The living archive is loading.
Continue exploring
Connected by scripture or shared themes.
Continue exploring
Connected by scripture or shared themes.
I want a hard emotional gear shift to set the tone for this sermon. You're going to die. Every single one of you within the hearing of my voice, in the words of Anne Lamott, 100 years, all new people. Every single one of you is going to die.
What's really interesting is you walk around in your life — me too — and we never think about it. Every week when I walk up here, people watch me whisper to myself under my breath, and people ask me what I'm saying. Every week, the last thing I say to myself before I preach is a quote from an old preacher from the 1600s, Richard Baxter:
"I preached as never sure to preach again, as a dying man to dying men."
What I am here to tell you this week is you are going to die. In fact, the reason you never think about it is the second lie Satan ever told in the book of Genesis: you will not surely die. That lie planted itself in the human heart, and we walk around our entire lives not prepared for the thing that's inevitable.
Only a fool goes through life unprepared for what's inevitable. You are going to die. This week in my rooted group, I prayed for a 24-year-old girl who got put on hospice care. Last night, right in that lobby, I prayed for a five-year-old boy battling life-threatening cancer. Some of you feel very invincible because of your physical health or your financial preparedness — whatever it is. Listen to me: all it takes is one rogue cell and you might be ready to meet your maker. You are going to die.
Some of you might say, "Man, pastor, can't you be more positive?" Yes — I'm positive you're going to die. All of you. I'm positive.
That was bad news. Here's the good news: you can be prepared for that moment, so that moment actually becomes the doorway to the greatest moment you will ever experience — coming face to face to hug your Lord Jesus Christ. You can be prepared for that moment.```
My primary job is not to help you be happy. My primary job is not to help you be prosperous in your life. My primary job, even though I love doing this, is not to help you fix your family. My primary job is to prepare you for eternity.
So here's the purpose of this entire message today: I want you prepared. This whole message is about what is going to happen to you 60 seconds after you die. Or I could also say it like this — we're also going to touch on this — when Christ returns, and he will, what is going to happen to you in that moment, and how can you be prepared for it?
The title of the message is The Two Question Test. I want to give attribution where it's due — I have a spiritual mentor, Pastor Chris Hodges, a pastor a few decades older than me in Alabama. I first heard some of the framework of this message from him, and I want to honor him for that. He said some things better than I can say them, so I want to say them to you.
Today I'm going to talk about the two-question test that you're going to face when you die. This is straight from the book of Romans.
Here's the context: Paul is speaking into a situation where Christians in the same church were arguing with each other. And Paul is rebuking them:
"You then, why do you judge your brother and sister? Or why do you treat them with contempt?"
In other words: why are you focusing on them instead of focusing on you? Why are you focusing on what you want to do to them instead of praying about what you can do for them?
He says this because we're all going to stand before God's judgment seat. As surely as I live, says the Lord — there's going to come a moment, the Bible says, in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, a last trumpet will sound, and like lightning flashing from the east to the west in the sky, Christ Jesus will return. And in that moment, every knee is going to bow and every tongue will acknowledge him.```
Everyone — every knee, every person, every tongue, every language, every tribe, every nation, every religion that has ever existed — all of them in that moment will bend their knee to Jesus. It'll be revealed and they'll go, "Oh my goodness, it was Jesus the whole time. He was the one who was God." And they'll acknowledge God. You want to be on the right side of that equation when that moment happens.
So then each of us will give an account of ourselves to God. You're going to face a test in that moment. Now let me explain to you exactly what that test is going to be.
Was anybody else, growing up, someone who went into a test thinking, "I got this, I'm going to crush this thing," and just didn't test well? It's like I had it in my head, I just wasn't good at testing.
When I got to college, the hardest class I ever took was Biblical Hebrew — two semesters of it. I had an academic scholarship that was a big part of me being able to go to the college I went to, and the stipulation for keeping the scholarship was maintaining a 3.0 GPA. I graduated from Union University with a 3.01 GPA. My mentality was, I don't have time for classes, I've got intramurals to play — that was kind of my thing.```
But Biblical Hebrew almost tripped me up, almost cost me my scholarship. It's a really hard language — no vowels, and it reads right to left instead of left to right. My first few tests: C, C, D. If I didn't get the grade I needed, I was going to lose my scholarship, maybe have to drop out.
Somebody eventually tipped me off that at the bookstore on campus, students from the Hebrew class would turn in their old study notebooks — those blue books — and in the back of those notebooks, sometimes they'd recorded the questions that had been on the Hebrew tests. So I donated some plasma, made 30 bucks, and bought all of them — every single one. Then I wasn't just studying the material anymore — I was studying the actual questions I was going to be asked. Sure enough, my grades went from C, C, D to A, A, A. I made it.
Here's my point: my fear is that a lot of people don't know what's going to happen when they have to give an account to God — you're actually preparing for a test, but preparing in the wrong way, so you're not going to be prepared for what happens, and you're going to fail.
So here's what I want to do right now: tell you exactly what's going to happen the moment you stand before God and give an account.
Let me do a little theology and then we're going to get into Revelation 20. What we're going to talk about is judgment day. In the Bible, a lot of people miss this: Bible scholars talk about there not being one judgment, but actually two judgments.
The first, scholars often call the great white throne judgment. The second is often called the bema seat judgment. I'm going to talk about the difference between those today.
The great white throne is the everybody judgment — everybody's going to experience this one. Let me read it to you from Revelation 20, and I'll show you a few things you may have missed.
"Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it" — that's Jesus. "The earth and the heavens fled from his presence, and there was no place for them."
That's a big Bible way of saying time ended — there's going to come a moment where all of history ends. That moment's coming.
"Then I saw the dead, great and small..."
That's saying it doesn't matter how rich or powerful you were — you can't buy your way out of this judgment. You're going to face this judgment standing before the throne.
"And books" (plural) "were opened. And another book" (singular) "was opened, which is the book of life."
Why books plural, and then a book singular? Let me explain.
"The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books."
When it says "the dead" here, it's talking about the spiritually dead — people who didn't know Jesus, who never had a relationship with God, who never believed that somehow, in some way, the cross counted for them and their sins were forgiven. That can happen for you today.
What the Bible teaches is that every second of your life, everything you've ever done — good or bad — is being recorded in those books. That's a terrifying statement, isn't it? That's why it's plural — a lot of material on you. Some of you are like, "There's going to be many volumes just for my freshman year of college."
But then there's the other book — not a book of sins, but a book of names, called the Lamb's Book of Life. Everyone who has placed their faith in the Lamb who was slain — who just happens to also be the one seated on the throne doing the judging — has had their sins erased. There's no sins left, only names, written in his book, and they get entrance into heaven.
Let me explain this because it's really important to me that you understand what's going on here. Imagine that every second of your life, every time you do something good or bad, God reveals it — you see this all throughout the Bible. Moses says it, David says it, the prophet Isaiah says it. There's a verse that should terrify you — Jesus says:
"Nothing that is done in secret will not be made manifest. There is nothing done in the darkness that will not be proclaimed in the light."
What he's saying is: in that moment, if you end up being judged according to what's in the books, God's going to read out loud, for everyone everywhere to hear, everything you did wrong and how you sinned against him.
So imagine you could see yourself from the light of eternity. You watch yourself sin, and you see it from the light of eternity because you've laid eyes on a holy God. Everyone in the Bible who lays their eyes on a holy God is afraid they're going to die — because they instinctively know that sin cannot be in the presence of a holy God.
Every now and then you'll hear somebody foolishly say, "God can't be in the presence of sin." That's exactly backwards. The problem is not that God cannot be in the presence of sin — it's that sin cannot be in the presence of a holy God, in the same way that tissue paper can't be in the presence of the sun.
Habakkuk 1 says, "Your eyes are too pure to look upon evil."
So you see, from that vantage point of eternity, and you immediately think, "What am I going to do?" You start trying little things — trying to erase it. But the problem is, when God writes in those books, the Bible says he "etches" those things in. It's permanent.
So then some of you try to make up for it — you think, "Maybe if I do some good things, it'll replace the bad things." So you go on with your life trying to do some good here and some good there. Those things do get recorded — but you notice these just get added; the bad doesn't get subtracted.
There's a reason for that: the Bible says God is a good judge. In the same way that if somebody guilty of murder walked into a courtroom, they can't plead innocence by appealing to the fact that they were also nice to four people — that doesn't make the murder go away.
So then you might go to the person you sinned against and say, "Let me apologize, let me make amends." But that's not going to work either — because reconciliation and the forgiveness of sin are two different things.
Here's what's really interesting: if you start reading your Bible, you'll notice one phrase repeated throughout that is the only way to get sins out of the books. It talks about God "blotting out" our transgressions.
The moment you place your faith in Jesus — the moment you look at the cross and believe that somehow, in some way, that cross counted for you, that the Lamb on the throne was slain for you, condemned in your place — in that moment, God begins to apply the blood of Jesus...
He begins to apply the blood of Jesus to cover over your sin. The book of Isaiah describes God as he who blots out our transgressions and remembers our sins no more. Some of you may remember in Psalm 51, right after David commits adultery with Bathsheba — some of you have that sin in your life — David prays, "Have mercy on me, oh God, according to your unfailing love, according to your great compassion." And then watch what he says: "Blot out my transgressions."
So the Bible says that when you place your faith in Jesus, God applies the blood of the Lamb and begins to cover over all of the sins in the books with the blood of the Lamb. But it actually gets even better. If you go to the New Testament, it calls everybody who's placed their faith in Jesus a saint — it means holy one. So God doesn't just blot out your transgressions; he writes a new name over your sins so that now you're not just a sinner, you're a saint in the eyes of God. You're holy in the eyes of God.
But it gets even better again, because 1 John says this: if we walk in the light — and what it means to walk in the light is that light makes things visible, whenever we get honest with God and ourselves about his holiness, our sinfulness, our need for Jesus — if we walk in the light as he is in the light, the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all unrighteousness. Nothing else could remove those sins from the books, but when the blood of Jesus was applied to them, he can remove them forever and they will never be counted against you.
So let's go back to the question: why are there all these sins in the books? There's only names in the book, because the people whose names are in the book are the people whose sins have been blotted out and erased. So there's no sins left — only names. And Jesus says to them, "Welcome in."
Here's the moral of this: you don't want to be judged by what's in the books. You want to be judged by what's in the Book. You don't want to be judged based on what you did — you want to be judged based on what Jesus did.
In one sense, hell isn't a place where God just sends people he's mad at. Hell is a place where you have the option of paying for your own sins if you want to.
So here's what's going to happen. The first question you're going to face when you get there — picture a big long line, and it'll be a little awe-inspiring — is this: What did you do with Jesus? Because Jesus wasn't just dying to show off. He was dying to pay the bill for your sins. So God's going to ask: were you planning on paying the bill for your own sins, or were you going to let Jesus do that?
Many people are going to get the answer to this question wrong. Jesus explicitly told us that many people are going to fail on this question. In Matthew 7, Jesus says:
Not everybody who says to me, "Lord, Lord," will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.
Some of you are thinking, "Well, that was literally my plan — when I was ten, I was told to pray a prayer and say Jesus was my Lord, and that would get me into heaven." But Jesus said many will say to him on that day, "Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons, and in your name perform many miracles?" And Jesus will say plainly, "I never knew you." He wasn't looking for religious works. He was looking for a relationship.
I totally grew up in church — I'm a third-generation Baptist pastor, over-saved if there's such a thing. We went to big church on Sunday morning, then stayed for Sunday school, then came back for church Sunday night, then RAs, then youth group on Wednesday, then junior Bible quiz on Thursday. My mom's strategy was to get us so full of the Word of God that if a mosquito bit us, we'd fly away singing
"But on the judgment day, fire will reveal what kind of work each builder has done. The fire will show if a person's work has any value."
Watch this—it's really important. If the work survives, that builder is going to receive a reward.
Imagine it's like there's a conveyor belt for everything that you've ever built. You're building something with your life right now. You're building a family, you're building a reputation, you might be building a business, you're building a career. Everything you've ever built is going to pass on that conveyor belt through the fire of eternity.
If it passes through the fire—if it's something that lasts into eternity—then you are going to get rewards for investing in things that last for eternity. Do you know what lasts for eternity? There's only one thing: the souls of people. That's it. The souls of people. How will you receive rewards? By investing in things that lead to the eternal blessing and life of the souls of people.
Here's the thing: you can't change the world. You can change somebody's world. For the rest of this series, we're going to be looking at the three things you can do to change people's worlds in a way that will receive reward in eternity.
I want you to see the story of one Lakepointe family that's laying it all on the line to do this right now — the story of Lewis and Casey.
Lewis's story:
"My biological mom was just not equipped to take care of us. She was really young. When I was about 6 weeks old, she just walked out and left. I grew up thinking she didn't choose me. She doesn't want me. I was put in my grandmother's care. She was very physically and emotionally abusive. My dad fought very hard to get custody of me and my sister. The judge court-ordered to have me removed and placed in my parents' care. The woman I call my mom, she is my stepmom. She really showed tremendous grace and kindness. She used to tell me, 'God shows us grace and kindness when we don't deserve it.' She was the first person in my life that chose me."
Casey's story:
"I always wanted a child of my own. When we got our home, the objective was to start a family. I got sick. My body kind of just started shutting down. And so, we started running all these different tests, and that's when we found out that I had PCOS and that our chances of getting pregnant were very, very low. We decided to put our dreams on hold and to take a really nice trip to Disney. My husband, when we were at Disney, said, 'I think I want to foster.' The whole entire week we were at Disney, God kept putting people in our path that had either been fostering and just adopted, or they were there with their foster kid. We came back and we went to church and, as it just so happens, it was the announcement for the foster and adoption conference. My husband said, 'We really should sign up for that conference.' So I actually signed us up for it. I had no interest in doing this. I've been a product of the system and I had no desire to ever go back to it. But I left that day knowing that it's what God really wanted me to do. I capitulated to both God and my husband, and I decided that we would jump into this world and we would do it. It's been the best decision we've ever made. The conference really did open up my eyes. I really did believe that I could use everything that happened to me as a child and turn all of that negative into something positive. I really found a purpose for it. Without that conference, we wouldn't be fostering today."
Our church does support fostering and adoption. Right now, 9,000 children in the greater DFW area are in foster care, and 40% of them are within 30 minutes of a Lakepointe campus.
I want a hard emotional gear shift to set the tone for this sermon. You're going to die. Every single one of you within the hearing of my voice, in the words of Anne Lamott, 100 years, all new people. Every single one of you is going to die.
What's really interesting is you walk around in your life — me too — and we never think about it. Every week when I walk up here, people watch me whisper to myself under my breath, and people ask me what I'm saying. Every week, the last thing I say to myself before I preach is a quote from an old preacher from the 1600s, Richard Baxter:
"I preached as never sure to preach again, as a dying man to dying men."
What I am here to tell you this week is you are going to die. In fact, the reason you never think about it is the second lie Satan ever told in the book of Genesis: you will not surely die. That lie planted itself in the human heart, and we walk around our entire lives not prepared for the thing that's inevitable.
Only a fool goes through life unprepared for what's inevitable. You are going to die. This week in my rooted group, I prayed for a 24-year-old girl who got put on hospice care. Last night, right in that lobby, I prayed for a five-year-old boy battling life-threatening cancer. Some of you feel very invincible because of your physical health or your financial preparedness — whatever it is. Listen to me: all it takes is one rogue cell and you might be ready to meet your maker. You are going to die.
Some of you might say, "Man, pastor, can't you be more positive?" Yes — I'm positive you're going to die. All of you. I'm positive.
That was bad news. Here's the good news: you can be prepared for that moment, so that moment actually becomes the doorway to the greatest moment you will ever experience — coming face to face to hug your Lord Jesus Christ. You can be prepared for that moment.```
My primary job is not to help you be happy. My primary job is not to help you be prosperous in your life. My primary job, even though I love doing this, is not to help you fix your family. My primary job is to prepare you for eternity.
So here's the purpose of this entire message today: I want you prepared. This whole message is about what is going to happen to you 60 seconds after you die. Or I could also say it like this — we're also going to touch on this — when Christ returns, and he will, what is going to happen to you in that moment, and how can you be prepared for it?
The title of the message is The Two Question Test. I want to give attribution where it's due — I have a spiritual mentor, Pastor Chris Hodges, a pastor a few decades older than me in Alabama. I first heard some of the framework of this message from him, and I want to honor him for that. He said some things better than I can say them, so I want to say them to you.
Today I'm going to talk about the two-question test that you're going to face when you die. This is straight from the book of Romans.
Here's the context: Paul is speaking into a situation where Christians in the same church were arguing with each other. And Paul is rebuking them:
"You then, why do you judge your brother and sister? Or why do you treat them with contempt?"
In other words: why are you focusing on them instead of focusing on you? Why are you focusing on what you want to do to them instead of praying about what you can do for them?
He says this because we're all going to stand before God's judgment seat. As surely as I live, says the Lord — there's going to come a moment, the Bible says, in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, a last trumpet will sound, and like lightning flashing from the east to the west in the sky, Christ Jesus will return. And in that moment, every knee is going to bow and every tongue will acknowledge him.```
Everyone — every knee, every person, every tongue, every language, every tribe, every nation, every religion that has ever existed — all of them in that moment will bend their knee to Jesus. It'll be revealed and they'll go, "Oh my goodness, it was Jesus the whole time. He was the one who was God." And they'll acknowledge God. You want to be on the right side of that equation when that moment happens.
So then each of us will give an account of ourselves to God. You're going to face a test in that moment. Now let me explain to you exactly what that test is going to be.
Was anybody else, growing up, someone who went into a test thinking, "I got this, I'm going to crush this thing," and just didn't test well? It's like I had it in my head, I just wasn't good at testing.
When I got to college, the hardest class I ever took was Biblical Hebrew — two semesters of it. I had an academic scholarship that was a big part of me being able to go to the college I went to, and the stipulation for keeping the scholarship was maintaining a 3.0 GPA. I graduated from Union University with a 3.01 GPA. My mentality was, I don't have time for classes, I've got intramurals to play — that was kind of my thing.```
But Biblical Hebrew almost tripped me up, almost cost me my scholarship. It's a really hard language — no vowels, and it reads right to left instead of left to right. My first few tests: C, C, D. If I didn't get the grade I needed, I was going to lose my scholarship, maybe have to drop out.
Somebody eventually tipped me off that at the bookstore on campus, students from the Hebrew class would turn in their old study notebooks — those blue books — and in the back of those notebooks, sometimes they'd recorded the questions that had been on the Hebrew tests. So I donated some plasma, made 30 bucks, and bought all of them — every single one. Then I wasn't just studying the material anymore — I was studying the actual questions I was going to be asked. Sure enough, my grades went from C, C, D to A, A, A. I made it.
Here's my point: my fear is that a lot of people don't know what's going to happen when they have to give an account to God — you're actually preparing for a test, but preparing in the wrong way, so you're not going to be prepared for what happens, and you're going to fail.
So here's what I want to do right now: tell you exactly what's going to happen the moment you stand before God and give an account.
Let me do a little theology and then we're going to get into Revelation 20. What we're going to talk about is judgment day. In the Bible, a lot of people miss this: Bible scholars talk about there not being one judgment, but actually two judgments.
The first, scholars often call the great white throne judgment. The second is often called the bema seat judgment. I'm going to talk about the difference between those today.
The great white throne is the everybody judgment — everybody's going to experience this one. Let me read it to you from Revelation 20, and I'll show you a few things you may have missed.
"Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it" — that's Jesus. "The earth and the heavens fled from his presence, and there was no place for them."
That's a big Bible way of saying time ended — there's going to come a moment where all of history ends. That moment's coming.
"Then I saw the dead, great and small..."
That's saying it doesn't matter how rich or powerful you were — you can't buy your way out of this judgment. You're going to face this judgment standing before the throne.
"And books" (plural) "were opened. And another book" (singular) "was opened, which is the book of life."
Why books plural, and then a book singular? Let me explain.
"The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books."
When it says "the dead" here, it's talking about the spiritually dead — people who didn't know Jesus, who never had a relationship with God, who never believed that somehow, in some way, the cross counted for them and their sins were forgiven. That can happen for you today.
What the Bible teaches is that every second of your life, everything you've ever done — good or bad — is being recorded in those books. That's a terrifying statement, isn't it? That's why it's plural — a lot of material on you. Some of you are like, "There's going to be many volumes just for my freshman year of college."
But then there's the other book — not a book of sins, but a book of names, called the Lamb's Book of Life. Everyone who has placed their faith in the Lamb who was slain — who just happens to also be the one seated on the throne doing the judging — has had their sins erased. There's no sins left, only names, written in his book, and they get entrance into heaven.
Let me explain this because it's really important to me that you understand what's going on here. Imagine that every second of your life, every time you do something good or bad, God reveals it — you see this all throughout the Bible. Moses says it, David says it, the prophet Isaiah says it. There's a verse that should terrify you — Jesus says:
"Nothing that is done in secret will not be made manifest. There is nothing done in the darkness that will not be proclaimed in the light."
What he's saying is: in that moment, if you end up being judged according to what's in the books, God's going to read out loud, for everyone everywhere to hear, everything you did wrong and how you sinned against him.
So imagine you could see yourself from the light of eternity. You watch yourself sin, and you see it from the light of eternity because you've laid eyes on a holy God. Everyone in the Bible who lays their eyes on a holy God is afraid they're going to die — because they instinctively know that sin cannot be in the presence of a holy God.
Every now and then you'll hear somebody foolishly say, "God can't be in the presence of sin." That's exactly backwards. The problem is not that God cannot be in the presence of sin — it's that sin cannot be in the presence of a holy God, in the same way that tissue paper can't be in the presence of the sun.
Habakkuk 1 says, "Your eyes are too pure to look upon evil."
So you see, from that vantage point of eternity, and you immediately think, "What am I going to do?" You start trying little things — trying to erase it. But the problem is, when God writes in those books, the Bible says he "etches" those things in. It's permanent.
So then some of you try to make up for it — you think, "Maybe if I do some good things, it'll replace the bad things." So you go on with your life trying to do some good here and some good there. Those things do get recorded — but you notice these just get added; the bad doesn't get subtracted.
There's a reason for that: the Bible says God is a good judge. In the same way that if somebody guilty of murder walked into a courtroom, they can't plead innocence by appealing to the fact that they were also nice to four people — that doesn't make the murder go away.
So then you might go to the person you sinned against and say, "Let me apologize, let me make amends." But that's not going to work either — because reconciliation and the forgiveness of sin are two different things.
Here's what's really interesting: if you start reading your Bible, you'll notice one phrase repeated throughout that is the only way to get sins out of the books. It talks about God "blotting out" our transgressions.
The moment you place your faith in Jesus — the moment you look at the cross and believe that somehow, in some way, that cross counted for you, that the Lamb on the throne was slain for you, condemned in your place — in that moment, God begins to apply the blood of Jesus...
He begins to apply the blood of Jesus to cover over your sin. The book of Isaiah describes God as he who blots out our transgressions and remembers our sins no more. Some of you may remember in Psalm 51, right after David commits adultery with Bathsheba — some of you have that sin in your life — David prays, "Have mercy on me, oh God, according to your unfailing love, according to your great compassion." And then watch what he says: "Blot out my transgressions."
So the Bible says that when you place your faith in Jesus, God applies the blood of the Lamb and begins to cover over all of the sins in the books with the blood of the Lamb. But it actually gets even better. If you go to the New Testament, it calls everybody who's placed their faith in Jesus a saint — it means holy one. So God doesn't just blot out your transgressions; he writes a new name over your sins so that now you're not just a sinner, you're a saint in the eyes of God. You're holy in the eyes of God.
But it gets even better again, because 1 John says this: if we walk in the light — and what it means to walk in the light is that light makes things visible, whenever we get honest with God and ourselves about his holiness, our sinfulness, our need for Jesus — if we walk in the light as he is in the light, the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all unrighteousness. Nothing else could remove those sins from the books, but when the blood of Jesus was applied to them, he can remove them forever and they will never be counted against you.
So let's go back to the question: why are there all these sins in the books? There's only names in the book, because the people whose names are in the book are the people whose sins have been blotted out and erased. So there's no sins left — only names. And Jesus says to them, "Welcome in."
Here's the moral of this: you don't want to be judged by what's in the books. You want to be judged by what's in the Book. You don't want to be judged based on what you did — you want to be judged based on what Jesus did.
In one sense, hell isn't a place where God just sends people he's mad at. Hell is a place where you have the option of paying for your own sins if you want to.
So here's what's going to happen. The first question you're going to face when you get there — picture a big long line, and it'll be a little awe-inspiring — is this: What did you do with Jesus? Because Jesus wasn't just dying to show off. He was dying to pay the bill for your sins. So God's going to ask: were you planning on paying the bill for your own sins, or were you going to let Jesus do that?
Many people are going to get the answer to this question wrong. Jesus explicitly told us that many people are going to fail on this question. In Matthew 7, Jesus says:
Not everybody who says to me, "Lord, Lord," will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.
Some of you are thinking, "Well, that was literally my plan — when I was ten, I was told to pray a prayer and say Jesus was my Lord, and that would get me into heaven." But Jesus said many will say to him on that day, "Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons, and in your name perform many miracles?" And Jesus will say plainly, "I never knew you." He wasn't looking for religious works. He was looking for a relationship.
I totally grew up in church — I'm a third-generation Baptist pastor, over-saved if there's such a thing. We went to big church on Sunday morning, then stayed for Sunday school, then came back for church Sunday night, then RAs, then youth group on Wednesday, then junior Bible quiz on Thursday. My mom's strategy was to get us so full of the Word of God that if a mosquito bit us, we'd fly away singing
"But on the judgment day, fire will reveal what kind of work each builder has done. The fire will show if a person's work has any value."
Watch this—it's really important. If the work survives, that builder is going to receive a reward.
Imagine it's like there's a conveyor belt for everything that you've ever built. You're building something with your life right now. You're building a family, you're building a reputation, you might be building a business, you're building a career. Everything you've ever built is going to pass on that conveyor belt through the fire of eternity.
If it passes through the fire—if it's something that lasts into eternity—then you are going to get rewards for investing in things that last for eternity. Do you know what lasts for eternity? There's only one thing: the souls of people. That's it. The souls of people. How will you receive rewards? By investing in things that lead to the eternal blessing and life of the souls of people.
Here's the thing: you can't change the world. You can change somebody's world. For the rest of this series, we're going to be looking at the three things you can do to change people's worlds in a way that will receive reward in eternity.
I want you to see the story of one Lakepointe family that's laying it all on the line to do this right now — the story of Lewis and Casey.
Lewis's story:
"My biological mom was just not equipped to take care of us. She was really young. When I was about 6 weeks old, she just walked out and left. I grew up thinking she didn't choose me. She doesn't want me. I was put in my grandmother's care. She was very physically and emotionally abusive. My dad fought very hard to get custody of me and my sister. The judge court-ordered to have me removed and placed in my parents' care. The woman I call my mom, she is my stepmom. She really showed tremendous grace and kindness. She used to tell me, 'God shows us grace and kindness when we don't deserve it.' She was the first person in my life that chose me."
Casey's story:
"I always wanted a child of my own. When we got our home, the objective was to start a family. I got sick. My body kind of just started shutting down. And so, we started running all these different tests, and that's when we found out that I had PCOS and that our chances of getting pregnant were very, very low. We decided to put our dreams on hold and to take a really nice trip to Disney. My husband, when we were at Disney, said, 'I think I want to foster.' The whole entire week we were at Disney, God kept putting people in our path that had either been fostering and just adopted, or they were there with their foster kid. We came back and we went to church and, as it just so happens, it was the announcement for the foster and adoption conference. My husband said, 'We really should sign up for that conference.' So I actually signed us up for it. I had no interest in doing this. I've been a product of the system and I had no desire to ever go back to it. But I left that day knowing that it's what God really wanted me to do. I capitulated to both God and my husband, and I decided that we would jump into this world and we would do it. It's been the best decision we've ever made. The conference really did open up my eyes. I really did believe that I could use everything that happened to me as a child and turn all of that negative into something positive. I really found a purpose for it. Without that conference, we wouldn't be fostering today."
Our church does support fostering and adoption. Right now, 9,000 children in the greater DFW area are in foster care, and 40% of them are within 30 minutes of a Lakepointe campus.
