Good People Go To Hell. Bad People Go To Heaven.

This text is an AI transcription of the sermon. Please forgive any mistakes.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, amen. Tonight we are finishing up our series on a popular American belief system that people call moralistic therapeutic deism. Now this popular belief system is a religious worldview that is part of what the church experiences because we live in a culture that tells us that everyone is supposed to believe a certain way. And this belief system has five main tenets. The first one is that God created the world and looks down on it. The second is that God wants us to be good, nice and fair, just as the major world religions teach. The third one is that God wants us to be Be happy and feel good about ourselves. Number four is that God doesn't need to be involved in your life unless you have a problem. And the last one, the one that we're covering today is good people go to heaven when they die.

Good people go to heaven when they die.

It's a funny thing that in, in the broader society and in America, people still have rituals that they like to do with the church. Even if they're non Christians at all. They have no connection to do any formal religion. You can see it on on TV, when people get married, they still want to do it in church. I remember back to that series friends. Whenever anybody wanted to get married, they always would go and try to find a pastor to do it. Why? Well, none of them were religious. None of them had any affiliation with any kind of church. They were Basically secular, but for some reason they felt the need. They felt the need to tie that one ritual, to a church, to a pastor. We see that in a number of different rituals, things like baptisms Sometimes Sometimes though that's becoming less popular. Sometimes it's confirmations. But most of the time the important one are funeral. We want funerals to have a religious overtone. Even if the person who died hasn't been to church in years and years and years, we still want someone to do that.

And we ask why. It's because that last belief of moralistic therapeutic deism tells us that everyone who is goes to heaven. Now the big question about does it mean to be good? If good people go to heaven? If we think that just about everyone who is good is going up to the good place?

What does it mean to be good? Now, there are two ways that you can come up with the idea of goodness in a person. The first one is comparing ourselves to other people. And the second is comparing ourselves to a standard. And I think most of us when we think about being good people, we think about comparing ourselves to others. We are good people if we aren't as bad as others. And for most of us, that means we compare ourselves to what we think are really evil. Now, of course, the big comparison is that none of us is like Hitler. Are we? None of us is Stalin, we haven't gone around causing massive suffering and pain. In fact, I think that's how comparisons work is when we're asking, am I a good person, we think somebody else is much worse than me. Which means that I must be good.

Now, that works really well for everyone. Because then we get to the side, whatever it is, that means to be good. And we can look at only those people that are worse than us and say, yeah, I'm a good person, so I must be going to hell. Oh, Bible looks at it a little differently. According to the Bible, there is a standard that we must apply. And that standard, you can read in Deuteronomy chapter 30.

It says, “If you obey the commandments of the Lord, your God that I command you Today, by loving the Lord your God by walking in his ways, and by keeping His commandments and his statutes and his rules, then you shall live and multiply. And the Lord God will bless you in the land that you are entering to take possession of it. But if your heart turns away and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you today, that you shall surely perish.”

That's a standard. You have to love God and follow him perfectly. And that is the only thing that makes one good. Now, I think for many of us, especially outside of the church, when we hear that standard, we say, how is it possible nobody can be good. What is it if a sin is doesn't hurt anybody? How does it matter if we're just doing something, something little, how could God judge anyone for that?

Well, the Bible To look at sin differently than just saying, it's like having an account, where you just can't have too many sins and if you cross the line, then you're a bad person. The Bible looks at sin as being independent from the source of life. That's what we see in the Garden of Eden. It's the condition of humanity is that we are independent of the source of life. When Adam and Eve went and ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they became aware that they could make a choice that they could choose to turn away from God and just being able to make that choice cut them off from the tree that was next to the tree of the of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree of life and so they did not have that tree. To provide life they did not have that connection to God to live by his mind and his power and his grace. And so death came into the world.

And when we do things that are against God's will, it's not that these things are especially wicked, or horrible or should be criminal. It's because when we do these things, we are saying that we are independent from God. We are turning to him and saying, God, no, I do not want to be fully in your will. Instead, what I want is to make my own decisions and to be away from you. That means we end up being cut off from the source of life. Cut off from God who sustains us and gives us right. So moral, higher moralistic therapeutic deism tells us that good people go to heaven when they die. Christianity tells us the opposite. Good people go to hell, bad people go to heaven.

See, when we think that we are good people, when we think that we are just fine and we have everything that we need, when in our own decision making, everything is going great. We don't turn to ourselves and say my sin has cut me off from the source of mine. I need something. I need help. When we look at ourselves, and we realize that we're bad people, we look at ourselves and we realize we have sin that cuts To us off from God, we have to turn to Jesus who gives us the life sustaining bread that we need.

Jesus says, “I am the bread of life, whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe All that the Father gives me will come to me and whoever comes to me, I will never cast them. For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of Him who sent me. And this is the will of Him who sent me that I should lose nothing of all that He has given me, but raise it up on the last day. for this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the sun and believes in Him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”

So it's people who know that they are sinners, who will turn to Jesus the bread of life. Because he is the source of life for people who aren't perfect for people who are cut off from God by our own sin and say, God, please save me. He sends us Jesus. You send just Jesus who comes into our own condition, who himself became cut off from God by dying on a cross and entering into death that we deserve. And then he raised himself to new life so that he will raise you up on the last day and all who believe in him. And then he doesn't leave you alone to just ponder that he gives you the very Bread of Life himself. When you come to eat his body and blood.

We become connected to the source of life, because we know that we need it, because we know that we need a savior tomorrow. bring us back to him. We become one with Jesus. And as it says in john chapter six, then he will raise us up on the last day and give us eternal life with him. Now we in the church, we struggle with this, we struggle with the idea that good people can go to hell. Because we think there's such a thing as good people. We look out at the world and we see all these amazing people doing amazing things. And there are if you look at the comparisons, in fact, many people outside the church are way better than those people inside the church. Sometimes they give more, they volunteer more, they do more, they care more. They're just wonderful people and I know a lot of and I'm sure you do too.

But what it is is for us to continue thinking that We are good to continue thinking that we have something. Eventually we do something that makes us feel guilty. And we have to justify. There's a song by Meghan Trainor that really runs through exactly how we do this. It's called walkashame.

“well, please don't judge me. It was mad late. I had a lot to drink, but I was only being safe. It was a walk of shame. Don't act like you've been you haven't been there. 7am with the bedhead? Everybody knows it's a walk of shame. But my Daddy Knows I'm a good girl. We all mistake make mistakes in the drunk world. everyone here’s done the walk of shame.”

Do you hear all the ways she justifies herself? It was it was late so you can understand I had a drink and I was being safe. It's not that bad. You done it. We've all been in the same place. My dad knows that I'm a good girl. There are all these reasons I shouldn't be judging myself. Why she has to tell herself that she doesn't believe it. And eventually there will become a point where you don't believe it either. Or you look at yourself and your justifications, just don't do it.

And when you're there thinking good people go to heaven, well, suddenly, you're not a good person. But you need then is to be connected, to learn to eat of the bread of life, that is Jesus. He gives this gift freely to you.

Now often, we continue thinking about this, and we say, but that just isn't fair. How could God judge people who are doing these He pulled I talked about. You know what that's like saying? That's like saying, How could someone starve if they refuse to eat? There's food all around them, but they say No, I will not be drawn into eating this food. I can live on my own. It doesn't work that way, does it? You need food to live. Or it'd be like saying, How could someone be thirsty if they don't drink any water? The only way to not be thirsty is to drink. And we know that so we do anything we can to get to it. We do anything we can to get the food we need to get the water we need.

And it's the same for Jesus.

So we do anything we can to be included in him to eat his body and drink his blood and become a part of his church because that's how we have life and without that We only hunger, we only thirst. We have nothing. The only thing we can look forward to is death and hell. So it's not that good people go to heaven when they die. It's just the opposite. Good people who are confident in their goodness and their independence. They're the ones who turn away from from life who don't eat it. They're the ones who end up in death and hell for all eternity. See, it's the bad the ones who repent, the ones who turned to God and say, feed me please, I can do nothing. That's when God connects them to life. For Jesus promises to raise us up on the last day in his name

Transcribed by https://otter.ai