Really Sad

I watched a news special about a preacher the other day. I can't remember his name now, but I guess he's pretty well known. He has decided to preach against hell.

What I found to be so sad was that he believed people were coming to his church because of a fear of hell and not a love of God. In fact he couldn't reconsile himself to love God as long as he believed in hell.

When I was growing up I was raised to believe that if I died with even one little white lie that I hadn't repented for, I would surely burn. I will admitt that the fear of hell did not teach me to how have a relationship with God.

A few years ago I got saved and really started learning more about "being saved" (a concept scoffed at in the religion I grew up in). It was a relief to concretrate more on my relationship with God than my fear of God.

That said, there has to be a middle ground, don't you think? The bible talks about hell, we know that. And if one believe's the Book to be the word of God, then we have to assume there is a hell because the Book is not wrong.

This preacher spoke of hell like it's somewhere God sends us. My studies have made me grow to believe that God does not send us to hell, we send ourselves, and it's not His will that any of us go there. I just found my heart going out to him because I felt like all those years of being raised in church and all of that schooling....he had missed the big picture. I guess maybe I related a little because I too had been raised in church and had gone to a christian universtiy and ended up missing the big picture myself.

Right before I got saved I heard a scripture I had heard a thousand times...but this time it made sense. It was when Jesus said what the two greatest commandments were....and it finally occured to me that if we love God above all else and love our neighbors like our brother...we will end up naturally follwing all of the other commandments. Amazing how something so simple can be so hard to understand.