Jude 2

If the wooing of Christ's wounds cannot make you love. Christ, do you think the flames of Hell will?
Charles Spurgeon
What a great quote from one of his sermons. I have added it to a message I am preaching. I cant stand the theory that the fear of Hell is what saves. It isnt biblical by any means!

I wonder if fear of hell brings true repentance but I know that Jesus spoke about it often so it has it's merits for sure.

I would think that if you consider people's varying temperaments that some are saved by preaching love, some by preaching righteousness, and some by preaching hell fire. Pull them from the flames if that's what it takes.

one love wrote:I cant stand the theory that the fear of Hell is what saves. It isnt biblical by any means!

Really, it is not a theory though. Jude tells us that is how to save some!

It is VERY biblical! I wouldn't say it is the best way, or the way to use often. I would say it shouldn't be used often at all, but it SHOULD be used some, the bible tells us that is how to save some!

Pastor Daryl

Neither wooing through His wounds nor fear of hell makes us love Christ. The cross is an offense, not an instrument of love, to the lost. And, hell is foolishness to them, too.

What will bring a person to repent, though, is godly sorrow. Now, the Holy Spirit is fully at work in bringing sorrow to bear in anyone's heart. Confronting someone with their guilt for breaking God's law and the grace of God that is available through Jesus Christ as the remedy for that is the great sermon of God's love for us, is it not? Romans 5:8 -- "God commends his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."

There is a mad streak of self-righteousness in each of us that rules us until we are humbled by the realization of a holy God and the redemption of our sins by His Son. We are so completely self-everything that I cannot comprehend how anyone can turn from sin and to Christ without having God's mirror of their true selves shown to them to their face. Lovingly. Graciously. Kindly. Patiently. Pleadingly. Urgently.

Wooing by the wounds of Christ and confronting with the truth of one's sin are necessary correlates, indispensible to full gospel sharing. While either one, unaided by the Holy Spirit's work, is certainly not the content of full gospel teaching we see in the Bible, it is also the sovereign work of God that, at any point a person may spiritually seize upon these truths with only a partial exposure and/or almost non-existent understanding of some of them. But, the means God chooses is gospel preaching, and the gospel is the full message of both the guilt and the wounds. Otherwise, it is really insignificant that God's love extends to us "while we were yet sinners", or it is no relief to us that while we were still sinners, "Christ died for us" because of God's commended love.

Incidentally (?), this movie was released today.

www.geniusthemovie.com

I highly recommend it.

onelove,
You have confused me yet again. In this thread you question "fear" as motivation in the salvation process. Yet in your other thread, about your hip hop friend being saved, he alludes to the power of the gavel (fear) as being instrumental in his salvation. Which is it? Does fear play a roll in the salvation of some, or not?


TW

onelove, I am not sure what application you would give to Spurgeon's statement. Yet, I can furnish you the application he gave to his own statement.

This link is the text of the full sermon from which your quote is supplied. www.spurgeongems.org/vols10-12/chs682.pdf

A few excerpts to put to rest any notion (not saying your notion, because I don't know exactly what you mean in your post) that Spurgeon or any real gospel preaching avoids fear of hell -- and these appear in the same sermon your quote is from:

God has ordained both the terrors of the Law and the tenderness of the Gospel—that by means of both—men may be saved.

The themes of mercy need, in order fully to manifest their brightness, the dark background of the terrors of the Law—for men will never value a Redeemer so well as when they have a very clear consciousness of the ruin from which He has redeemed them.


If you read the full sermon, Spurgeon makes the statement you quote in the context of rebutting the then-increasingly popular view that in hell, men will be restored to God through correction or purifying. He utterly denounces it as a perversion of Scripture, and then says .... your quote. In other words, if the gospel of Christ --- which he has made abundantly and painfully clear in the earlier parts of the sermon include the terrors of hell and the fear of God's wrath --- as demonstrated in the wounds of Christ cannot save a man while he is alive on earth, then how can hellfire save him after he is dead? That's his point. That's the application of the statement. In the link I supplied, go to page 6 and read beginning at subheading #3. Read it through. That's for all of us who would comment on the quoted part.

If I may add one thought, I have come into contact with more churched people in the past few years who do not believe in a literal burning hell than in my previous 27 years of ministry combined.

This leads me to believe, and grieves me, that the church has failed to clearly communicate the reality of a subject that Jesus preached and taught extensively during his ministry.

Hebrews 2:1
Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip.