APOSTOLIC ACTING OUT
THE REALITY OF BEING LEFT BEHIND
Exodus 14:8-16, 21-23, 26-31.
The reality of this story is that the Egyptians were left behind, and then they tried to catch up with the Israelites but they did not and were washed away every one of them. If Moses had not told every Israelite to put blood over their door during the Passover, then those that did not listen to Moses would have been left behind also. But Moses was accountable for every single person in Israel, and he made sure that every soul in his nation knew how to be saved.
Of course every Israelite wanted to get out of bondage anyway they could, so they listened to Moses. None of them wanted to take a chance of being left behind and facing the possibility of getting put back into bondage.
This world is just like Egypt. When we are born, we are born in bondage in this world to sin. God wants to help us out of bondage, but if you don’t listen to Him, then He needs somebody that will lead you out. That is why He sends us Moses in our life. The one who has been to the wilderness, seen the light, God has spoken to him, and He is given a staff to lead God’s people. He is a shepherd coming out of the wilderness into where you live and leading you out of bondage to the promised land. Without the shepherd, you would still be in bondage.
The exodus out of Egypt is a lot like the rapture. Israel had to get their house ready to leave. If their door posts were not covered by the blood of the lamb, they were not saved. If we are not covered by the blood of the Lamb, we will not be saved. The only difference between them and us is that they knew when they were going to leave. We do not know when we will leave. It could be evening, morning, or at noon. But we should be ready. The Egyptians, however, did not know about what was about to happen. They were not ready and, as a result, they perished. It is the same today. If we are not ready, we will perish.
2 Peter 3:9-10 - “9The 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. 10But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.”
It came like a thief in the night in Egypt when death passed through, and they could do nothing about it. They had no time to prepare.
Exodus 11:6-7 - “6And there shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there was none like it, nor shall be like it any more. 7But against any of the children of Israel shall not a dog move his tongue, against man or beast: that ye may know how that the Lord doth put a difference between the Egyptians and Israel.”
The only way Israel could get out of Egypt was to listen to Moses. If they had not listened to Moses, they would have known nothing and death would have overtaken them.
I could also talk about John the Baptist, how he paved the way for Jesus Christ’s first coming. He was the Pastor of the land in that time, warning people of Jesus’ coming and that you need to repent or perish. It is the same way today. We need a present day John the Baptist that is paving the way for Christ’s second coming. He is doing the same thing by warning us and preaching the way to keep from being left behind when Jesus comes.
The only way we are going to make the rapture is by listening to our Pastor. This is Pastor appreciation service and the best way to appreciate him is to listen to him. He preaches so hard to lead us in the right ways because he is accountable for us. If you do not want to listen to the Pastor, or you only want to listen to half or part of what he says, then you will not make the rapture.
You can thumb your nose at the pastor and say, “Who does he think he is telling me how I should live. This is my life I am going to live how I want to. Besides, some of that stuff is just to hard to do anyways.” Listen up. Stop crying about all the little things in the church that bother you and start listening to your pastor. You enlisted in God’s army, not the chocolate factory. You are in an army and armies go to war. Armies fight together and die together. Jesus Christ is our Commander in Chief. And guess who is our Commanding General appointed by the Commander in Chief? Our pastor is our CG and he is leading us into this battle and you are either going to follow his lead and fight until the end when we win it all, or you can quit and get left behind in the battle grounds and get blown up by the enemy.
Then you say, “Well, I still have things I want to do while I am going to church that I just have to do.” You can straddle the fence between the world and the church if you want to, but when the rapture takes place and you are still straddling that fence, don’t be crying out with your right hand toward heaven when everyone is gone. Because you know what the Lord will do? He will knock you back on the side of the fence that you should not have been on because He is done with you.
Revelation 3:16 - “16So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”
That is what you are when you are straddling the fence between the world and the church. You are lukewarm. You are neither totally committed to the world and cold. You are neither totally committed to the church and hot. You are lukewarm and that puts a bitter taste in Jesus’ mouth and that is why He will spue you out. When the trumpet sounds and you are still straddling that fence, He will just spue you back to the worldly side of the fence because there will be no more fence. The church will be gone.
Don’t think that after the rapture you will still get a chance to be saved. If that was the case then we would not have to preach so hard. We would just wait until the rapture and then start preaching to everyone that was still left behind. Once you are left behind, that is it, no second chances. You would have had your whole life full of second chances. The purpose of preaching is to get you ready for the rapture, not have you wait until the rapture, realize the reality of being left behind, realize that there really is a God who came back and took His church and now you are left in this world without a hope of ever reaching God again, and then say, “Oh, NOW I know that there is a God and NOW I know that I must be saved and NOW I know that hell is real and that is my only option now that I have missed heaven.” By then you will realize how real hell really is and how close you are to actually ending up there.
Not only will this world be chaotic, it will literally be hell on earth, just without the everlasting fire, brimstone, burning, pain, and torment without no relief. You think this world is bad now, this is nothing. This world today is bad, but God is still in the midst of us. There are still holy and righteous people here on Earth. If you are left behind, you will realize a world without any righteousness anywhere, which is what the majority of this world wants because they don’t want to here the condemnation or be convicted of the things that they do wrong.
They don’t want to hear about the smoking that they are doing will not only destroy their lungs, which they probably already know anyway by scientific fact, but that it will also destroy their spiritual body because once they do die physically, they will be in pain for eternity. NEWS FLASH - there are no cigarette, tobacco, alcohol, or marijuana machines in hell. There is no internet, television, or magazines in hell. There won’t be any adultery, fornication, murder, stealing, or idol worshipping in hell. So if you have to quit all of these things to go to hell, why not quit all of these things to go to heaven?
It says in 1 Corinthians 6:9 - “9Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God?” It should have also said the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of hell either because nobody will be doing anything unrighteous in hell because they will be in too much pain to even want to.
1 Corinthians 15:52 - “52In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.” We are all going to be changed when the trumpet sounds. Whether will be changed into a glorious body and go to heaven and live forevermore with Jesus, or we are changed into a body that is made for everlasting pain, punishment, and torment while we die forevermore with Satan.
Don’t think that you will have time just before the rapture to get yourself right with God. For one thing, I have never seen nor heard of anybody repenting, getting baptized in Jesus’ name, and filled with the Holy Ghost with the evidence of speaking in other tongues within seconds. You will have about the time it takes for you to blink. Everybody blink. That is how much time at the most that you will have to prepare once the trumpet sounds. But the Bible did not say in the blink of an eye, it said in the TWINKLING of an eye. The dictionary does define twinkling as the time required to wink an eye, but it also says, a flickering light. Light is the fastest speed in the universe. So in a flickering or twinkling light that is about as fast as a flash or a spark. So if you time a twinkling, it would be about less than a millisecond. So there you go, that is how you prepare for the rapture when the trumpet sounds, you do as much as you can in less than a millisecond, then you should be good.
Just in case you don’t, you will be left behind, and this is what you will face during those first few minutes of being left behind. You are in H1 traffic during the daily traffic jam and traffic is stopped. I have on my truck a bumper sticker that says, “WARNING, in case of rapture, this car will be unmanned.” So my truck is unmanned in H1 traffic when the trumpet sounds. My truck is in the middle of the highway on a hill and it starts rolling forward. It hits the car in front of it. The person in the car gets out of the car to confront the person in the truck. The person looks in the driver side and nothing is there except a pair of clothes or BDU’s and shoes or boots in the floor with one shoe or boot on the brake pedal. The person then faints in the middle of the highway falling into the other lane and oncoming traffic swerves to miss the person and as a result hits other traffic in the other lanes and causes more of a wreck which then causes a domino affect.
That is a minor situation. Let’s think of another situation. Say my truck is going along on Kamehameha Highway and it becomes unmanned. The truck is going about 50 m.p.h. and starts to merge to the left. It crosses over the median and hits three cars coming right at it head on, killing one person, and seriously injuring another person. The third person gets out of their vehicle with minor injuries, goes to confront the truck that merged toward the traffic and sees nothing but clothes. The person, not worrying about the head injury he has, walks away confused.
The medics come to the scene and cannot find a body anywhere from the truck. Then one medic reads the bumper sticker on the back of the truck that warned about the truck being unmanned during the rapture. This person had been to church before, heard the preaching about the rapture and hell and decided to ignore the preaching because he did not believe it was going to happen anytime soon and he liked the way he lived. He did tell the preacher that he would come back to church sometime when he was done doing things with his career. He then hit his knees and started crying realizing what had just happened was real. He had realized the reality of being left behind. He knew from what he had remembered from the preacher just two weeks earlier that there was not going to be anymore chances for him.
So you think that the rapture is not going to happen in your lifetime. Let’s think about this. Right now, the news is talking about several big things. One is that an atheist is trying to convince the courts to get rid of the Christmas holiday because it is Christian. They are also trying to stop Christian broadcasts over the radio and television. In Colorado, they are trying to legalize marijuana for anybody over the age of 21. You don’t think that Jesus Christ is coming back soon? If they take out Christian broadcasts and Christmas, coming to church will be your only hope and will be the only place you will ever get to receive these kinds of messages and warnings. If they legalize marijuana, then the church will be the only sane place on the earth that will have people that actually know what is going on. We will be high too, we will be drunk too, but it will be the high that the Holy Ghost gives and we will be drunk in the Spirit.
There is also another way to be left behind besides the rapture. You can drive out of this church parking lot into the merging lane and you look to your left and here comes a truck right at you that is controlled by a driver that is intoxicated with alcohol and hits you. What now? You have been straddling this fence for a few months now because 1. I don’t like the way someone in the church is treating me. 2. I have been worrying too much about the specific details of every service and if one tiny thing goes wrong then I can’t get my blessing, or 3. I haven’t prayed about any of these things in the past few days, weeks, months and I can’t get forgiveness for myself because of it.
So now you are in the situation of what ifs. What if I had prayed through? What if I would have went to that person that was bothering me and told them I forgive you? What if I paid more attention to how often I could praise the Lord, rather than how often something went wrong? All of this is going through your mind while you are burning in hell with such agony that nothing can calm it, nothing can soothe it, and nothing can stop it. All because you were worrying about the little things and so while everyone else was praising God in spite of their circumstance, you were left behind worrying about the circumstances. So now you are in a place that is red and black with fire and brimstone. Every where you move you are burning with a fire and a heat that is seven times hotter than the hottest star. And unlike here in this life where eventually there is relief from pain, whether it stops, numbs, or you just pass out or die from it; this pain is constant and everlasting and will never ever stop. I know I am not the judge of where you will go when you die. Only God knows. I am just here to make sure that you are absolutely sure you know exactly, without a shadow of a doubt, where you would go. If the trumpet would sound before this service was over, would you know where you would go?
So you ask me, “Are you trying to scare me out of hell? Because if you are, I am not scared.” If I could scare you, I would. I would do my best to try to keep you away from there. That is our pastor’s main goal is to lead you to heaven and away from hell. And you say you are not scared? Just 10 seconds in a devil’s hell and you wish you would have made up your mind that you wanted to be saved and not left behind. You think of touching a hot skillet. It is so hot that it leaves a mark on you and it hurts for weeks. But you only touched it for a second. Now think about that pain on your entire body at one time touching you. That would hurt. Now try imagining that pain for 10 seconds. You would have wished, prayed, done anything to get away from it. Now imagine that pain magnified about 10 times, because 1. I guarantee the hottest star is at least 3 times hotter than any hot iron skillet or boiling hot water poured all over your body, and 2. Hell is 7 times hotter than the hottest star, so magnify that pain 10 times and never ever ever ever stop it, and you have a slight glimpse of what hell feels like.
Now I know this message might seem scary to some, and to some it might just make you wonder. Nevertheless, being left behind, no matter what the situation, is not fun, and always ends in extreme, everlasting pain, agony, and torment in hell. Those are facts. Now here are some more facts. You do not have to go to hell, nor do you have to be left behind. I know this is Pastor appreciation service, but I am sure he would appreciate it if I preached this. 2 Peter 3:9 says that the Lord is not willing that any should perish, which, perish, in other words means to go to hell. He goes on to say that the Lord wants all to come to repentance. What is repentance? You have to be truly and wholly sorry for any and all of the sin in your life.
1 John 1:9 - “9If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
Jesus will forgive you if you confess with your whole heart and repent and turn away from your sins. So I will ask the question again. If the trumpet were to sound right now, would you be ready? Would you be left behind? Do you know where you will go? If you do not know, you can make sure right now. You can come down to this altar and talk to God and make sure you are ready to go to heaven right now.
Acts 2:37-39- “37Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do? 38Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. 39For the promise is unto you and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call.”
Just remember that God is not willing that any should perish, but that ALL should come to repentance.
The reality of this story is that the Egyptians were left behind, and then they tried to catch up with the Israelites but they did not and were washed away every one of them. If Moses had not told every Israelite to put blood over their door during the Passover, then those that did not listen to Moses would have been left behind also. But Moses was accountable for every single person in Israel, and he made sure that every soul in his nation knew how to be saved.
Of course every Israelite wanted to get out of bondage anyway they could, so they listened to Moses. None of them wanted to take a chance of being left behind and facing the possibility of getting put back into bondage.
This world is just like Egypt. When we are born, we are born in bondage in this world to sin. God wants to help us out of bondage, but if you don’t listen to Him, then He needs somebody that will lead you out. That is why He sends us Moses in our life. The one who has been to the wilderness, seen the light, God has spoken to him, and He is given a staff to lead God’s people. He is a shepherd coming out of the wilderness into where you live and leading you out of bondage to the promised land. Without the shepherd, you would still be in bondage.
The exodus out of Egypt is a lot like the rapture. Israel had to get their house ready to leave. If their door posts were not covered by the blood of the lamb, they were not saved. If we are not covered by the blood of the Lamb, we will not be saved. The only difference between them and us is that they knew when they were going to leave. We do not know when we will leave. It could be evening, morning, or at noon. But we should be ready. The Egyptians, however, did not know about what was about to happen. They were not ready and, as a result, they perished. It is the same today. If we are not ready, we will perish.
2 Peter 3:9-10 - “9The 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. 10But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.”
It came like a thief in the night in Egypt when death passed through, and they could do nothing about it. They had no time to prepare.
Exodus 11:6-7 - “6And there shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there was none like it, nor shall be like it any more. 7But against any of the children of Israel shall not a dog move his tongue, against man or beast: that ye may know how that the Lord doth put a difference between the Egyptians and Israel.”
The only way Israel could get out of Egypt was to listen to Moses. If they had not listened to Moses, they would have known nothing and death would have overtaken them.
I could also talk about John the Baptist, how he paved the way for Jesus Christ’s first coming. He was the Pastor of the land in that time, warning people of Jesus’ coming and that you need to repent or perish. It is the same way today. We need a present day John the Baptist that is paving the way for Christ’s second coming. He is doing the same thing by warning us and preaching the way to keep from being left behind when Jesus comes.
The only way we are going to make the rapture is by listening to our Pastor. This is Pastor appreciation service and the best way to appreciate him is to listen to him. He preaches so hard to lead us in the right ways because he is accountable for us. If you do not want to listen to the Pastor, or you only want to listen to half or part of what he says, then you will not make the rapture.
You can thumb your nose at the pastor and say, “Who does he think he is telling me how I should live. This is my life I am going to live how I want to. Besides, some of that stuff is just to hard to do anyways.” Listen up. Stop crying about all the little things in the church that bother you and start listening to your pastor. You enlisted in God’s army, not the chocolate factory. You are in an army and armies go to war. Armies fight together and die together. Jesus Christ is our Commander in Chief. And guess who is our Commanding General appointed by the Commander in Chief? Our pastor is our CG and he is leading us into this battle and you are either going to follow his lead and fight until the end when we win it all, or you can quit and get left behind in the battle grounds and get blown up by the enemy.
Then you say, “Well, I still have things I want to do while I am going to church that I just have to do.” You can straddle the fence between the world and the church if you want to, but when the rapture takes place and you are still straddling that fence, don’t be crying out with your right hand toward heaven when everyone is gone. Because you know what the Lord will do? He will knock you back on the side of the fence that you should not have been on because He is done with you.
Revelation 3:16 - “16So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”
That is what you are when you are straddling the fence between the world and the church. You are lukewarm. You are neither totally committed to the world and cold. You are neither totally committed to the church and hot. You are lukewarm and that puts a bitter taste in Jesus’ mouth and that is why He will spue you out. When the trumpet sounds and you are still straddling that fence, He will just spue you back to the worldly side of the fence because there will be no more fence. The church will be gone.
Don’t think that after the rapture you will still get a chance to be saved. If that was the case then we would not have to preach so hard. We would just wait until the rapture and then start preaching to everyone that was still left behind. Once you are left behind, that is it, no second chances. You would have had your whole life full of second chances. The purpose of preaching is to get you ready for the rapture, not have you wait until the rapture, realize the reality of being left behind, realize that there really is a God who came back and took His church and now you are left in this world without a hope of ever reaching God again, and then say, “Oh, NOW I know that there is a God and NOW I know that I must be saved and NOW I know that hell is real and that is my only option now that I have missed heaven.” By then you will realize how real hell really is and how close you are to actually ending up there.
Not only will this world be chaotic, it will literally be hell on earth, just without the everlasting fire, brimstone, burning, pain, and torment without no relief. You think this world is bad now, this is nothing. This world today is bad, but God is still in the midst of us. There are still holy and righteous people here on Earth. If you are left behind, you will realize a world without any righteousness anywhere, which is what the majority of this world wants because they don’t want to here the condemnation or be convicted of the things that they do wrong.
They don’t want to hear about the smoking that they are doing will not only destroy their lungs, which they probably already know anyway by scientific fact, but that it will also destroy their spiritual body because once they do die physically, they will be in pain for eternity. NEWS FLASH - there are no cigarette, tobacco, alcohol, or marijuana machines in hell. There is no internet, television, or magazines in hell. There won’t be any adultery, fornication, murder, stealing, or idol worshipping in hell. So if you have to quit all of these things to go to hell, why not quit all of these things to go to heaven?
It says in 1 Corinthians 6:9 - “9Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God?” It should have also said the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of hell either because nobody will be doing anything unrighteous in hell because they will be in too much pain to even want to.
1 Corinthians 15:52 - “52In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.” We are all going to be changed when the trumpet sounds. Whether will be changed into a glorious body and go to heaven and live forevermore with Jesus, or we are changed into a body that is made for everlasting pain, punishment, and torment while we die forevermore with Satan.
Don’t think that you will have time just before the rapture to get yourself right with God. For one thing, I have never seen nor heard of anybody repenting, getting baptized in Jesus’ name, and filled with the Holy Ghost with the evidence of speaking in other tongues within seconds. You will have about the time it takes for you to blink. Everybody blink. That is how much time at the most that you will have to prepare once the trumpet sounds. But the Bible did not say in the blink of an eye, it said in the TWINKLING of an eye. The dictionary does define twinkling as the time required to wink an eye, but it also says, a flickering light. Light is the fastest speed in the universe. So in a flickering or twinkling light that is about as fast as a flash or a spark. So if you time a twinkling, it would be about less than a millisecond. So there you go, that is how you prepare for the rapture when the trumpet sounds, you do as much as you can in less than a millisecond, then you should be good.
Just in case you don’t, you will be left behind, and this is what you will face during those first few minutes of being left behind. You are in H1 traffic during the daily traffic jam and traffic is stopped. I have on my truck a bumper sticker that says, “WARNING, in case of rapture, this car will be unmanned.” So my truck is unmanned in H1 traffic when the trumpet sounds. My truck is in the middle of the highway on a hill and it starts rolling forward. It hits the car in front of it. The person in the car gets out of the car to confront the person in the truck. The person looks in the driver side and nothing is there except a pair of clothes or BDU’s and shoes or boots in the floor with one shoe or boot on the brake pedal. The person then faints in the middle of the highway falling into the other lane and oncoming traffic swerves to miss the person and as a result hits other traffic in the other lanes and causes more of a wreck which then causes a domino affect.
That is a minor situation. Let’s think of another situation. Say my truck is going along on Kamehameha Highway and it becomes unmanned. The truck is going about 50 m.p.h. and starts to merge to the left. It crosses over the median and hits three cars coming right at it head on, killing one person, and seriously injuring another person. The third person gets out of their vehicle with minor injuries, goes to confront the truck that merged toward the traffic and sees nothing but clothes. The person, not worrying about the head injury he has, walks away confused.
The medics come to the scene and cannot find a body anywhere from the truck. Then one medic reads the bumper sticker on the back of the truck that warned about the truck being unmanned during the rapture. This person had been to church before, heard the preaching about the rapture and hell and decided to ignore the preaching because he did not believe it was going to happen anytime soon and he liked the way he lived. He did tell the preacher that he would come back to church sometime when he was done doing things with his career. He then hit his knees and started crying realizing what had just happened was real. He had realized the reality of being left behind. He knew from what he had remembered from the preacher just two weeks earlier that there was not going to be anymore chances for him.
So you think that the rapture is not going to happen in your lifetime. Let’s think about this. Right now, the news is talking about several big things. One is that an atheist is trying to convince the courts to get rid of the Christmas holiday because it is Christian. They are also trying to stop Christian broadcasts over the radio and television. In Colorado, they are trying to legalize marijuana for anybody over the age of 21. You don’t think that Jesus Christ is coming back soon? If they take out Christian broadcasts and Christmas, coming to church will be your only hope and will be the only place you will ever get to receive these kinds of messages and warnings. If they legalize marijuana, then the church will be the only sane place on the earth that will have people that actually know what is going on. We will be high too, we will be drunk too, but it will be the high that the Holy Ghost gives and we will be drunk in the Spirit.
There is also another way to be left behind besides the rapture. You can drive out of this church parking lot into the merging lane and you look to your left and here comes a truck right at you that is controlled by a driver that is intoxicated with alcohol and hits you. What now? You have been straddling this fence for a few months now because 1. I don’t like the way someone in the church is treating me. 2. I have been worrying too much about the specific details of every service and if one tiny thing goes wrong then I can’t get my blessing, or 3. I haven’t prayed about any of these things in the past few days, weeks, months and I can’t get forgiveness for myself because of it.
So now you are in the situation of what ifs. What if I had prayed through? What if I would have went to that person that was bothering me and told them I forgive you? What if I paid more attention to how often I could praise the Lord, rather than how often something went wrong? All of this is going through your mind while you are burning in hell with such agony that nothing can calm it, nothing can soothe it, and nothing can stop it. All because you were worrying about the little things and so while everyone else was praising God in spite of their circumstance, you were left behind worrying about the circumstances. So now you are in a place that is red and black with fire and brimstone. Every where you move you are burning with a fire and a heat that is seven times hotter than the hottest star. And unlike here in this life where eventually there is relief from pain, whether it stops, numbs, or you just pass out or die from it; this pain is constant and everlasting and will never ever stop. I know I am not the judge of where you will go when you die. Only God knows. I am just here to make sure that you are absolutely sure you know exactly, without a shadow of a doubt, where you would go. If the trumpet would sound before this service was over, would you know where you would go?
So you ask me, “Are you trying to scare me out of hell? Because if you are, I am not scared.” If I could scare you, I would. I would do my best to try to keep you away from there. That is our pastor’s main goal is to lead you to heaven and away from hell. And you say you are not scared? Just 10 seconds in a devil’s hell and you wish you would have made up your mind that you wanted to be saved and not left behind. You think of touching a hot skillet. It is so hot that it leaves a mark on you and it hurts for weeks. But you only touched it for a second. Now think about that pain on your entire body at one time touching you. That would hurt. Now try imagining that pain for 10 seconds. You would have wished, prayed, done anything to get away from it. Now imagine that pain magnified about 10 times, because 1. I guarantee the hottest star is at least 3 times hotter than any hot iron skillet or boiling hot water poured all over your body, and 2. Hell is 7 times hotter than the hottest star, so magnify that pain 10 times and never ever ever ever stop it, and you have a slight glimpse of what hell feels like.
Now I know this message might seem scary to some, and to some it might just make you wonder. Nevertheless, being left behind, no matter what the situation, is not fun, and always ends in extreme, everlasting pain, agony, and torment in hell. Those are facts. Now here are some more facts. You do not have to go to hell, nor do you have to be left behind. I know this is Pastor appreciation service, but I am sure he would appreciate it if I preached this. 2 Peter 3:9 says that the Lord is not willing that any should perish, which, perish, in other words means to go to hell. He goes on to say that the Lord wants all to come to repentance. What is repentance? You have to be truly and wholly sorry for any and all of the sin in your life.
1 John 1:9 - “9If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
Jesus will forgive you if you confess with your whole heart and repent and turn away from your sins. So I will ask the question again. If the trumpet were to sound right now, would you be ready? Would you be left behind? Do you know where you will go? If you do not know, you can make sure right now. You can come down to this altar and talk to God and make sure you are ready to go to heaven right now.
Acts 2:37-39- “37Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do? 38Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. 39For the promise is unto you and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call.”
Just remember that God is not willing that any should perish, but that ALL should come to repentance.
