Hell

This Week’s Recommendations

This Week’s Recommendations
  1. Sin is Death? Pierce Taylor Hibbes begins his profound post on how we can say that sin is death this way, ““Sin is death” sounds like something you’d hear echoing from a bullhorn in a city that embraces noise as part of its culture.”

  2. What Lewis Had Wrong About Hell: Paul Dirks confronts CS Lewis’s notion that the gates of hell are locked from the inside. He explains that, “In other words, man’s will to populate hell thwarts God’s desire that they should be in heaven. In Lewis’ view, God—in a particular but important sense—is eternally defeated.”

  3. Why You Must Leverage Your Self-Despair: Dane Ortlund doesn’t want us to waste our discouragement. He says, “Fallen human beings enter into joy only through the door of despair. Fullness can be had only through emptiness.”

  4. Is there Such a Thing as Righteous Anger? Maybe not. Marli begins, “As a teenager, I took a hunter safety course at a Christian retreat center that also hosts hunting groups. On the wall by one of the main doors, there was a spattering of holes, scars from a shotgun accident. Thankfully it only injured the wall, and turned into a convenient object lesson for gun safety. A sign next to the hole reads, “There’s no such thing as an empty gun.”

  5. Ocean Depth Comparison: Oh, how little we know!

This Week’s Recommendations

This Week’s Recommendations
  1. Why Brutal Honesty Isn’t Honest at All: Justin Hale with an important response to us when we might be tempted to excuse our harsh responses to others, “Being more honest is about being more clear, more specific, more sincere, and more authentic. So, you DON’T have to raise your voice to increase your honesty. You DO need to be more effective at stating the observable facts of the situation and your honest perspective about those facts.”

  2. Why Does Hell Exist? James Williams offers some simple analogies to help get our minds around this challenging doctrine. He concludes, “If there were no hell, there would be no need for salvation. If sin didn’t separate us from a holy God, then we wouldn’t need the gospel. The testimony of Scripture undeniably points us to such realities. We lack the ability to atone for ourselves, thus our need for an external deliverance. But, thanks be to God us gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!”

  3. You Will Fail Sometimes. Don’t Quit: Melissa Edgington considers the discouragement of sanctification and the double truth that God will change us, but we will also fail along the way. She encourages us, “You see, there is no moment of arrival. At least, not on this side of Heaven. But on any given day, in any given moment, we can become a little more like Christ. We can become a little more devoted. We can have moments of sincere adoration and awe for who God is. We can grow. And, before we know it, if we establish these patterns of putting another sin to death, of taking one more step toward God instead of away from Him, we’ll wake up one morning and realize that we are a whole lot more like Jesus than we were twenty years ago. Growth is slow. But He is patient.”

  4. There is Power in Counting it All Joy: Paul Tautges begins, “Joy is a state of mind, not merely a feeling. Joy is peaceful confidence in knowing God’s good and perfect will is being carried out as the result of your trials. I know from experience that this can be hard to accept.”

  5. How Turtles Find Their Way Home: How do turtles find their way back to the place of their birth decades later? What an amazing Creator we have.