On January 24, I preached a sermon in the meaning of hell. I got more requests for that sermon than any I have preached at New Hope. The subject of real love has dominated my thinking for at least three years now. Dr. Walter Shurden, Chairman of the Department of Christianity at Mercer University until his retirement a couple of years ago, has helped me to understand how living without real love leads to hell. In a meditation on how the author of The Shack plays on the theme of “living an unloved life,” Dr. Shurden brought together the relationship between living unloved and hell. He wrote,
“At least part of what it means to be “lost” is to live as though you have never been loved. All are children of God, but some have resisted the embrace . . .. When we live unloved lives we end up overreaching like Adam, lying like Eve, manipulating like Jacob, being fearful like Saul, living unbuttoned like David, amassing like Solomon, denying like Peter, boasting like Paul, and killing ourselves like Judas. Living unloved, we end up puking in alleys, bed-hopping, living self-destructive lives, buying till it hurts, climbing ladders made of others’ heads, building barns too big to live in, confusing ambition with vocation, hoarding rather than sharing, hating folk who don’t look like us, driving by Lazarus, and using rather than serving people. To tell the truth, we end up on trash heaps on the southwest corner of Jerusalem. They called it Gehenna. We call it Hell! We end up as waste, and we waste the only life given to us. That is hell: waste.”
I know some people who are living unloved. They are lost. They are on the way to wasting the only life they will ever have. They are resisting God’s embrace and the embrace of the human channels through which God’s love flows. I pray for their salvation from the trash heap, from hell.
