I mean for us men, come on, pick up your towels; but really if we leave it there, is it that big of a deal? Is it worth degrading the intelligence, and being disrespectful, to a man that you would expect to die for you, if an intruder came in the house tonight? Does your husband know you're saved, even if he does something stupid - because we need to know that.
Does your wife know you're saved even, if she disappoints you; or do you withdraw, and not talk for two and three days at a time? So a woman who's supposed to be the love of your life, that you want to do life with forever - you punish her because she disappointed you, and she has no idea what she's done. Does your wife know that you're saved, even if she disappoints you?
The alternative is that we live a life where we're on our way to heaven some day, and there's this some day, some day… the lion and the lamb; some day… the no sickness, dying, crying, sadness.
There’s this some day aspect to salvation, and if we're not careful, as Christians we paint this picture of salvation as: hey, get saved, and one day you get to die, and it'll all get better. We don't want that!
No, a far better calling would be to be known as a group of people who are bringing heaven to earth to everybody they come in contact with now! That we are to be ministers in this kingdom - the kingdom of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost; that the kingdom of God is not up and down, or this way and that - the kingdom of God is actually in the last place you looked for it, which is inside of you. We are called to minister that.
So I was sitting around with a group of people, and we were brainstorming about: how can we bring heaven to earth. This brainstorm we had all kinds of answers, all the typical Pentecostal answers you know, like ‘press in’, ‘break through’, ‘pray more’, ‘fast more’. All those are right - not right or wrong - but in my infinite creativity, this is what hit me: the best way to bring heaven to earth, is to avoid hell.
The best way to bring heaven to earth, is to stop bringing hell to earth.
So I started doing this study on hell, and I realised that when I just looked at what Jesus said about hell, that I had it all wrong. Can I share it with you? No one's going to get mad at me?
Like there are three different words for hell - three different words that translate ‘hell’.
1) One of them is fairly irrelevant to us - it's the word Tartoro. That word is only used one time in the whole Bible, and that's in 1 Peter. Tartoro was a Greek mythological word, about a place the Greek gods created to punish disobedient angels.
Jesus only used two words for hell. He said the word ‘hell’ 18 times, and there were two different hells. The first hell was called ‘Gehenna’ and the second hell was called ‘Hades’.
2) Now Hades was only used by Jesus three times - and this is the hell you really, really, really want to avoid okay! Hades was the hell ‘in the unseen place’, like it was the hell of the grave. It's the hell you go to after you die. This is the hell that gets thrown into the lake of fire.
In Revelations it says: “and death and Hades gets picked up, and thrown into the lake of fire”. So this is the one you don't want to go to, because this is the one that ends up in the lake of fire. This is a bad plan. This is in the unseen place.
Jesus only used that word three times. The first time He says: “woe to you Capernaum, how can you escape the condemnation of Hades”?