Podcasts about matthew 25:31-46

Hey, y'all! Welcome to the Gary Church Podcast . . . from Gary Church, here in Wheaton, IL. We would love to have you worship with us! You may find more information about our next worship service at www.garychurch.org. This is the scripture and sermon from November 26, 2023 . . . Christ the King Sunday!  Our scripture is read by Terry Balke (00:05) and the sermon by Rev. Dr. Daniel Cochran is entitled “Revere” (04:57). At Gary Church our mission through Christ is to grow in joyful faith and serve all in love! Ezekiel 34: 11-16, 20-24Matthew 25:31-46 Revised Common Lectionary

Matthew 25:31-46 New International Version The Sheep and the ...

Reign of Christ - Proper 29 (34) Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Pentecost (Year A, 2022-2023)Scripture Readings: Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24, Psalm 100, Ephesians 1:15-23, Matthew 25:31-46

Camp Hill UMC, Celebration Sermon, March 14 2021, Kathleen Kind, Putting Others First, Matthew 25:31-46

John asks "What’s the Deal with the Reign of Christ Sunday?"He then explores that For Matthew the reign of Christ is described in Sermon on Mount and how that helps us read this last story of the final teaching block - the parable of the sheep and goats. How does this help us glimpse what the kingdom of heaven and the reign of Christ looks like.In light of that do we act to earn something, because it is the right thing to do, or because that is just who we are?

Eastern Hills Baptist Church

Mike McKenna from Tabor brings our final message of the Remember the Poor series, a series in which we are journeying to develop awareness, mercy and compassion for the lost, poor, outcast and outsider. Support the show (https://tithe.ly/give?c=397080)

Welcome to the individual sermon page. On this page you can view a video of the sermon or you can ...

This sermon looks at the coming Judgement and what is the criteria to be those who go to heaven?

The criteria for judging if we are truly ready for the return of Jesus is how we love one another. ; Matthew 25:31-46

Reflections of a conversation from South Dakota Matthew 25:31-46

Jeff McLain looks at Matthew 25:1-13 as he concludes our series, Illustrate. Illustrate is our 13-week, Sunday morning series, exploring the parables Jesus used to illustrate for us the realities and inbreaking of the Kingdom of God; and so we can embody what life in the Kingdom looks like.Support the show (https://tithe.ly/give?c=397080)

From Matthew 25, Jesus will separate out posers from the genuine. (v.32) Jesus loves the least and anyone who also does the same. (v.40) Clearly better to be “sheep” than “goat”. (v.46) Take Home Truth: Jesus doesn’t want religious, but rewards the righteous who recklessly love the least. How to Love the Least: Feed the hungry and thirsty. Shelter and clothe the homeless. Care for the sick and imprisoned.

Reign of Christ Proper 28 - Sunday after Pentecost (Year A) Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24, Psalm 100, Ephesians 1:15-23, Matthew 25:31-46

SUNDAY, January 1, 2017 10:00 am “The Coming King” Revelation 21:1-6 Matthew 25:31-46

SUNDAY, January 1, 2017 10:00 am “The Coming King” Revelation 21:1-6 Matthew 25:31-46

"in Long Beach as it is in Heaven." For more information visit: garden.church

"in Long Beach as it is in Heaven." For more information visit: garden.church

Authentic love and worship of God is revealed when we seek justice in the world.

The New Testament Christian "visits."

The New Testament Christian "visits."

The Sermon Power Point is available by clicking on the sermon title above.

The Sermon Power Point is available by clicking on the sermon title above.

sermon transcript Introduction This is the last sermon in Matthew. Matthew is a powerful testimony of the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, and we come, one last time, for the third time now, to Jesus' incredible words in Matthew 25, commonly known as "the sheep and the goats". We've already had a kind of an expository overview of these words, Matthew 25:31-46, in a previous sermon. Last week, we zeroed in specifically on the doctrine of hell, and what these dreadful, these terrifying words mean, "Depart from me, you who are cursed into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” But this week, I want to talk about “mercy ministry” from as a starting point from the sheep and the goats. By "mercy ministry" I mean caring for the needy around us, for those that are hurting, those that are hungry, thirsty, those that are broken down by life, that we would minister to them. All my Christian life, I must be honest, I have struggled with the obligation that scripture lays on the people of God to care for the poor and needy of the world. I would say it wasn't until I went overseas on a series of mission trips that I really saw scenarios of poverty that just hit me at a deeper level and made me realize how far I had to grow in this area. I'm not saying there's not poverty in America, but you really do have to go overseas to see the way that some people are living in this world and have it just reach down into your heart and convict you and transform you, and that's, at least in my case, that's what had to happen. In the summer of 1986, I went on a short-term mission trip to Kenya. There were different phases to the summer 10-week mission trip. We did a variety of ministries, and then we had one final week, where we all gathered, the 40-50 of us who had been scattered all over the country. We reassembled one last time for one week of final teaching and prayer and decompression and all that, in Mombasa, which is a port city on the Indian Ocean in Kenya. A strong Muslim presence is in this sprawling city. Part of that time, I guess a day or so into our time there, some of us took a trip in a rented van to drive through the city, a kind of a tour of this historic city of Mombasa. It was a comfortable van, it was air-conditioned, it was pleasant, and we rode through one of the poorest areas of town, and I felt like I was in some kind of an air-conditioned bubble riding through a sea of poverty. It became somewhat of a metaphor of my American Christian way of living, that I actually could live the rest of my life that way. I just could just move right through life in an air-conditioned bubble and see but not really interact with the desperately poor and needy people around me. The next summer I went to Pakistan, 1987, and there were beggars everywhere. I had never really seen beggars like we saw in Pakistan. We would go to the bank and cash our traveler's checks to get local currencies, so we could do various things, and as soon as we come out of the bank, there would be at least five people coming and just relationally assaulting us, not physically, but just there with their needs and wanting money. Since we didn't speak a common language, they would point to their mouths and to their stomachs saying that they were hungry. So, I asked a missionary, "What should we do?" He told us that you need to understand that a lot of these beggars are really just working for a beggar syndicate, and they take the money and give it to... Somewhat like a prostitution ring, give it to an overlord who then cares for them out of that. I said, "Okay, but they're still coming to us." He said, "Well, one thing you might want to do is go and buy some fresh bread and just have it with you." So, I did, and that was delicious bread. Beggars would come up, they would point to their stomachs, and I would pull out the bag with the bread. I'd let them smell the bread, and I'd offer them some bread, and one man as I handed him bread, took it and threw it on the ground and walked away. I must tell you that there was a sinful relief inside me when he did it, because it confirmed this little sense, I had that there weren't genuinely needy people, but there was just a show of need. That was until about three minutes later, when a woman came up with a young child, pointing to her stomach, I gave her the bread, she divided it in a half, immediately ate it, and so did her child. Those are the tough ones, aren't they? They're real, and they really live out there, and they're really hungry and we can feed them. There's the problem. What do we do with them? I've come to the conclusion that the Lord Jesus Christ does not want us to come to a safe, neat, easy evangelical formula answer to the problem of poverty in the world. This sermon is not going to be that. I'm going to give you a series of biblical priorities, but you know what's going to happen. It will be easy for you to look at each of these five priorities as an escape valve so that you don't need to sacrifice for the poor and needy. It's not what I'm doing, because in each case, I'm going to give you the Biblical priority and then say, "But it doesn't mean such and such." Mercy Ministry Jesus' example compels action. It's a call to a life of mercy ministry. 2 Corinthians 8:9, "For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich." Jesus means, I think, to bring us to a point of desperation concerning the overwhelming physical needs of people all around us. I don't mean ultimate desperation, but that we would despair in our usual system of self-reliance. The problem is bigger than we can solve, it swallows up any individual, it swallows up any local church, it swallows up even a nation. I don't know how many billion dollars of American aid have gone down to Haiti, but it's somewhat like a sink hole down there, and you could multiply it by 10 and the problems would still be there. I'm not saying that there's not legitimate things that can be done with money, I'm just saying the problems are bigger than any of us, and the Lord means to stand in front of us and confront us with the problem. I think about the account of the feeding of the 5000 as one of the few things in the everyday life and ministry of Jesus that makes it to all four Gospels. Very few of his events before his arrest and trial and his last week make it in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but the feeding of the 5000 does. After Jesus administered to these people, it says in Matthew chapter 14, "When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, this is a desolate place, and the day is now over. Send the crowds away in the villages so they can go buy themselves some food. But Jesus said to his disciples, ‘They don't need to go away, you give them something to eat.’” In John's account, Jesus initiates the whole question. “Where are we going to buy bread so that all these people may eat?" He initiates the question and John tells us very poignantly, Jesus did this only to test them, Philip in particular, because He already knew what He was going to do. That is incredibly revealing for me, Jesus actually intends to test us in this matter of poor and needy ministry. He stands in front of you, and He brings you to a fork in the road and He tests you. He says, "What are you going to do?" He watches to see what we'll do, and I think He means to strip us of self-reliance because the problem's too big for us. He means for us to do what Jesus did when the little boy gave his five loaves and two fish. He took them and he looked up to heaven and He thanked God for what had been provided, and then He miraculously fed the 5000 plus the women and children. This is the test. Will we face the huge overwhelming needs, and will we look upward to God and then act or will we not? That’s the test. The issue of ministry to poverty-stricken people stands over us, it probes our hearts to prove how much sin is still in us. Christ does not mean for us to escape by means of a clever sermon or a formula or something that says, "You don't need to really do this for these reasons." He's going to be probing you the rest of your life about this. He does not mean for us American evangelicals to take an air-conditioned van ride through our time here in the world while other people are suffering. He means for us to tell the driver to stop, get out and go minister. There are two compelling passages in the scripture that keep this issue in front of me. There are a number of them that allude to it, but these two are the most powerful. One of them is the passage on the Good Samaritan in Luke 10, and the other is the sheep and the goats teaching that we're focusing on this morning. Let's look briefly at the Good Samaritan. What happens is a teacher of the law comes up to Jesus and asked, "What shall I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus then, in a very surprising way, gives him the law, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself." But it says the lawyer wanted to justify himself, so he asked, "And who is my neighbor?" Jesus then tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, a man on the road from Jericho who is beaten by some robbers and left stripped and bleeding by the side of the road. A priest and a Levite, both of them see the man. Jesus makes it plain that they see him, but they pass by on the other side and do nothing for the man lying there in the gutter. But a Samaritan man sees him, takes care of him even at the point of great cost and inconvenience. Tim Keller, who's a pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian New York City, wrote a book on mercy ministry, says, "We all live on the Jericho Road. You're on the Jericho Road every day of your lives. We're surrounded by opportunities to minister to people who are suffering, beaten by life and lying bleeding by the side of the road. We all have a tendency to want to justify ourselves and thus excuse ourselves from sacrificial ministry to the poor and needy, and to be like the priest and Levite who see the need and pass by on the other side, go about our business. If we are honest, then we can all see our own sinful omissions in the priest and Levite who pass by on the other side, and we are convicted by the Good Samaritan who allows himself to be interrupted, whatever his business was, gets diverted out of his life course and goes and takes care of this man.” Now remember some key issues of the parable. The question at hand is, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Is that a topic of interest to you? Let me ask another question, is Jesus' opinion on that topic of interest to you? How is it then that Jesus talking about the Good Samaritan and taking care of poor and needy is an answer to that question? Clearly, Jesus felt the parable of the Good Samaritan was relevant to this line of inquiry. Jesus teaches in some mysterious way that full obedience to the law of Moses is required to inherit eternal life. Once we are more fully instructed by the rest of the New Testament, indeed the whole Bible, we recognize that none of us can be or ever has been fully obedient to the law of Moses, except one man, Jesus Christ, who fully obeyed those two commandments, and who saves us by His righteousness, who saves us by His obedience to the law and by His death on the cross for our disobedience. Turn the whole thing around, and guess what, you know where you are in the parable of the Good Samaritan? You're the guy who got beaten and is laying by the side of the road, and Jesus is the Good Samaritan who comes and saves you. But that's not enough, is it? Clearly, Jesus is saying, "What does it mean to love your neighbor?" At some point, you're no longer the man beaten by the side of the road, you are one of those individuals walking by who sees the need. Then you must become like Jesus, you must imitate Him, because the love of Christ constrains you, compels you, it's in you now, and you're thinking like Jesus. That's what I get out of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Notice that the expert in the law also is seeking to justify himself asking, "Now who is my neighbor?" That just shows the tendency we have to get out of the situation, to evict and not do anything in that situation. Jesus said at the end, "Go and do likewise." Are we to take that at His word? The second instance is the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25. These are some of the most powerful words I've ever heard in my life. My sister at her wedding asked me to read scripture at her wedding, and she chose this passage of scripture. I was amazed. At the rehearsal I was surrounded by a lot of her non-Christian friends, and they were reading also. Then I got up and read this passage. You could have heard a pin drop. It was like the wedding rehearsal just came to a stop. I wanted to say, "I want you to know I didn't choose this passage for a wedding." My sister did, but my sister has a heart for the poor and needy, she wanted it read in her wedding, and I did read it at her wedding. "When the son of man comes in His glory and all His angels with Him, He will sit on His throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He'll put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then He will say to those on His right, ‘Come you who are blessed by my Father, take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you invited me in. I needed clothes, and you clothed me. I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison, and you came to visit me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you, a stranger invite you in or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick in prison and go to visit you? The king will reply, I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it for me.’ Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed into the eternal fire, prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry, and you gave me nothing to eat. I was thirsty, you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger, and you did not invite me in. I needed clothes and you did not clothe me. I was sick and in prison, and you did not look after me.’ They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty, or a stranger needing clothes or sick or in prison and not help you? ‘And he will reply, I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did not do for me.’ Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” This passage places mercy ministry in the context of the end of the world. I said before, this is not a parable. This is what will happen. You see what I'm saying? It is what will happen. He's going to separate the people like a shepherd separating sheep from the goats, but it's not a parable, this is going to happen. And the issues couldn't be more intense, heaven and hell, eternity in heaven, eternity in hell, is the outcome, and the basis for the separation here seems to be what you did and didn't do in life. We've already covered that there's a difference between being saved by works and being assessed by works. But Jesus here assesses by works, and the key issue here was what we call "ministry to felt needs or mercy ministry", simple things, somebody's hungry and you feed them. Central to that is Jesus' clear identification with poor and needy people. "I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink. Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it for me." Some have said this proves what the social gospel folks say is the universal fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man, that we are all in the family together. We're all in one family and Jesus sees it that way. I actually don't think so, and I'm going to talk more about that later. Jesus earlier in Matthew's Gospel has already identified his family. He was told that his mother and his brothers were waiting outside for him. He said, "Who is my mother? And who are my brothers?" Pointing to his disciples, He said, "Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother." I don't think Jesus had forgotten that by the time He got to chapter 25, but we need to understand at this point it's all over. The sheep are the sheep, and the goats are the goats, and we know who the family of God is. Jesus identifies Himself with His church. He identifies himself with the sheep, He identifies Himself with his people. Remember Saul of Tarsus breathing out murderous threats against the Lord's disciples. Jesus intervenes with these words, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It's my body. I am the head. You're hurting me." Conversely, then anyone who helps brothers and sisters in Christ, they're helping Jesus. This does not mean that we should only minister to Christians, I'm going to talk more about that, but Jesus is identifying in this way. So, this is the "sheep and the goats" teaching. These are the two great passages that are in front of me that keep “mercy ministry” constantly on my mind. There are others but these are the two big ones. What is our context here? We've looked at the context in Matthew, what is our context in history? Let me say, before I talk about historical context, throughout 20 century of church history, the church has on and off again, struggled to keep two things together. Ministry of word and ministry of deed, or the true Gospel and truly Christian outreach to the poor and needy. The church has struggled to keep the two together. Sometimes it's been all one and not the other, sometimes all the other and not the one. Frequently, neither one. But the church has struggled to keep the true Gospel producing true genuine ministry to the poor and needy. The early church didn't seem to struggle with it. I'm talking about Acts chapter 2. Peter preaches the Pentecost sermon, 3000 are baptized, added to the number that day. Right away, they devote themselves to the apostles' teaching, so they come in through the preaching of the gospel, and they right away are busy with doctrine, they're getting the apostles' teaching. They devote themselves to that and to the fellowship, that's the sharing together, the breaking of bread and the prayer. Everyone's filled with awe and many wonders and miraculous signs are done by the apostles, almost always mercy ministry, just done supernaturally, caring for sick people, dying people, that kind of thing, the apostles doing miracles. All the believers were together and had everything in common, selling their possessions and goods they gave to anyone as he had need. There you have apostolic teaching and a solid mercy ministry going on both inside and outside the walls of the church. So also, the early Christians during the time of the persecution of the Roman Empire. It's told that the Roman Christians would go along the Tiber River in Rome and pick up babies that had been abandoned there, infanticide. They were seeking to kill unwanted babies, and the Christians would go and scoop them up and raise them. Julian, the apostate, the evil pagan emperor who wanted to go back to paganism after Christianity had taken root in the Roman Empire, commented ruefully on what he called "the Galileans", that's what he called the Christians. "Not only do they care for their own poor and needy, but ours as well. We are having trouble competing with these people." That was the nature of the early church. But over the centuries, through the medieval Roman Catholic church era the gospel was lost. People lost the gospel. They didn't understand how a sinner is made right with God. Frequently, when they would sin, they would go and confess their sins to a priest and the priest would give them good works to do to reduce time in purgatory. Friends, there is no purgatory, there's heaven and hell, but the priest would say, "You know, you can reduce your time in purgatory if you just do some good deeds." The good works were either religious works like the saying of prayers, or the caring for the poor and needy, and this way, you could reduce your time in purgatory. The Reformation, through Martin Luther and Calvin and others, reclaimed the gospel, and the 16th century and on saw a growth again of a beautiful relationship between the true Gospel and a healthy mercy ministry of the poor and needy. Right on through the time of George Whitfield and John Wesley, who cared for orphans in Georgia, and others who just cared for the poor and needy in England, all kinds of combination of good preaching and good mercy ministry. The Moravians sold themselves into slavery in the West Indies so that they could share the gospel with slaves. There was William Wilberforce who understood the gospel well, and for 26 years fought to get rid of slavery and the slave trade in the British Empire. The Rise of Social Gospel But then in the 19th and 20th century we had the social gospel. People came in and they did not understand, through Darwinism and liberal theology and all that, they lost the gospel in a different way. They became universalistic. They basically said, "Anybody and everybody is going to heaven, that's not the issue. The issue is the world's a really bad place because we don't understand how much God loves us, we don't understand how good God is and how we should be loving each other [social gospel]. We need to stamp out societal ills and evils and try to make the world a better place." Charles Sheldon wrote his book, In His Steps, in which he asked the famous question, "What would Jesus do?" But he was an advocate of what we call Christian socialism, and definitely a part of that social gospel movement. The central problem with the social Gospel is they didn't understand how a sinner is made right with God. They didn't understand the need sinners have to be saved. As a result of that, fundamentalists over-reacted, they said that the liberals have lost the gospel, the deity of Christ, the virgin birth, the miracle workings of Jesus and all that. We've got to protect these fundamentals of the gospel and not do anything that these social gospelers are doing. So, they pulled in and worked on the doctrine, but they were in a different kind of bubble, not interacting with the outside world, trying to protect the gospel, so they didn't do those kinds of mercy ministries. Recently in the evangelical world, we've seen a change, people have gotten back. First it was moral issues like prayer in the schools, 10 Commandments, abortion and other things. Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship got into the prisons and started ministering to people at that level, and you started to see more and more evangelicals getting involved in mercy ministry, and I think in a healthy way. There are role models, especially in urban churches, like I've already mentioned, Redeemer Presbyterian, Tim Keller's church there in Manhattan, and 10th Presbyterian of Philadelphia, and John Piper's efforts at racial reconciliation in Minneapolis. So where does that leave us now? We live in a technologically advanced world, in which images of an earthquake in Haiti or floods in Pakistan can be right on your iPhone immediately as soon as they happen. We see more than ever before, the crushing burdens of this sin cursed world and the trouble we're in. Also, in the US and in other places in the Western world there's economic uncertainty, more and more unemployed people, a different kind of homeless people, some with college degrees, but are underemployed or unemployed. More and more troubles in churches just like ours, where people are really financially needy. The present administration, the Obama administration, I think sees increasingly a role of government in solving those problems, and that's really a fork in the road, the question, "Are we going to see bigger and bigger and bigger government answering these problems, or is there a different solution?" I think there's a different solution, I think the church is at the centerpiece of what God wants to do to solve these problems in the world. Among Christians, especially younger Christians, we're seeing more and more of a zeal to do a kind of physical ministry of the poor and needy, disconnected from the gospel and the exclusivity of Christ. Lots of college students who have no commitment to Christ at all want to do things to give something back, or they just feel good building homes for the homeless. CNN has a little spot every week called CNN's Heroes of the Week. I went on their website and found out who it was this week, it was a guy who builds bridges in Kenya. So, I'm back to Kenya again. There he is building bridges. He's built 46 bridges to help with local flooding and other things, but no mention of Christ. He may be a Christian. I don't know, I tried to find out whether he was. There's no mention, it doesn't seem relevant. That's where we live right now. People who are energetic and excited to do good works, but like back in the Kennedy days with the Peace Corps and all that, wanting to do exciting things with the United Nations or whatever, but no connection directly to the gospel. Christians can get involved, but the gospel's not at the center. We may be kind of oozing slowly back into a social gospel again. Priority of Gospel in Mercy Ministry That's just laying the land. What priorities do I want to give you quickly to try to sort these things through? As I look through scripture, I'm going to give you five, and instead of giving the applications at the end of the sermon, I'm going to do it as I make these points. The first priority concerning ministry to the poor and needy is justification before ministry. You must be born again before you can do anything God sees as good. That's the priority. You don't have any good works until you come to faith in Christ. There are really only two religions in the world: The religion of salvation by grace through faith in Christ and the religion of good works, and at the center of that religion of good works is usually some kind of ministry of the poor and needy. Ministry to the poor and needy will not save you on judgement day. Now you can read the sheep and the goats and say, "I don't see faith in Jesus anywhere here." That's where scripture has to interpret scripture, the gospel is clear that we must believe in Jesus, to trust in Him for the salvation of our souls. “By grace we have been saved through faith, and this is not of yourselves, it's the gift of God, not by works so that no one can boast.” Jesus comes to His apostles the night before His crucifixion, and He's there washing their feet. He comes to Peter and Peter has no interest in having Jesus wash his feet. He asked one of those obvious questions, "Are you about to wash my feet?" I think he was probably the seventh or eighth apostle, I don't know. "Yes Peter, I'm going to wash your feet." Actually, he said, "What I'm doing now you do not understand but later you will." The deeper answer. "Later you will understand the significance of the foot washing." "Never Lord, you shall never wash my feet." Jesus said, "Unless I wash you, you have no part with me." So first, Jesus has to wash you, then you can wash each other's feet. The Son of Man came not to be served. He doesn't need you; you need Him. “The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many.” The first priority then is you must be born again, you must be justified through faith in Christ, therefore come to Christ. Look to Christ, look to His blood shed on the cross. Don't try to earn your salvation by getting involved in the community or Habitat for Humanity, or any of these other good things, don't do that first. First come to the cross. But this doesn't mean that faith which is apart from works stays apart from works. The faith that justified is never apart from works. It always produces good works. Because when you are born again, you are spiritually united with Jesus and through the Spirit, his intentions and personality and his love start to pulsate through your soul, and you can't help but love the poor and needy if you're really a Christian. There's just going to be good works flowing through a faith that genuinely justifies, but first, you must be born again. The second gospel priority is ministry to the soul above ministry to the body. It is a higher priority for Christians to minister to the soul which will endure forever, than to the body which is destined for the grave. If you're already going to the "But that doesn't mean" part, hang on, okay, let me make my point and then I'll say, "But that doesn't mean... " There are three passages that teach me this priority. First, Matthew 16:26, "What would it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?" Or what could a man give in exchange for his soul?” Here, Jesus plainly puts the value of the soul as higher than any physical thing. If you took a homeless man from the streets of Chicago, gave him a new set of clothes, fed him for a year, gave him a job's training program, enabled him to get a good solid job, and he kept that job and became middle class, healthy, strong, and didn't love Jesus and died and went to hell, what would it profit him? What good is it? The second passage that teaches me this is after the feeding of the 5000. The next day the people were looking for another meal. Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, you're looking for me, not because you saw a miraculous sign, but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. Do not labor for the food that spoils but for the food that endures to eternal life which the Son of Man will give you." Stop thinking about your stomach. Stop thinking about your body. It is temporary. That's what Jesus is saying. Ecclesiastes 6:7 says, "All man's efforts are for his mouth yet his appetite is never satisfied." I don't think Ecclesiastes 6:7 is saying all man's efforts should be for his mouth, it's just saying that's what they tend to be. Or in Philippians 3, Paul says, "For as I have often told you before and now say again, even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is on earthly things." Jesus is urging everyone, both the lost, the needy, and Christian workers and evangelists, seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you as well. That's not one of the three key passages, I just slipped that one in there, but put your mind first on the spiritual things and let the other things come. What is that third and final passage? Some men brought to Jesus in Matthew 9:2, a paralyzed man, a paralytic, lying on a mat. When Jesus saw their faith, He said to the paralyzed man, "Take heart, son, your sins are forgiven." What was Jesus' priority there? Ministry to the felt need. What was the felt need? Freedom from paralysis. Jesus goes to the heart of the matter. "Take heart, son, your sins are forgiven." Let me ask you a question, if that's all Jesus had done, I don't mean just any person, now this is Jesus, the Judge of all the Earth, declaring that man's sin is forgiven, would that have been enough for the paralyzed man that day? Is that a valid ministry, if he had sent him home paralyzed, but forgiven of all of his sins? I tell you it is a valid ministry, because within the promise that his sins will be forgiven is the promise of resurrection to a glorified life, in which not just paralysis, but every disease and pain and suffering will be healed. Jesus in effect said, "I'll get to your paralysis by and by." He actually did it right away because they're saying, "This fellow is blaspheming. Who has the right to forgive sins?" Jesus said, "So that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on Earth to forgive sins,” he said to the man, "Rise and walk." Therefore, we must put a priority on gospel ministry, a ministry of the Gospel above ministry to the body. The gospel is the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes. Our good example will not save anyone's souls. I think a lot of you have a wonderful example, you have a sweet countenance, your face looks delightful, you are pleasant, you are patient, you are tender-hearted, you have a sweet tone of voice. I can just tell you there are non-Christians that can do better at all that stuff than you. The difference between you and them is you have the gospel, and they don't. So, in the midst of all of our ministry to the body must be a commitment to share the gospel as often as we can. There's a supposed quote and I've quoted it before, from St. Francis of Assisi, I actually don't think he said it, but some people say he did, "Preach the gospel, use words if necessary." Have you heard that before? Oh, my goodness. Where do they come up with this stuff? "Preach the gospel, use words if necessary." And I lampooned it probably a year or two ago, saying it's like saying, "Feed the hungry, use food if necessary." I think food is necessary to feed the hungry, don't you? I think the words of the gospel are necessary to preaching the gospel, and that's the only thing that's going to save souls. However, this does not mean that we don't minister to the body. Frankly, if we're not ministering to the body, how can we say the love of God is in us? Jesus ministered to the body. He just put a priority over the soul, that's all. 1 John 3, "If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?" James says, "Suppose one of you has food and clothing and all kinds of the world's goods, and you see a brother without food or clothing, and you say, ‘Go, I wish you well, keep warm and well-fed’, but does nothing for his physical needs, what good is that?" Both James and John are saying the same thing. Faith without deeds is dead. There must be deeds. I'm just saying in the middle of the deed doing let's preach the gospel. The third gospel priority is ministry to believers above ministry to unbelievers. Galatians 6:10 is the key verse, "Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially those who belong to the household of faith." We see in the sheep and the goats, Jesus identifies with His people, "These are my brothers, these are my sisters, you cared for me by caring for them." What's interesting is Christians see Jesus in everything anyway, all the time, that's what we do. The law of Moses isn't just the law of Moses, or some letters engraved in a stone, Jesus is the law, and therefore we see Him in all of these encounters. He's at the center of it all. But the commands and examples of benevolence in the New Testament always focus primarily on church members helping other church members. It's true. Look it up. Over and over, its church caring for church. The gospel was moving so rapidly and advancing so much that someone went from non-Christian to Christian quickly, they went from non-Christian with tremendous needs to Christian with tremendous needs quickly. That's the best way to do it, friends. Let's lead them to Christ and then take care of their tremendous needs. Oh, how sweet would that be. This does not mean we should not minister to outsiders; it says in Galatians 6:10, "Let us do good to all people, just especially those who belong to the household of faith." If a Good Samaritan was going by, let's say he were a Christian, and this guy's lying by the side of the road, is he going to kneel down and say, "I need to see some spiritual credentials, please? Are you a Christian? Have you come to faith in Christ? Let me share the gospel with you, okay?" When Jesus was engaging frequently with the people, first it was preaching, then feeding the 5,000. What I'm saying is put a mental doctrinal priority on the preaching of the gospel, while you minister to the needs of the body. The fourth gospel priority, a little arcane, I'm not going to spend much time on it, but there are a lot of people talking about doing good to the city, a lot of urban ministry. They tend to be what I call "post-millennial", in other words, as you get better and better and better, as we preach the gospel, more and more, the city is going to get brighter and shinier and better and better, if we can just plant more trees and have more gardens and just cover over more graffiti and all that will solve the problems. Well, you know what's going to happen, have you seen those pretty little parks five years later? A Christian knows what's going to happen five years later. Actually, a Christian knows what's going to happen at the end of the world. It's all going to burn. Every little gospel island that we set up is just an oasis of hope pointing to a future city that will not be destroyed. Hebrews 11 says, "We are aliens and strangers here, and we're looking forward to a better city with foundations that are never going to go away." The people who say that we should do good to the city are saying, "Well, Jeremiah said the exiles, they should pray for the shalom or the peace of the city, the well-being of the city and settle in there. You're going to be there for seven years, do good to the city." Yes, but what they forget to notice is that the same prophet, Jeremiah said, "I want you to know what's going to happen to Babylon, it's going to be destroyed. So, while you do good to the city, keep in mind that someday it's going to be a burning heap of rubble where even the jackals will not live." We should realize that if we set up an urban ministry center, it might get vandalized. The computers might get stolen. The stuff we do feels temporary because the physical stuff really is temporary. That's why we're going to put our hope on the eschatological city that we're building, the new Jerusalem by the ministry of the gospel. Be hope-filled people, don't get discouraged easily. Finally, ministry to the poor above ministry to the rich. This is convicting for us. Luke 14:12-14, "Then Jesus said, 'When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or your relatives or your rich neighbors. If you do, they may invite you back, and so you'll be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the cripple, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.’” Reach out to those who can't pay you back, that's what Jesus is saying. That doesn't mean you can't have friends over for lunch. I'm just saying, where is the sacrificial ministry to people who are difficult to love and who seem to be a bottomless pit? You've got to do it with a hope that Jesus at the resurrection of the righteous will repay you. Let's focus on those. Find a ministry that causes you to get out of an air-conditioned bubble If you've been doing that, get out of that and go out in the streets and minister to people who are hurting. Counseling ministry will be another one. It's not just financial, sometimes people's lives are just falling apart, they may be wealthy materially, but they're hurting, hurting, hurting in their marriages. Let's get out of the air-conditioned bubble, let's minister as Jesus did.

Andy Davis preaches an expository sermon on Matthew 25:31-46. The main subject of the sermon is how Christ credits His people for their service to one another.

Introduction Two weeks ago, I had the privilege of going out in the neighborhood here, sharing the gospel, as we were preparing for Summer Sizzle. We were talking to a group of young men in their teen years, 14, 15, 16 years old, just sitting there, hard to get them to focus on what we were saying. Quite honestly, it was hard to get them to take us seriously. They were shooting looks at each other, making little smiles, talking on their cellphones or checking for text messages or whatever while we were talking to them. All of that until I said, "You know, I really would just like 20 minutes of your time. I'd like 10 minutes to go with you to hell, and then 10 minutes up in heaven, then I'd like to come back here and share the gospel with you. I think you'd give me full attention then." That got their attention, I think. We talked a little bit longer after that. This morning, I feel the weight of the gospel ministry, the weight of preaching. I have for the last handful of days. It seems to me that one of the responsibilities of a pastor, of a preacher of the gospel, of an evangelist, is to make these eternal issues, the future issues of heaven and hell vivid and real through words and through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. I need to make it come alive, make it real so that people can be wise and do what they need to do now while there's still time to prepare for death. That's what I want to do today, but it eludes me. It's beyond what I can do. I also have been asking the last couple of days, what demeanor should I have as a man standing here in front of you preaching about hell? What should my face look like? What should my tone of voice be like? My yearning was that it would be genuine, it wouldn't be an act, I wouldn't have to be acting in front of you, but that I would be genuinely caught up with these things and be able to tell you the truth. I'd like to ask that you pray for me while I preach because these things, I think are important. It's important that when you hear about hell, when you hear about an issue like this, and I think you have to be honest, you don't hear about very often, not to this level, that you hear it properly. I want it preached to you properly for the glory of God, and that's my desire. We're coming to The Sheep and the Goats now for a second week, we're going to have one more week next week, in which I talk about mercy ministry based on The Sheep and the Goats. As we come for a second week to The Sheep and the Goats, we're coming to a concentrated look on the doctrine of hell. We've already had several sermons in which we have unfolded in detail some aspects of the doctrine of heaven. It would be well worth doing in parallel with this, but I'm not doing that today, but just focusing on hell. Christ did not stop at talking about the glorious and joys and rewards of heaven but warned many times about the doctrine of hell. In Matthew 24 and 25, we've come against it again and again, but I haven't really stopped and focused on it like I'm going to do this morning. I'm going to concentrate on this one verse, verse 41, in the message this morning. "Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels." At the end of Matthew 25, also this statement, "Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life." This issue of hell has been hanging over us for some time in the Gospel of Matthew in Chapters 24 and 25 as Christ got the apostles there on the Mount of Olives and through them, the church and the world, ready for His Second Coming and for Judgment Day. The Timing of the Second Coming & Judgment is Unknown If you go back to Matthew 24:30, talking about the Second Coming of Christ, "At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn." Why are they going to mourn? Because Jesus is bringing judgment back with Him. It's a time of judgment. He likens it to the days of Noah, "As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage right up to the day Noah entered the ark, and they had no idea what would happen until the flood came in and swept them all away." That's how it's going to be at the coming of the Son of Man. Christ likens the Second Coming to the circumstances of the flood at the time of Noah. The flood was a devastating act of judgment around the world. So also, in the parable at the end of Matthew 24 of the faithful and unfaithful steward that the master put in charge of the house where Jesus focuses on the case of the wicked steward who says, "My Master's staying away a long time," and then he begins to beat his fellow servants and eat and drink with drunkards. "His master's going to come at a time he's not aware of, an hour he's not expecting. And he will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." Then in the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, we get just a touch of it, but in the larger New Testament context, we know exactly what Jesus means when the five foolish virgins come late and are pounding on the door and they want to enter in, they want to be led in, and he won't let them in. And he says, "I never knew you. I don't know you." He doesn't open the door for them. Then in the parable of the talents, in verse 30, concerning that one that hid the talent in the ground, the judgment on him is this, "Throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." We've seen this again and again in Matthew 24 and 25. To be fully faithful then to Jesus is to embrace everything He teaches, not just some of what He teaches. To be fully faithful to Jesus is to emphasize what He emphasizes, to the degree to which He emphasizes it, and therefore, we can't pick and choose. We have to understand this doctrine of hell. Two years ago, some members of our staff and I went to Ridgecrest for a conference, and we were just stunned, convicted, moved by a sermon by Don Whitney, entitled, “Hell is Real.” He began with these words, "Those who are not church-goers believe that men who preach from the Bible are always preaching about hell. Those who are church goers but who are not Southern Baptists typically believe that Southern Baptist preach frequently about hell. However, regardless of your denominational background, can you remember the last time you heard an entire sermon about hell? More and more evangelicals are now moving toward an inclusive position on how people get to heaven. That is, that the gates of heaven are opening wider to people of other faiths and that hell is less of a threat than previously preached for Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and others. For professing Christians who are not evangelicals, the consensus is fast becoming that in the end no one or almost no one will go to hell." Recently, R.C. Sproul said, talking about the doctrine of justification by faith that was uncovered and emphasized by Luther at the Reformation, "Justification is God's righteous declaration that sinners are not guilty in His sight and will not go to hell." That's what justification is. But R.C. Sproul was saying, "The prevailing doctrine of justification today is not justification by faith alone." It's not even justification by good works or a combination of faith and works. The prevailing notion of justification in Western churches today is justification by death. It is assumed that all one has to do to be received into the everlasting arms of God is to die. There is no hell, or if there is, God would never send anyone but the worst people to hell, and therefore, as long as you're not a Hitler or a serial killer or a terrorist or something, you're definitely not going to go to hell. In January of 1996, the Church of England and its American counterpart, the Episcopal church, officially rejected the traditional view of hell and embraced what is known as annihilationism: The view that those who aren't allowed into heaven will be annihilated, they will cease to exist after death. They said that the orthodox view of hell implies that God is, "A sadistic monster who consigned millions to eternal torment." In October of 2007, on the front of USA Today, the question was, "Is there a Hell? and 48%, or almost half of American adults said “No, there is no hell.” So, this morning, we have to focus on what Jesus taught about this and understand the prevailing currents and eddies of our evangelical culture, of the wider Christian culture, and of American culture. Now, what do we mean by hell? What does the Bible teach about this doctrine? Wayne Grudem put it this way, "Hell is a place of eternal conscious torment or punishment for the wicked by God." Eternal conscious torment as a punishment by God. Jonathan Edwards, in probably the single most famous sermon in history, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” warned his hearers at the end with these words. "O sinner, consider the fearful danger that you are in. It is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned who are already in hell. You hang by a slender thread with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and that thread every minute is ready to be singed and burned apart. And you have no interest in any mediator, you have nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you for one moment more." Hell: Annihilation vs. Eternal Torment I said that that was one of the most famous sermons in history, because it seems that a lot of English literature classes ask, "Have you read that sermon?" It's fascinating to me that they'd want you to read those kinds of things. In that message, Edwards was struggling, it seems, with language to describe Revelation 19:15, “Christ treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God." Edwards said this, "The words are exceeding terrible. If it had only been the wrath of God, the words would have implied that which is infinitely dreadful, but it is the fierceness and wrath of God. The fierceness of Jehovah. O how dreadful must that be. Who can utter or conceive what such expressions carry in them?" John Piper, a pastor in Minneapolis, was commenting on the fact that so many high school students read “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, and in some way minimize its language and some way critique it or despise its message as echoes from a puritanical era that thankfully, we are now out of it last. You never need to go there again. But John Piper asked a deeper question, "Why did Edwards wrestle with that kind of language?" Piper says, "What high school student is ever asked to come to grips with what really is an issue here?" If the Bible is true, and if it says that someday Christ will tread his enemies like a winepress with an anger that is fierce and almighty, and if you are a pastor charged with applying Biblical truth to your people so that they will flee the wrath to come, then what would your language be? What would you say to make people feel the reality of texts like these? Edwards labored over language and over images and metaphors because he was so stunned and awed at the realities that he saw in the Bible. Did you hear that one line in the quote I have just read, "Who can utter or conceive what such expressions carry in them?" Edwards believed that it was impossible to exaggerate the horror of the reality of hell. High school teachers then would do well to ask their students the really probing question, "Why is it that Jonathan Edwards struggled to find images for wrath and hell that shock and frighten, while contemporary preachers try to find abstractions and circumlocutions that move away from concrete, touchable Biblical pictures of unquenchable fire and undying worms and wailing, and gnashing of teeth?" If our students were posed with that simple, historical question, my guess is that some of the brighter ones would answer, "Because Jonathan Edwards really believed in hell, and most preachers today don't." I understand that there is a natural human repugnance to this topic. Mark Twain said this really strange thing, at least he read the New Testament, we'll give him that. But he said, "It is believed by everyone that when God was in heaven in the Old Testament era, he was stern, hard, resentful, jealous and cruel, but that when he came down to earth as Jesus, he became the opposite, sweet, gentle merciful, forgiving. But Jesus was a thousand billion times crueler than ever he was in the Old Testament.” Meek and gentle? By and by, we will examine that popular sarcasm by the light of the hell that he invented." Twain went on to say, "The invention of hell is the prodigious crime of the Bible." Charles Darwin, in his autobiography wrote of his spiritual slide from acceptance of general Christian doctrine to complete unbelief. "The key step," he said, “was his rejection of the doctrine of hell." He said, "I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true. For if so, the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother, and almost all my best friends will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine." So, searching around for some other way to think of the universe, I think led him toward natural selection, toward evolution. Clark Pinnock, a Canadian theologian who is drifted far from his evangelical roots, said, "I was led to question the traditional belief in everlasting conscious torment because of moral revulsion and broader theological considerations, not first of all on scriptural grounds." Did you hear that? "It wasn't the Bible that led me away from the doctrine of hell, it was just that I was personally morally revulsed from it and didn't like the doctrine." Back to Pinnock, "It just does not make any sense to say that a God of love will torture people forever for sins done in the context of a finite life. It's time for evangelicals to come out and say that the biblical and morally appropriate doctrine of hell is annihilation, not everlasting torment." John Stott shocked many of his evangelical friends by supporting this view, annihilationism. He said, "Emotionally, I find the concept of eternal conscious torment intolerable, and I do not understand how people can live with it without either cauterizing their feelings or cracking under the strain. But our emotions are a fluctuating, unreliable guide to truth." Thank God he said that. “Emotions must not be exalted to the place of supreme authority in determining it. My question must be and is not what does my heart tell me, but what does God's word say?" And then he went on a, I think, empty quest to try to redefine some words so that hell wasn't eternal. But at least he was trying to do it biblically. Now, Matthew 24 and 25, and some more evidence I'm going to give you in just a minute, shows very plainly and clearly that Christ warned us about hell again and again. Dorothy Sayers said, "There seems to be a kind of conspiracy, especially among middle-aged writers of vaguely liberal tendency to forget, or to conceal, where the doctrine of hell comes from. One finds frequent references to the, ‘Cruel and abominable medieval doctrine of hell,’ or ‘The childish and grotesque medieval imagery of physical fire and worms.’ But the case is quite otherwise. Let us face the facts. The doctrine of hell is not medieval, it is Christ's. It is not a device of medieval priestcraft for frightening people into giving money to the church, it is Christ's deliberate judgment on sin. The imagery of the undying worm and the unquenchable fire derives, not from medieval superstition, but originally from the Prophet Isaiah, and it was Christ who emphatically used it. One cannot get rid of it without tearing the New Testament to tatters. We cannot repudiate hell without altogether repudiating Christ.” It is a biblical fact that Jesus Christ taught far more about hell than any other figure in the Bible ever did. Most of the clear imagery we have about hell comes from Jesus. I want to give you a partial listing of some of the verses in which Jesus refers to hell and you get a sense of it. This is just a partial listing, this is not just something He mentioned once in a while, He mentioned it again and again and again. In the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew Chapter 5:22, "Again, anyone who says to his brother, 'Raca,' is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, 'You fool' will be in danger of the fire of hell." Matthew 8:11-12, "But I say to you that many will come from the east and the west and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, but the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." Matthew 10:28, "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell." In the parable of the wheat and the tares, Matthew 13, "The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of His kingdom everything that causes sin and all those who do evil. They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." In that same chapter, at the end of the parable of the good fish and the bad fish and the dragnet, Jesus said, "This is how it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." The parable of the wedding banquet. The king comes in and finds a man there who's not wearing the proper wedding clothes. He said, "Friend, how did you get in here without wedding clothes?" The man is speechless. The king told the attendants, "Tie him hand and foot and throw him outside into the darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen." Jesus in His sevenfold woe to the Scribes and Pharisees in Matthew 23 said, "You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?" In Mark Chapter 9:43-49, He said, "If your hand causes you to sin, then cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out. And if your foot cause you to sin, then cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to sin, then pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell, where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched. Everyone will be salted with fire." Luke 13:23-28, "Someone asked him, 'Lord, are only a few people going to be saved?'" He said to them, "Make every effort to enter through the narrow door, because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able to, and once the owner of the house gets up and closes that door, you will stand outside knocking and pleading, 'Sir, open the door for us.' But he will answer, 'I don't know you or where you come from.' Then you will say, 'We ate and drank with you, you taught in our streets.' But he will reply, 'I don't know you or where you come from. Away from me, all you evildoers! There will be weeping there, and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but you yourselves thrown out.’” Then very pointedly, in the rich man and Lazarus account in Luke 16, the rich man is thrown into hell, and it says, "In hell, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side so he called to him, 'Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue because I am in agony in this fire.'" That's just some of Jesus's teachings on hell. It is very plain and clear that Dorothy Sayers is right, Jesus taught this doctrine. Friends, He came into the world, He took on a human body to deliver us from hell. Isn't it appropriate that God, the Father would assign to Him the job of teaching us about it? I don't think a Sunday goes by without me looking at that wood cross up there in that latticework and thinking about it. This morning, more pointedly than usual. When we're singing, "Jesus, Thank You," that's what was in my mind. Jesus taught us about hell. It's not some scheme originated by hellfire and brimstone preachers to get more money or to manipulate people, it is something Jesus taught, because it's real. What I want to do is draw out aspects of the doctrine of hell from one verse in the text. Look at Verse 41, and I'm going to go phrase by phrase, and leaning on these other verses, teach you what Jesus teaches us about hell based on this one verse. "Then He will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.'" That's the verse I want to focus on. First of all, let's understand who's speaking, it's Jesus, who has returned in heavenly glory, He's seated on the throne of judgment, He's judging the whole human race, everybody's gathered in front of Him. They're all there. He has already divided the entire human race into two categories, not seven, not 12, whatever many categories there are now, there's going to be two on that day, sheep, goats. Those on his right, the sheep are already blessed with the blessings of heaven. We talked about that in the last message. But then the King, the one seated on the throne, the one of authority to judge because He is the Son of Man, Jesus is going to say to those on his left, these words. Look at the first phrase, "Depart from me." Depart from me. The goats, the lost people, the wicked, the sinners, they will be driven from Jesus's presence. He doesn't want to spend eternity with them. He doesn't want to be with them. They are His Creation, He created them, but He doesn't know them, and they don't know Him. So, He says, "Depart from me." They're going to be driven from His presence. It is a command given to them. They don't have an option in this matter. He wants them away. "Depart from me. Go away from me, I never knew you." This, I believe, is the worst punishment of all, being away from God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, being out of the presence of God. It's spoken of as outer or black as darkness because I think God is light. I think there'll literally be no light there, but God is light, and so you're away from the presence of God. It's commanded by the King, "Depart from Me. Go away from me." But no one is going to be able to obey that command. The goats will not move. They can't because they will not willingly throw themselves into hell. They will not willingly walk or gladly walk as some lost people think, like Mark Twain said, "Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company." Nobody is going to make the choice to go to hell when hell is clearly revealed with your own eyes of what it's like. The King will dispatch his angels with these kinds of commands, "Bind him hand and foot and throw him outside." The verb is consistently “thrown out” or “cast out”, this kind of thing. There's no choice in the matter. The goats will not be able to argue back or run or hide, or any of that. Angels are sent and they will bind them hand and foot and throw them outside into the darkness. One thing we have to understand when he says, "Depart from me," we should not imagine that the power of God is not in hell. Hell is powered by the Word of God. You need to understand that there's no place in the universe that isn't God's. Hell is God's hell. It bothers me when evangelicals make stupid statements such as “God doesn't send anyone to hell. People go there of their own free choice, and God merely ratifies the decision they've made their whole lives.” That's complete bunk. This seems to me like God is sending people to hell. I tell you, not a single one of the goats would willingly choose to go there on that day. It's a terrifying place. They're cast there, and the power of God is there, sustaining their existence and their torments. It's biblical doctrine. But God is not there to bless, and so He says, "Depart from me, you who are cursed." What is that phrase or that word “cursed” mean? Understand it with its biblical tandem, bless, blessings and curses. Someone who is blessed is first and foremost in a right relationship with God and God with them. They're in a reconciled relationship. God loves them, they love God, they're in a right relationship with God. Out of that right relationship, God wants to give them good things, and his power is motivated toward those blessed people to bless them and give them good things. That's what it means to be blessed. To be cursed is the exact opposite. There is no good relationship. He doesn't know them, they don't know him, they're not in any good, reconciled relationship, and then God's power is unleashed toward their destruction, not to do them good, but to do them harm. That's what a curse is, and Jesus says, "Depart from me, you who are cursed." Hell, then is the ultimate curse from Almighty God. Then He says, "Into the eternal fire." First of all, look at the word “into.” This is going to be a judgment that will surround or in which someone is immersed, therefore in the Book of Revelation, we have this language of the lake of fire. It's like plunging down into the wrath of God, into eternal fire. It's not near you, it's not by you, it's not around you, you're in it. It's full immersion, a lake of fire. It's never-ending. Look at Verse 46, the annihilationists don't have any good explanation for Verse 46. Stott does what he can with it, but he can't change the language there. It's very plain. There's a parallelism. "Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life." How can it be that we're counting on when we've been there 10,000 years bright, shining as a sun, there's no less days to sing God's praise than when we first begun. Timeless, eternal, it never ends. That's heaven, right? Well, so also must be hell, friends. It's eternal, it never ends, and it's an eternal fire. I thought a lot about that word, even this morning as I was praying and thinking about this. Again, and again, the image of fire is used. Jesus speaks of Gehenna, which was a fire pit right outside of Jerusalem where the garbage was burned that had a sordid, wicked history. Isaiah 30:33 says, "The wrath of God sets it ablaze." It's a place where wicked kings like Ahab and Manasseh burned their children to Molech and it became a symbol of hell. Jesus uses it in that passage I quoted earlier in Matthew 5:22, “It's better for you to lose one part of your body than to go into Gehenna, which is this burning place.” It's always fire, friends. Fire. It's not multiple metaphors or images, it's the same thing over and over. It's always fire, a blazing fiery furnace. That kind of thing. Recently, we were doing some American history, and we were talking about September 11th when those planes crashed into the Twin Towers. I hadn't thought a lot about it in the days and weeks that preceded that, but when I put on the YouTube video and watched the plane crash in there, I started to cry, I couldn't help myself, it was just very poignant to me. I have three very powerful images in my mind from that day. One of them is when the second plane crashed into the other tower, because we were watching the news at the time and it happened, and I remember the CNN people or whatever, didn't notice, and they kept on talking about whatever topic they were discussing, and it's like we knew before they did what was going on. Then you could hear the change, and something had happened with the second tower. That's one image. The second image I have is when the towers actually collapsed, how they just seemed to get sucked to the ground, how they seemed to melt and fall like a house of cards and fall so quickly. But those two actually are small compared to the third memory, that of people who threw themselves off the high floors to escape the fire. It's estimated that 200 people did that that day. 200 people threw themselves from a thousand feet off the ground. Most of them were in the North Tower because the plane hit a little bit lower, and it was mostly the smoke that made them go, it wasn't the fire, or they would have been burned immediately. But the fire was coming their way and they knew it, there was no escape, and they were up there, and they had to make what they thought was a better choice, and they chose rather to die by falling and, I mean, there's no chance, they reached 150 miles an hour and they were just immediately killed upon impact, they knew they would be. But imagine it's about 1,000 degrees centigrade, smoke billowing up, and they have a choice, you see. You see the choice, and what was the choice? Stay there with the fire or throw themselves out the window. And they chose to throw themselves. With hell, there's no choice, there's no escape. There's no death, it’s an eternal death. This is the image that Jesus has given us. I was thinking, "Do I even share that?" It's too painful. But then I thought about the words at the beginning of my sermon, isn't that my job? This isn't a pleasant topic, it’s a painful one. Flee the wrath to come, friends. Flee it now. This isn't mythical. This is real. Jesus said again and again and again, it’s an eternal fire. You may ask about this word “eternal.” "Where is the justice of God?" you may say. Clark Pinnock said, "How can it be that we get an eternal punishment for things done in finite space and time?" The punishment doesn't seem to fit the crime. Even God gave us eye for eye and tooth for tooth so that there wouldn't be an escalation of punishments. “You took out my eye, I'm going to kill you.” No, we're going to go even; if there's a tooth then a tooth. So, we, with our developed sense of justice, we sit in judgment on God on this issue of hell and say it is unjust for God to do that. Let's just stop and talk about our capacity for justice compared to God's. As I've said before, it's like a flickering candle compared to the raging inferno of the sun. God is far more committed to justice than you are. Do you understand that? He killed his Son out of justice. That's how committed God is to justice. Secondly, does that punishment fit the crime? What is the crime? There is lust and there is anger and pride and selfishness and stealing and all kinds of things, and all kinds of horizontal things we do to each other, but David in Psalm 51 said, "Against You and You only have I sinned." All sin is coming short of the infinite value of the glory of God, and that is an infinite sin, and it deserves an infinite punishment. It's the only thing my mind can do with it. That's why hell is eternal, because God's glory is of infinite value. The final phrase is, "Prepared for the devil and his angels." Do not believe the mythology that the devil thrives in hell or loves it, or is comfortable there, or that's his home address. He's not there yet. It's prepared for the devil and his angels. They're not there yet. The devil's angels are demons. They dread the wrath to come, they dread the justice of God that's going to come on them. Why would we human beings share in the punishment made for the devil and his angels? Because we shared in their rebellion against God. We joined Satan in his rebellion against God, in Genesis Chapter 3, when Adam and Eve ate from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we joined Satan at that point. We are born sinners, we joined Satan, we became children of the devil, as Jesus called someone of his enemies, "You are a child of your father, the devil,” and we deserve his punishment. Do you know that there is no gospel release for Satan? There's no message of salvation for him or for the demons. They have no possibility of escape, but we human beings do because God became a man in Jesus. Isn't that the good news that that we actually have a way out, we have an escape, Satan doesn't. But if we don't take that way out, we will share the devil's judgment. That's what it means, “prepared for the devil and his angels.” What will that torment be like? There will be a physical side to it, and there will be a psychological or mental side to it. The wailing and gnashing of teeth or weeping and gnashing of teeth, the gnashing of teeth, I think of in terms of physical pain. The wicked are going to be raised out of their graves, they will receive some kind of body and that body will be sustained forever in hell, so there's a physical torment aspect, but there's also a mental and psychological aspect, and I think a lot of it has to do with memories. Remember in Luke 16, when Abraham was speaking down to the rich man who's in torment and he said, "Son, remember, remember, remember that when you were in your life, you had all your good things and Lazarus, he had nothing. He's a poor man at your gate, you wouldn't give him anything. Remember that. Remember." We're going to remember. They will remember. We remember in heaven, but lost people remember in hell. What are they going to remember? They'll remember the sins that brought them there. I think more than anything, they're going to remember times just like this one, where they hear the gospel plainly, and they didn't repent and believe. What would they give to be delivered out of hell for just one more hour with another chance to hear the Gospel again at that point, what would they give? All the rich man wanted was somebody to wet his tongue with a little water. What brings us there, sins of commission — actual acts of adultery and murder and theft and selfishness, but also sins of omission. "Depart from me, you who are cursed into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry, and you gave me nothing to eat." It's all omission and in Matthew 25, it's all omission, what you didn't do. Application What applications can we take from this doctrine. First, I said at the beginning, it's just my dread. I've tried to visualize what it's like that I am likely speaking to people who are going to end up in hell right now. I don't know how many, I don't know who you are, I don't know your names, I don't know your faces, I don't know for a fact that what I said is even necessarily true. But Jesus gave us a sense of the percentages, didn't he? Many enter through that broad road to hell, but only a few find that narrow gate. I know this is a concentrated assembly of the people of God here. You've come together for worship, and so the percentages are different here, but is it impossible that there is some nominal Christian listening to me, somebody who just thinks they're saved, but they're really not? Somebody who's on the road to destruction, they're self-deceived. I'm just asking you to consider the seriousness of this doctrine and flee to Christ. He shed his blood on the cross for sinners like you and me. This is the good news of the gospel. This is the good news that Jesus will receive you even now. Forget your pride, forget your reputation, forget what's happened up till now, just say, "Am I saved or not? Have I trusted in Christ or not? Am I ready to face judgment or not?" And flee to Christ. Second, if you've already done that, you're saved, you've been saved for years. You know you're saved. You see the fruit of God in your life. You are by the power of the Holy Spirit, putting to death the misdeeds of the body. There's good fruit in your life, you have the testimony, the indwelling spirit that you are a child of God. Romans 8:1 says, “therefore for you, no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." You're not going to go to hell. The more we meditate on this incredible doctrine, the more grateful we're going to be to God for our precious salvation. Thank you, God for saving me. The paradox here is that this doctrine actually has tremendous power to make you happy for the rest of your life, it really does. We deserve hell, we're getting heaven. So, let me say this tenderly, stop complaining about your bodily aches and pains. God has delivered you from eternal hell, eternal torment and hell. I'm not saying don't tell the doctor what hurts, definitely tell your spouse as much as you want, and they'll tell you right back but stop complaining about your bodily aches and pains. Stop complaining about your temporary financial setbacks, God has delivered you from eternal loss. Thank him in the midst of your struggle financially, thank him for your salvation. Stop complaining about your feelings of loneliness or isolation or desolation. God has delivered you from ultimate expression of that, the darkness where they're weeping and gnashing of teeth. You're free from that, you're going to be welcomed into eternal habitations with blessed people. You'll be there forever. I don't minimize feelings of loneliness that widows, or widowers or other people may be feeling, the church is the answer to that, find them and dissolve that loneliness with good fellowship, but until that happens, praise God anyway, because you're delivered from loneliness. Let this make you happy. Remember Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol. Remember Scrooge after the visit of the third ghost, the ghost of Christmas yet to come, who consigns him to hell. Then he wakes up in his bed there. What is he feeling at that moment? Incredible relief and unbelievable joy. He just starts jumping around in his night shirt, he goes crazy with joy, and then he just starts spending money hand over fist. He can't spend it fast enough on the poor and needy, and all of that, dear friends without a single mention of Jesus. We should do better than Dickens, don't you think? We have been delivered from hell by Jesus, and we should be giving him thanks. We should be thankful people, and we should worship Christ for his incalculable courage. Stott said, "We can't bear this doctrine day after day after day, unless we become callous or start to deny it." I think God hides the full weight of this from us so we can live our lives. I think to some degree, he did that to Jesus. Jesus knew he was going to die on the cross, he knew he was going to stand in the wrath of God, but what would that really be like while Jesus was flesh and blood. God didn't fully press that on to him until Gethsemane. In Mark's Gospel, it says that Jesus was amazed and fell to the ground, and then, "Great droplets of blood were coming as sweat from his face." Like the capillaries inside, were just bursting. You can't live like that. Then God the father asked Jesus a very important question, "Will you do it anyway, even though this is what it's going to be like?" There the second Adam, reversed the bad decision of the first Adam, and said, "I'll do it. Not my will but yours will be done." The single greatest act of courage in history, praise him for it. Worship Jesus for that. For drinking your cup to the bottom. There's no wrath left for you, no wrath because Jesus stood under your wrath for you. It's a motive also to personal holiness. Hell is God's response to sin. He hates sin that much, so you ought to hate it that much. If your right eye causes you to sin, then gouge it out and throw it away. If your right hand cause you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It's better for you to lose a part of your body than for your whole body to be destroyed in hell. When does Jesus say that? Jesus said, “You've heard that it was said, ‘You shall not lust or to commit adultery’, but anyone who lusts at a woman has committed adultery within his heart. If anything is causing you to sin, get rid of it out of your life." The meditation on hell is a strong inducement to personal holiness for Christians. Finally sorrow for the lost resulting in zeal in evangelism and prayer follows. Both Jesus and Paul wept over this doctrine. Jesus wept over Jerusalem. Paul said, "I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart for the Jews who are lost.” We should grieve over lost people, and we should pray for them. Paul said in Romans, "My prayer for the Israelites is that they may be saved." Understanding the incredible immensity of this doctrine of hell and that most people around us are on the road to destruction should motivate us to greater faithfulness in evangelism and missions. Hudson Taylor was speaking at a missionary convention, I believe it was in Canada, maybe in England. He had been on the mission field in China for a while, came back, and he was rather shocked by the low level of intensity of missionary zeal among the people that were attending this missionary conference. He told a true story from his own experience there in China. While traveling by boat, one day Taylor entered into conversation with a Chinese man who had once visited England, and while he lived there, he went by the name of Peter. Hudson Taylor shared the Gospel thoroughly with this man, the man was moved, he was interested, but he didn't make a commitment to Christ, he couldn't do that at that point. Later on, that same boat trip, in a mood of great depression, this Chinese man jumped overboard and sank. In agonize suspense Hudson Taylor looked around for assistance and saw really close by some Chinese fishermen with a dragnet furnace with some hooks, "Come." He shouted to those fishermen. "Drag over this spot, a man just sunk here, he's drowning right now." Chinese fishermen answer with no emotion at all, "It's not convenient." "Don't talk of convenience, a man is drowning." "We're busy fishing, we cannot come,” they responded. Taylor begged them and offered to pay them for their time. They asked, "How much?" He offered them an equivalent amount of about $5. They said it wasn't enough and kept fishing. He cried out one more time. He said, "I'll give you everything I have." "How much is that?" "About $14." They agreed to come. Within a minute or so, they were able to get the individual up out of the water, but he was already dead. To Hudson Taylor, the incident was profoundly sad and pathetic, almost as a parable. He said those fishermen were in some way guilty of the death of that man because they had the means to save him but didn't do anything about it. But he said to this missionary convention, “Before you start judging those Chinese fishermen, let's pause, let someone greater than Nathan stand in front of us and point the finger at us and say, 'You are the man, you've had the resources to save people and you haven't done it because it wasn't convenient.'" I don't know if it's ever going to be convenient to witness. The Lord is glorified when we are courageous, the Lord is glorified when we love, but this doctrine of hell is part of God's motivation to missionaries and evangelists, to teach us to be faithful to share the gospel. Let's be bold. Let's see things from an eternal perspective. It's not going to be long, friends. We'll be standing before Jesus, and He will welcome us into his presence. Meanwhile, there are around us people who are enroute to hell who can be rescued by the gospel if we share with them.

Andy Davis preaches an expository sermon on Matthew 25:31-46. The main subject of the sermon is the eternal wrath to be suffered by Satan and his followers.

Introduction I believe one of the most serious responsibilities a pastor has in life, and one of the most serious responsibilities I have in this church is to keep Judgement Day in front of you constantly, to get you ready for what's really coming. The Day of the Lord is coming, and the Bible makes it plain that there is a day coming in which He will judge all humanity. When the Apostle Paul stood before the Greek philosophers in the Areopagus at Mars Hill, he finished his message with these words, Acts 17:31, "God has set a day when He will judge the world with justice by the man that He has appointed." Later, when Paul stood before the Roman governor, Felix, on trial for his life, Paul turned the tables and gave Felix a sense of the time when he would stand on trial for his soul. In Acts 24:25, as Paul discoursed on righteousness, self-control and the judgment to come, Felix became afraid and said, "That's enough for now. You may leave. When I find it convenient, I'll send for you." Felix dismissed Paul because he could not handle the thought of Judgement Day, it made him feel uncomfortable. But I tell you that concept cannot be easily dismissed by sending the messenger away. You can dismiss the messenger but Judgement Day stands, Judgement Day looms, it is coming. I think it's one of my responsibilities to get you ready for that day. As the Lord Jesus Christ finished his discourse on the Mount of Olives, He's getting his disciples ready for his Second Coming. They had asked him, "When will these things be, the destruction of Jerusalem? What will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?" In Matthew 24 and 25, He's been answering those questions and He ends with this teaching, what's commonly called the sheep and the goats, sometimes wrongly called the parable of the sheep and the goats. This isn't a parable, actually. It's a simple description from our Lord Jesus Christ of elements of Judgement Day. It's a simile. A simile is a comparison of two things using the word like or as. Jesus said, "All the nations will be gathered before him, and He will separate the people one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats." He's going to put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. What is being compared? Separation. Righteous from the unrighteous, the believers in Jesus Christ, from those who did not believe in Jesus Christ, the saved from the lost, the redeemed from the unredeemed. They're going to be separated. Recently, I saw yet again, and you've seen it too, I'm sure, the bumper sticker that uses various religious symbols to spell out the word “co-exist.” The crescent moon forms the sea representing Islam, the peace sign forms the O, representing an end to all war. The X was made out of the star of David, representing Judaism. The I is dotted with the Wiccan symbol representing earth religions or pagan religions. The S is made out of the yin and yang circle representing Confucianism and the T of course is the cross of Christ, and we need to co-exist. It's printed by the Co-exist Foundation which seeks to promote peace between the world religions, especially through dialogue. Jesus told the parable of the wheat and the weeds, also saying that we need to co-exist. In that, and probably in little else, Jesus and those folks agree. We have to live together, but Jesus says, the time is coming when He will separate the wheat from the weeds, and that day is Judgement Day, and we will not co-exist with them anymore. We will be separated from them, and that separation will be eternal. The harvest is the end of the age, and that's Judgement Day. Matthew 25:31-46 is, in my opinion, the plainest description of Judgement Day you will find in the Bible from the lips of Jesus. It's the plainest and clearest He ever gets, and we would do well to heed it because the Scripture reveals, He is the judge, He is the man whom God has appointed. He begins, I think, by talking about his own glory at that time, the glory of the judge on Judgement Day. Verse 31, "When the son of man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, He will sit on His throne in heavenly glory." The judge of all the Earth is the Son of Man, that's Jesus Christ. It is the unique privilege and glory of God the Son, of the Son of man, of Jesus, to judge every human being that's ever lived. It says in John 5:22-23, "Moreover, the father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son, even as they honor the Father." Jesus Christ will be judge of all the earth, and every single human being will stand before Him on that dreadful day. What of the time of judgment? When will it happen? He says right here, when the Son of man comes in his glory, that's when the Judgement Day happens, the Second Coming of Christ, it's clear that Judgement Day will follow the return of Christ to the earth in glory. What is the nature of the glory of Christ, a judgment? We know that Christ in his first advent, his first coming to earth, laid aside, all of His glory. "Mild he lays his glory by, born that man no more may die," as it says in Hark the Herald Angels Sing. He lays his heavenly glorious aside. He was born of a human mother, Mary, in very rude and poverty-stricken circumstances. He was laid in a manger where animals feed, and from that point on, as He grew up, He looked like any ordinary man. That feeling of the ordinary-ness of Jesus reached its climax at the cross, when Jesus was shedding his blood, dying like two other guys who were being crucified with him. Isaiah 53 says, "He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him. Nothing in his appearance that we should desire Him.” The Second Coming of Christ However, at the Second Coming of Christ, that will all be different, won't it? He's going to come back in a radiant heavenly glory. Christ's glory at the judgment will be even more ominous, even more awe-inspiring. In many cultures, judges at the time of a trial wear certain robes, even ornate robes to set them apart from anyone else in the courtroom. In the United Kingdom, especially, they wear ermine robes and purple and scarlet, silk, and when the judge appears in the courtroom, everyone's commanded to rise out of honor and respect for him and for the law that he represents. If these are the trappings of earthly judges, then how much more glory will attend the judge of all the earth when He sits on His throne? It will be an awesome display of glory and the throne itself that He's going to sit on will exude His attributes and his nature. Hebrews 1 says, "Your throne, oh God will last forever and ever, and righteousness will be the scepter of your kingdom. You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness, and therefore God, your God, has set you above your companions by anointing you with the oil of joy." There Jesus is perhaps on a raised throne high and lifted up, glory surrounding him, and there's going to be angels there. It's not just that there's going to be angels there, all the angels will be there. Frequently, He dispatches small contingents of angels or just maybe even a single angel, but not this time. All the angels are going to be there when the Son of Man comes in His glory and all the angels with Him. He will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. Daniel 7:10 describes the scene of Judgment Day I believe very well. "A river of fire was flowing coming out from before him. Thousands upon thousands attended Him, and 10000 times 10000 stood before him." Amazing, 100 million radiant powerful beings. These are angelic warriors, not fat little babies with tiny little wings that could not lift them with little arrows shooting, these are mighty beings. Often when angels appear, the first thing that they have to say is, "Fear not,” because there's just this radiant glory, this power that surrounds them. The Roman soldiers guarding Jesus' tomb shook with fear and became like dead men, at one angel, who moves the stone and sits on it. The Book of Daniel depicts one angel so awesome and powerful and overwhelming that Daniel said he fell at His feet as one dead, he couldn't get his breath. The Book of Revelation in Revelation 10:1-3 describes another mighty angel coming down from heaven. "He was robed in a cloud with a rainbow above his head and his face was like the sun, and his legs were like fiery pillars, and he planted his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the land, and he gave a loud shout like the roar of a lion." That's one angel. A big one too, I get the sense. These are awesome beings and these warrior servants; these angelic servants move people. I don't mean they move them emotionally, they might do that, but I mean they physically move people like bulldozers. They are the ones that the Lord sends out at the time of the Rapture to gather all of the Elect. But they're also going to be dispatched to gather all of the goats. All nations are going to be gathered to stand before Christ and they, the angels, will be the powerful agents of his wrath to bind the lost, the condemned hand and foot and throw them into the lake of fire. Judgment at the Second Coming So that's setting the scene. What of the judgment itself? It’s going to be a comprehensive judgment, all nations, all deeds, all motives laid bare. There's nothing concealed that will not be disclosed. There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed. Look at Verse 32, "All nations will be gathered before him." The word ‘nation”, we've learned to understand as an identifiable people group, an ethnic or linguistic people identified by history, geography, world view. This is a nation, and in the Gospel of Matthew it says that He has its eye on the nations all the time. In Matthew 12:18-21, it says there that, "Jesus will proclaim justice to the nations. And in his name, the nations will put their hope." Matthew 24:14 says, "This Gospel of the Kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come." In that same section of Scripture, in Matthew 24:9, it says that "The messages of the gospel will be hated by all peoples on account of Christ." Then, of course, the gospel itself ends with a great commission, “‘All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me’, said Jesus, ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I've commanded.’” Jesus is a worldwide creator, Jesus is a worldwide King, he is a worldwide Savior, and He will most certainly be a worldwide judge. All nations will be gathered before him. Every single solitary person who's ever lived in every nation on Earth will be gathered before Christ's Judgment Seat. Plato, the fourth century Greek philosopher, will stand before Jesus to give an account for his life. Julius Caesar, the 1st century conqueror of Gaul, the beginning warrior of the Roman Empire really, will stand before Christ's Judgment Seat. Shakespeare, the British poet and playwright, will be there. So will Voltaire. Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin, two communist dictators are going to stand before Jesus. Osama bin Laden will be there, so will George Bush. Barack Obama's going to stand before Jesus. So will the most common street beggar in Budapest, or in Calcutta. It doesn't matter the station, everybody's going to be standing before Jesus. The word “gathered” implies something happening to you, doesn't it? All the nations will be gathered before him. It implies in some cases, as if by force. There is no choice but to heed this summons. No Muslim, for example, will be able to say, "I will not stand, I refuse to stand before a Christian judgment, I am a Muslim, and I will only stand before Allah." No, dear friend, you'll stand before Jesus Christ. The Son of Man will send out his angels and they will weed out of His kingdom everything that causes sin. It is a comprehensive judgment, not just as to who is there, but as to what is open to view. It says in Hebrews Chapter 4, "Nothing in all creation is hidden from His sight, everything's uncovered and laid there before the eyes of Him to whom we must give an account." Everything will be exposed, all of the deeds and all of the motives. Jesus is able to weigh the motive of every deed. Why did you do it? What were you intending when you did it? Proverbs 16:2 says, "All of man's ways seem innocent to him, but the Lord weighs the motives.” see that? He's going to be weighing the reason, He's tracing it back, and it's going to be a divisive judgment. Jesus said, "Do not suppose that I came to bring peace. I came to bring a sword to divide father against son, daughter against mother and daughter-in-law... " He divides people, and this is the ultimate division here. It's a judgment. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people. One from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He's going to put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. We are mixed now; we will be divided then. We must co-exist now, and it's not easy for us, is it? Surviving in an impure and mixed world. It is because of unbelievers that we have the police forces and courts and jails in the numbers that they are. It's because of unbelievers that so many laws and restrictions need to be written. It's because of unbelievers in Hollywood and New York that we are assaulted daily with images and other temptations that wage war against our souls. It is unbelievers in foreign lands that are waging war against Christians simply because they're Christians. It's unbelievers that make this alluring sinful enticing system known as, in Pilgrim's Progress, as Vanity Fair. Just what it is. However, at the end of the world, this mixed experience in which we must tolerate each other because you can't tell the difference between the weeds and the wheat right now. I'll tell you this, Saul of Tarsus sure looked like weeds that morning that he got converted, didn't he? Praise be to God that those who look like goats to us now can actually be revealed in the end to have been a sheep, that they're going to be sheep through faith in Jesus Christ. Praise be to God; this is the day of salvation. This is the time when people can be converted. But now I'm talking about Judgement Day when there will be no conversion, the division will be perfect, there'll be no mistakes. The sheep are the sheep, and the goats are the goats. Essential to this is the perfect knowledge that the Good Shepherd has of His own sheep. He says, "I am the good shepherd, I know my sheep, and my sheep know me." No mistakes will be made. He knows the goats, but differently. He knows them, but he just knows them differently. Psalm 138:6, "Though the Lord is on high, he looks upon the lowly, but the proud, he knows from afar." He knows them from a distance, just not intimately and relationally. Those angels will make no mistakes. All the sheep will be gathered on one side and all the goats gathered on the other, and there'll be no mix ups, it will be a perfect division. And the division is eternal. Oh, the terror of those words. If you're identified as a goat, you'll be a goat for all eternity, there'll be no change. Same thing with the sheep, it's an eternal division, they will never meet again, the sheep and the goats, they will never be mixed again. They will never look on each other's faces again, after that day. I've seen some wrenching scenes in movies in which loved ones were torn apart from each other. In movies about World War II, the Nazis were especially vicious in separating families. The train would pull into Auschwitz and the doors of the cattle cars would clank open, and the SS would pull people violently down out and start separating families, and some of those people never saw each other again, men over here, women over here, those that could work over here, those that couldn't over there. This separation is far more significant than that. But if I can tell you a mystery, the sheep won't miss the goats. How could we enjoy heaven if we're forever missing the goats? A hint of this, in 1 Corinthians 16, "Anyone who will not love the Lord Jesus Christ, a curse be on him." I don't want to spend eternity with people who don't love Jesus. I want to be with people who love Jesus. We're not going to miss them, therefore. Now again, we're in a different era now. We should weep for the lost, pray for them, yearn for them, be pulling on them. Yes, now is the day of salvation. But on Judgement Day, now it's over, it's finished. We will begin for the first time to see things the way Jesus does in every respect, and love him and embrace every decision He makes, but this separation will be eternal. The Basis of Separation on Judgment Day This is the key to the whole message. Now, please listen, what is the basis of the separation? I'm going to go beyond what's written here, but not beyond the doctrine of the New Testament, but I'm going to find roots of that full doctrine right here in the text. I'm going to give it to you in redemptive historical order. The first basis of the separation is in the mind of God, it is eternal predestination. Before the foundation of the world, this separation had been made. Look at verse 34, "Then the King will say to those on His right, come you who are blessed by my Father." I say this is a blessing from the Father from eternity past. "Take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world." Now, the clear teaching of Scripture, this division of sheep and goats existed in the mind of God, before God even said, "Let there be light." The Elect, the Bible calls them, another word for the sheep, the Elect are chosen by God for Heaven and rescued from hell. The first blessing that the Elect receive, and they don't even, they're not even in existence when they receive it, is eternal predestination, the choice of God, unconditional election, not based on merit or anything that they would do [Romans 9 through 11]. It says in Romans 11, "There is at this present time, a remnant chosen by grace, and if it is by grace then it is no longer by works. If it were by works, then grace would not be grace." So, the first blessing that the sheep received, and they don't even exist yet when they receive it, is the choice of God that they should be sheep. He says, "Come you who are blessed by my Father. Take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you, since the creation of the world." It is prepared for Christ's sheep; He knows his sheep. In God's infinite knowledge and wisdom, it's impossible to think He doesn't know by name each of those sheep, He openly says He does, He knows his sheep by name. That inheritance, that kingdom has been prepared for a specific group of people with their own stories and their own glories, their own agonies, their own struggles and conquests. What a lavish, rich tapestry of history and grace that is. I am looking forward to looking at every strand. I want to hear all about the martyrs, don't you? I want to learn about those missionaries. I want to get in and find out how people ministered in the poorest and the most difficult places on earth. I want to know my brothers and sisters in Christ. I want to study their stories. We'll have eternity to do it and it's going to be delightful. We'll be delivered from our selfishness and we'll have plenty of time. We will just be able to find out what God did in and through them. This kingdom is presently being prepared. What's going on is we are the living stones, we are the building materials, and He is preparing us for Heaven as much as he's preparing heaven for us. That's the preparation that's going on. Isn't that glorious? So, Jesus says, "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, trust also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so I would have told you. For I'm going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will return and take you to be with me so that you also may be where I am." The glory of Heaven is growing brighter and brighter and brighter with every generation of Christians and their stories and their achievements and what God does in and through them. The second basis of separation is God blessing of those sheep in life. Something that happens to them in life, something happened to them while they live. Now they're born, they live for a number of years, they're drawing breath, they have a bunch of experience, then God blesses them. What does He bless them with? He blesses them with salvation. He blesses them with Christ, He blesses them with revelation. You remember when Jesus was gathered with His disciples in Caesarea Philippi, He said, "Who do people say the Son of Man is?" They gave a bunch of answers. He said, "What about you? Who do you say that I am?" Simon Peter, speaking for all of us as believers said, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." Do you remember what Jesus said to him? "Blessed are you. Blessed are you, Simon, son of John, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven, revealed into your heart who I am." God blesses the sheep with a revelation of Christ. God speaks the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ, right into their souls, and they are born again. The same thing happens at the end of John's gospel. Thomas said to Jesus, that great confession, "My Lord and my God.” Jesus said, “Because you have seen Me, you have believed." What's the next word? "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." Has that blessing come to you? Have you received that blessing? Have you received the blessing of conversion of the image of God and your soul of Christ? And this blessing too, Romans 4:7-8, "Blessed are they whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will never count against him." The blessing that you receive in this life, the blessing of hearing of the gospel, but God doesn't just do that, He gives you the twin graces of repentance and faith. He gives that to you as a gift. Then He takes out your heart of stone, and He gives you a heart of flesh, and you respond. You might have heard it many times before, but now you're moved. You see it, and He blesses you with the new birth, and with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms. He's just lavishing blessing on you. The sheep are no different than the goats. Do you understand that? We're no different. We're no better than they are. We're the same people. But it's the blessing of God that makes the difference. Now what happens? The third basis of separation is that those sheep at a certain point repented and believed in Jesus. Actively, they believed, they trusted, they turned away from their sins. This is not so evident in the sheep and the goats, but this is what it says, "The King will say to those on His right, 'Come you who are blessed by my Father, take your inheritance, the kingdom.'" The key concept here is an inheritance, a kingdom, something that's promised. Jesus began His preaching, saying, "The time has come. The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the good news." If you repent and believe, you get a promise, you get an inheritance. You get a kingdom. They believed the gospel, they trusted, and this inheritance was given to them, they became heirs, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ of heaven, and they get this beautiful inheritance, this kingdom given them as a gift. Notice in verse 37, the Lord calls them righteous. “Then the righteous will answer, Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you?” Etcetera. How did they get this label “righteous”? Let me tell you something, if there's a good time and a good place to be called righteous, Judgment Day is it, don't you think? And even better, if it's Jesus, the judge, calling you righteous, how sweet is that? Jesus calls them righteous. It says in Romans 3:10, "There is no one righteous, not even one." How did they become righteous? They believed in Jesus, they trusted in Him, and the righteousness of God was given as a gift. Then on Judgement Day, they're vindicated in that righteousness. That's the third basis: [Romans 3:22], this righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. The fourth basis and the one most obvious from the text is a lifestyle of good works, that flows from the first three. True faith always results in a lifestyle of Christ-focused good works. "For we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance that we should walk in them." [Ephesians 2:10]. Notice that these good works are Christ-focused. Everything the sheep do they're doing for Christ's pleasure, for Christ's glory, to minister to Christ's people. Look at verse 35, and following, "I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you invited me in. I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick, and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me. And then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you or thirsty and give you something to drink. When did we see you a stranger, invite you in and needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and help you?’ And then the King will answer, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it for me.’” Clearly, the righteous sheep wanted to please Christ with their actions. Christ Himself was the focus of their desires, and then they acted. It was simple and practical, they fed hungry people, they gave drink to thirsty people, they invited strangers in, they were inviting hospitality kind of people, they clothed the naked, they provided clothes for people, they looked after sick people in their time of struggle and distress, visited prisoners as well. In every case, these sheep were truly ministering to Christ. Notice that the sheep are not falsely humble here, they're just stunned by the fact that anything they would do would look good in that context, the holiness of Christ, and those eyes of blazing fire. "Lord when did we do anything for you?" Don't you feel that now? I don't feel like I do anything really perfectly for Jesus, everything is marred and flawed in some way, because I've touched it. When did I do anything? And He said, "I tell you the truth, whatever you did." Oh, what a sweet word, “whatever” is. I mean, that's... Gives you freedom, right? Whatever you want to do for the body of Christ, just do it. Do something for a brother or sister, do something for Jesus. "Whatever you did, you did it for me." We're going to talk about the sheep and the goats and mercy ministry in the next message, but we'll just leave it there. I want you to notice therefore the four-fold basis of separation, it starts before the foundation of the world, in the mind of God, it's an eternal plan. It starts there, eternal predestination, resulting in the temporal blessings of the Gospel that come in in space and time into the sheep's life at the right time, resulting in the sheep repenting and actually believing in Jesus, resulting in good works, which are described here. It's the exact opposite for the goats all the way across. Rejected by God before the foundation of the world, under the curse of Adam, under the curse of the law, they stand fully accountable for their own sins, they have no Savior. They reject Christ and the Gospel; they turn their back on Christ and the Gospel and they have no Christ-centered good works. Now, I find it interesting on their rejection of Christ, notice that they call him Lord here. Have you noticed that? I find that interesting. Look at Verse 44, then the goats are going to answer, "Lord," just stop there. I find that an interesting word, especially when spoken by Voltaire, don't you think? Or Thomas Jefferson who said, "The doctrine of the trinity will someday be seen to be a myth like Minerva bringing fully formed out of the brain of Jupiter." We know that's a myth, and so the Trinity is a myth. Or this quote from Benjamin Franklin. "As to Jesus of Nazareth, I have some doubts as to His divinity. Though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon having never studied it and think it needless to busy myself with it now when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with much less trouble." If that doesn't bring a chill to you, you need to read it and think again, what he's saying. He says, I'll find out whether Jesus is God or not. Oh, he'll find out. He has found out. You need to find out now, by faith that Jesus is Lord, because you're going to say it then either way. "Before me, every knee will bow. By me, every tongue will swear that Jesus Christ is Lord," it says. Richard Dawkins, who doesn't even think that Jesus really existed, will, find that he not only existed, but is his judge. All of these men are going to say, "Lord." The Work of the Goats is Not Christ-Centered I want to say just a brief word about the good works. Did they really do no good works at all, the goats, nothing? They didn't feed any hungry people; they didn't put any clothes on the naked? Well, I think the goats break into two categories on this one. First, there are some that literally didn't. They didn't care at all about anybody. They lived selfish self-feeding lives, and they walked by the guy on the Jericho Road, and they don't give a rip, they just walk right on by and they don't care. There are goats like that. But there are other kind of goats too aren't there? There's some that actually spend a lot of their time doing these kinds of good things, these good works. There are secular aid agencies, like for example, the International Red Cross, helping 97 million people worldwide. I would think many, if not most of their volunteers do nothing in the name of Jesus Christ, they just do good works to help people in disaster areas. But here's the key. They don't do anything in Jesus’ name. United Nations aid agencies, they're all over the world, alleviating human suffering. How about the federal government itself? Does it feed anybody? Does it clothe anybody? Are there programs for the poor and needy? Oh yes. Can you do those and never think about Jesus at all? Oh yes. As a matter of fact, that almost seems to be a goal, the secularization of these kinds of good works. That will not work on Judgement Day, friends. Other charities which were begun by Christians and begun in Christ's name, now have drifted. They are still done by many Christians, but open to non-Christians to take part. Like the YMCA, for example, or Habitat for Humanity. You don't have to be a Christian to go build a house for somebody. There are non-Christian religions that have aid agencies, there's something called the Red Crescent, which is the Islamic version of the Red Cross operating in Muslim countries. There are many famous rock stars and movie personalities that get involved in things like tennis matches for Haiti and things like that, you know what I'm talking about. Or “We are the World” kind of concerts. You know what I'm talking about. I mean, they have a certain number of pet issues that they definitely get involved, but it's not a surprise to see them involved. Are you shocked when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and Elton John and others do concerts for AIDS victims? I'm not shocked by that. Doesn't surprise me at all. I know Christians do those kinds of things too. But the key issue here is that none of those non-Christians, none of the goats, did anything for Jesus. They're not trying to minister to Jesus, they're not trying to minister to Christ's people, they're not trying to find who are Jesus' brothers and sisters and care for them, they don't care about Jesus at all. They're not thinking about Jesus, Jesus is irrelevant to their lives. But can I tell you He will not be irrelevant on Judgement Day; He will be the relevance on Judgement Day. What did you do for me through caring for these? The King is going to tell them, "Depart from me, you who are cursed into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels." Anything not done in obedience to Christ's commands by faith in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, for the body of Christ and for the up building thereof is no good work on Judgement Day. That's all I'm saying, and the outcome will be eternal -an eternal separation, eternal punishment and eternal life. Application What applications can we take from this? First, I urge you to come to Christ if you're here in a lost state. You can't get across that barrier, once the separation's made, it's stone. Now is the time to cross over from death to life. John 5:24, "Whoever hears my Word and believes Him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned, he has crossed over from death to life." Let now be the day for you to do that. Look to Christ crucified, He shed His blood for sinners like you and me. It will be enough for you on Judgement Day, it will be infinitely enough for you on Judgement Day, trust in Him. But if you're a Christian, I urge you to make Judgement Day come alive in your mind every day, make it part of your quiet time. Say, “I know I'm going to stand before you, I want to be rich in good works." If I can give you a hint on that, please focus on the body of Christ, even in evangelism, what are you doing? Paul says, "I suffer everything for the sake of the elect, that they too may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory." That's our mission. We want others to come and join the body of Christ, the brothers and sisters in Christ. If I can urge you, please first of all, have a ministry to build up the body of Christ. Get involved in women's ministry, if that's your calling as a woman. Get involved in international student ministry or urban ministry, look at the ministry teams and say, "I want to be rich on Judgement Day" and minister to the body of Christ. "Whatever you do for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you do it for me." I just want there to be lots of whatevers for us. By the power of the Spirit, we can be rich in good works.

Andy Davis preaches a verse by verse expository sermon on Matthew 25:31-46. The main subject of the sermon is the final judgment, which will be carried out by God.