority of Jesus, just as he freely submitted to the authority of the Father during His earthly ministry. Freedom really means bondage to Jesus for the rest of my life. Try putting that on a bumper sticker.

Freedom always costs something. It’s never ever free. Just because I didn’t pay the price doesn’t mean that a price wasn’t paid by someone. My salvation is free to me, but it wasn’t to God, who paid for it with the very lifeblood of His Son, Jesus.

Thank you, God, for my freedom. May I be reminded every single day of the cost involved so I who deserve death, could go free. Help me to celebrate liberty not just one day a year, but 365 days a year.

Help me to live out my freedom in such a way that my life makes Your name look great in all I do and say. May Your liberty and freedom spread over the whole world until there is no more oppression or slavery or bondage anymore.

Thank You again that I will be able to get up tomorrow and read my Bible and go to a worship service with no fear. Help me never again to take my freedom for granted.

Amen!

Tonight I am letting the apostle Paul speak about what love really looks like. I’ll let him speak (from the Message translation):

“If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.

   Love never gives up.
   Love cares more for others than for self.
   Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
   Love doesn’t strut,
   Doesn’t have a swelled head,
   Doesn’t force itself on others,
   Isn’t always “me first,”
   Doesn’t fly off the handle,
   Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
   Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
   Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
   Puts up with anything,
   Trusts God always,
   Always looks for the best,
   Never looks back,
   But keeps going to the end. . . .

But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.” (1 Cor 13:1-7, 13)

I don’t have anything to add to that, other than to quote David Gray:

“Honey, now if I’m honest

I still don’t know what love is”

It’s true. I don’t. But one day I will know Love just as fully as Love knows me. That’s the day I’m looking forward to!

Today, you signed off at 8:59 am for the last time. It made me sad. I felt like I had just said goodbye to a dear friend. This may come across as creepy and stalker-ish, but I count you three as dear friends. Brant, Pablo and Katie Rose, you made my mornings.

You made me fall in love with God again and really understand how good God is and how free grace is and what it means. You made me laugh, cry, and think. You melted a little of the ice I had let accumulate around my heart.

You showed me that it was okay to be me, even if I was not like everybody else and didn’t always do and say the right things and the right time. That it’s okay to be socially awkward and goofy and quirky. That being normal is boring, but being who God made you to be is so much better.

I will never forget you guys. There were times when work would have been almost unbearable without you and life would have been duller. You didn’t put the colors in my world, but you certainly made them brighter. My favorites were the Malarkey, Club Awesome, the joke lab, and all you did with sponsoring children with Compassion International, among other things. I was never bored with your show. Confused and befuddled? Sometimes. But never ever bored.

I think today as you were saying goodbye I had a hard time seeing my computer screen for the tears in my eyes. I wished then that I could capture one moment of you guys bantering back and forth and hold on to it forever.

I know too well that life is about change and nothing stays the same forever. Nothing can grow and transform without change. Sometimes you have to let go of what you know and embrace the unknown, as Abraham did once long ago. Sometimes you have to release the good to lay hold of the better thing.

I know whatever show that replaces you will be good, too. I will learn to love it as much as I loved this one. But I still can’t help but feel there’s a hole in my heart where you used to be. I still can’t help but feeling a sense of grief.

Thank you again for reminding me that in all things God really is good, that He really is for me and roots for me, that He loves me completely no matter what.

I pray blessings for each of you and thank God for all of you. You were a part of a lot of beautiful moments and I am better because of all of you.

Whether we ever meet this side of heaven, I thought you should know that.

I heard a really good illustration today at Kairos. Suppose you had a gun pointed at your head. I think that would inspire fear and terror and quite possibly the loss of control over bodily functions (to put it mildly). In other words, if it were me, I’d wet my pants and pass out at the same time.

Ok, now suppose you were shown the gun and the bullets being taken out. Now if the gun were held to your head, it would no longer have the same fearful effect. It would still have the ability to produce loud noises, but it would have lost any ability to do any actual damage (other than some temporary hearing loss).

If I am afraid of the devil and his demons, all I need to do is look at the Cross. The Bible says that there Jesus publically disarmed the enemy and paraded him in front of us to show Who had really won. In other words, Jesus showed us satan’s smoking gun, emptied out all the bullets, and handed it back to him.

Never again do I ever have to fear what anyone else can do to me. The only one I have to fear is the One who can destroy both the body and the soul, and that’s God. The good news is that I don’t have to fear God destroying my soul.

Think about this. The worst that could ever happen to me happened to Jesus. The very worst of hell and sin and death fell on Jesus and He took all those things to the grave and left them there. He came out of the grave unbound, bringing freedom to His children.

There’s nothing that can touch you and me as believers unless God allows it. That’s guaranteed. There’s nothing bad that God can’t turn into good. There’s nothing that will stop Him from finishing what He started in you, making you into a radiant masterpiece replica of His son Jesus.

Those things that you are so afraid of and so worried about? They’re just blanks.

That unknown future? God’s got it figured out.

Your life? It’s in the very best hands possible.