22 Sermon Illustrations on Eternal Consequences

I was in an infirmary not long since, and a mother brought a little child in. She said, "Doctor, my little child's eyes have not been opened for several days, and I would just like you to do something for them." The doctor got some ointment and put it first on one and then on the other, and just pulled them open. "Your child is blind," said the doctor; "perfectly blind; it will never see again." At first the mother couldn't take it in, but after a little she cast an appealing look upon that physician, and in a voice full of emotion, said, "Doctor, you don't mean to say that my child will never see again?" "Yes," replied the doctor, "your child has lost its sight, and will never see again." And that mother just gave a scream, and drew that child to her bosom. "O my darling child," sobbed the woman, "are you never to see the mother that gave you birth? never to see the world again?" I could not keep back the tears when I saw the terrible agony of that woman when she realized the misfortune that had come upon her child. That was a terrible calamity, to grope in total darkness through this world; never to look upon the bright sky, the green fields; never to see the faces of loved ones; but what was it in comparison to the loss of a soul? I would rather have my eyes plucked out of my head and go down to my grave in total blindness than lose my soul.

There is a fable of a covetous man, who chanced to find his way one moonlight night into a fairy's palace. There he saw bars, apparently of solid gold, strewed on every side; and he was permitted to take away as many as he could carry. In the morning, when the sun rose on his imaginary treasure, borne home with so much toil, behold! there was only a bundle of sticks; and invisible beings filled the air around him with scornful laughter. Such shall be the confusion of many a man that died in this world worth his thousands, and woke up in the next world not only "miserable and poor and blind and naked," but in presence of a heap of fuel stored up against the great day of burning.

Two young men were walking along one evening, towards a prayer-meeting, when they were accosted by several acquaintances. who were on their way to a place of usual resort. They entreated them to join them; but they refused. Finally, one of them consented, and turned aside, only once more, for an evening of worldly pleasure, and let his friend go to the prayer-meeting alone. One found peace with God: but his companion became hardened; and in three months, while his associate on that eventful night was honoring his Master by his faithful and consistent life, he was the inmate of a prison, awaiting the penalty of the law. Our life is full of these turning-points of fortune and of ill, of peace and of woe, of life eternal, or of despair and death. The track we travel has a switch at almost every step. Dr. Haren.

A house took fire. The mother was busiest of all saving her trinkets. The fire spread rapidly. The mother, trying to enter the house a second time, was stopped. She shrieked in anguish; for her babe lay in its cradle in the burning building. At what a cost had she saved her trifles! Should she not have rescued the child first? Is not this true of our children's souls now in danger of eternal fire?

A recent discovery at Pompeii has brought to light the fact of a priest fleeing from the temple when the warning came of the city's approaching doom. But the treasures of the temple, — why should he leave them? He is supposed to have returned to obtain them. Again he sets out, but had not proceeded far before the destruction came, and he was lost. Had it not been for the treasures, his life might have been spared. Bib. Treasury.

A minister of the gospel determined on one occasion to preach on the text, "Now is the accepted time; now is the day of salvation." Whilst in his study, thinking, he fell asleep, and dreamed that he was carried into hell, and set down in the midst of a conclave of lost spirits. They were assembled to devise means whereby they might get at the souls of men. One rose, and said, "I will go to the earth, and tell men that the Bible is all a fable, that it is not divinely appointed of God." No, that would not do. Another said, "Let me go: I will tell men that there is no God, no Saviour, no heaven, no hell;" and at the last words a fiendish smile lighted upon all their countenances. "No, that will not do: we cannot make men believe that." Suddenly one arose, and with a wise mien, like the serpent of old, suggested, "No: I will journey to the world of men, and tell them that there is a God, that there is a Saviour, that there is a heaven, — yes, and a hell too, — but I'll tell them there is no hurry; TO-MORROW will do, it will be 'even as to-day.'" And they sent him. Biblical Treasury.

The vanity of the purchase and the value of the loss is such, that no man, conscious of his immortality in the next state, but must acknowledge that he is an infinite loser and prodigious fool that gains the world by the loss of his soul. It is said of the ancient Germans, that, in their commerce with the Romans, receiving silver for their amber, that has no virtue but to draw straws to it, they were amazed at the price. And certainly the great Tempter cannot but wonder at the foolish exchange that men make in giving their immortal souls to him for perishing vanities; and, having this scornful advantage, will much more upbraid them hereafter than ever be allured them here. Hence it was a good saying of one to a great lord upon his showing him his stately house and pleasant gardens, "Sir, you had need make sure of heaven, or else, when you die, you will be a very great loser." Yes; "and what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" W. Bates.

Tell our gay triflers there is no such thing as a trifle upon earth. Can any thing be a trifle which has an effect eternal? Edward Young.

the present has such intimate connections with the future . We are told in Scripture that this life is a seedtime, and the future is the harvest. "He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit, shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting." As the seed generates the plant, even so does this present life generate the eternal future. Heaven and hell are, after all, but the developments of our present character, for is it not written, "He that is unjust, let him be unjust still . . . and he that is holy, let him be holy still"? Do we not know that in the heart of every sin condemnation slumbers? Is it not a fearful truth that the germ of everlasting torment sleeps in every vile wish, every unholy thought, every unclean act, so that hell is but a great breaking out of slumbering lava, which had been so quiet, that while the mountain was covered with fair verdure, even to its summit, death came and bade that lava rise, and down the steeps of manhood's eternal existence, the fiery lava of eternal misery doth pour itself? Yet it was there before, for sin is hell, and rebellion against God is the prelude of misery. So is it with heaven; I know that heaven is a reward, not of debt but of grace; but still the Christian has that within him which forestalls for him a heaven. What did Christ say? "I give unto my sheep eternal life." He did not say, 'I will give ," but "I do give ." As soon as they believe in Me, I give them eternal life. "He that . . . believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation." The Christian has within him the seed-beds of a paradise; in due time the light which is sown for the righteous, and the gladness which is sown for the upright in heart, shall spring up, and they shall reap the harvest. Is it not plain, then, that religion is a thing which we must have here? Is it not prominently revealed that religion is important for the present? For if this life be the seed-time of the future, how can I expect to reap in another world other harvests than I have been sowing here? How can I trust that I shall be saved then, unless I am saved now? How can I have hope that heaven shall be my eternal inheritance, unless the earnest be begun in my own soul on earth?

Jerry Falwell Jr. isn’t a hypocrite. But the former Liberty president is a cautionary tale for cultural Christianity.

________

Countless friends texted me a Vanity Fair profile of former Liberty University chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr., featuring an extended interview with the man who went from being a kingmaker in the 2016 presidential election to resigning after a series of scandals.

What most people highlighted was not the salacious recounting of the stories but one particular quote from Falwell: “Because of my last name, people think I’m a religious person. But I’m not. My goal was to make them realize I’m not my dad.”

For some, this shows the problem: hypocrisy. If only it were.

When I say that Jerry Falwell Jr. is no hypocrite, I mean it in only one sense. Obviously, Falwell was hypocritical in, among other things, allegedly engaging in behavior that, for even the smallest of the offenses, would have led to fines or expulsions for his students.

In that sense, the scandal is similar to the revelations that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson attended Downing Street cocktail parties while the public was forbidden by law to gather due to COVID-19 public health measures. And, of course, beyond that is the much more fundamental matter: How can the chancellor of one of the world’s largest Christian universities justify his behavior by saying he’s not religious?

That’s precisely the point, though. Hypocrisy is an ongoing and always-present danger in the church. Jesus warned us to beware of hypocrisy — charging the religious leaders of his day with maintaining piety out of pretense.

For Jesus, the congruence between the inner and the outer — the heart and the mouth, the motivations and the behavior, the public and the private — is a crucial matter of integrity before God. The warnings were needed, Jesus told us, because hypocrisy is, by definition, crafty and hidden. Wolves look like lambs, which is why they are able to ravage the flock.

For such hypocrisy, Jesus used the metaphor of yeast (Luke 12:1) — a metaphor he also used for the kingdom of God (13:20–21). In other words, both hypocrisy and the kingdom work powerfully but invisibly, under the surface of perception. Only in the very long term are such hidden realities brought to light (12:2).

Hypocrisy typically leaves people vulnerable to deception and predation precisely because it is so carefully hidden. I often find churches or ministries unable to discover horrific things done in their ministries because they assume that evildoers in the church give off a creepy vibe or have a supervillain’s sinister laugh.

The most dangerous hypocrites, though, are those who are actually skilled at hypocrisy — at pretense, at hiding, at mirroring the look of true fidelity.

Yet Jerry Falwell Jr. told us repeatedly how he saw the world. When confronted with the immorality and scandals of his preferred presidential candidate, Falwell didn’t seek to measure the moral deficiencies against what he saw as the greater good as much as he ridiculed the premise of the question.

To him, Trump was moral because he had created jobs and made payroll. Unlike some other Trump evangelical supporters — with whom I disagreed but whose positions were reasonable and understandable — Falwell didn’t try to measure the business leader’s intemperate and crass attacks on people with some other objective, like judicial nominations, for instance. Instead he often mimicked such attacks, right along with the cartoonish and bullying tone of them.

Falwell Jr. frequently spoke not in terms of the gospel or the way of Christ, even parenthetically, but in terms of decidedly Machiavellian political aims and objectives. When individuals questioned the cost to Christian witness of merging evangelicalism with populist demagoguery, he often dismissed them as though they were morally preening puritans, out of touch with the real world.

When his own scandals started to proliferate, Falwell did not defend himself as a faithful follower of Jesus Christ. He didn’t even (as do so many scandal-ridden Christian leaders) present himself as a repentant David in the middle of Psalm 51.

Falwell said that he was a lawyer, not a preacher — as though the commands to integrity, obedience, repentance, and mercy were ordination vows, not the call of Jesus on every one of his disciples and, even before that, written by God on the consciences of every human being.

In many ways, Jerry Falwell Jr. did not hide from us who he was. He told us, over and over again.

If the problem were his hypocrisy, we could blame him. We could absolve ourselves of responsibility. After all, how could we know? We knew enough to know that something was wrong here. When some of the details of the final days of the Falwell Jr. era were revealed, lots of people said, “How could he be this stupid and self-destructive?” But I don’t think many said, “How could this happen? He was such a godly man.”

That is a crisis of accountability, yes. If we cannot see the problems even when a leader is telling us (at least the roots of) them outright, how can we expect to keep watch for leaders who actually are skilled at mimicking discipleship and sanctification?

But this is also a crisis of love. As evangelical Christians, it is a scandal that we didn’t hold Jerry Falwell Jr. accountable for all the vulnerable people who suffered because of his decisions. And yet it’s more than that: It’s a tragedy that we did not love Jerry Falwell Jr. enough.

My reaction to some Christian scandals — the Ravi Zacharias revelations, for instance — is a kind of simmering anger at the leader. In the case of the Vanity Fair profile, though, I fail to see how anyone can read it and not come away with at least some compassion for Falwell.

When asked whether he was seeking to self-destruct, he said, “It’s almost like I didn’t have a choice.” And then he disclosed, repeatedly, how he identified with the wilder side of his family — the atheists and bootleggers — rather than with what he seems to consider the puritanical piety of his mother.

In this, he does not appear to be a prodigal son, rebelling against his father, as much as a son who loved his father and who counts him as being on his side. He and his father understood each other, he said. They shared an irreverent sense of humor and a knack for institution building.

While Falwell Sr. was building a Religious Right empire, the younger Falwell’s description of his role is telling: “I’d be the kid in the back of the auditorium selling my dad’s books and records to people while he preached. I would have all this money stuffed into every pocket. That was my life.”

Indeed it was. And, later, when the university his father built was in financial trouble, Falwell Jr. was tapped to help lead them out of it. In the article, he discloses how his father affirmed and admired his business savvy. And he was successful at that.

As chancellor, Falwell Jr. built Liberty’s enrollment, campus, and financial reserves into a powerhouse. Even to the end while someone else was preaching, he was right there, selling.

In some ways, the Jerry Falwell Jr. story is emblematic of the state of American cultural Christianity. If, as the old saying goes, hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, then the older form of American cultural Christianity was genuine hypocrisy.

Some people belonged to churches so they would be seen as good people. Even if they never believed, they sang the hymns and prayed the prayers and played on the church softball teams. The adulterer would pontificate on family values, and the embezzler would teach Sunday school classes on the Ten Commandments.

In time, as always happens, politicians sought to make this kind of religion a political force — a moral majority — that could de-emphasize the less popular aspects of Christianity (Trinity, incarnation, blood atonement, carrying a cross) and emphasize the more marketable aspects (fighting for the soul of America, reclaiming the culture, saving Western civilization).

Now, though, cultural Christianity seems to have evolved to the state where many people don’t even have to pretend to belong to churches. They just need to know how to post Facebook memes about Christian values right along with profane slogans about the president of the United States.

And behind all of that, are real people — created in the image of God, destined for an eternity of glory or damnation. The consequences aren’t just societal or even just theological. They are strikingly and tragically personal.

Is it possible that Jerry Falwell Jr. could never see himself as anything but someone who had to succeed, who was trapped into leading a family business bound up in a religion he didn’t really embrace? I don’t know.

I do know that when a man tells us he was in such a desperate, self-destructive place for so long, we owe it to him — and to ourselves — to ask, “Were we so deceived that we couldn’t help him? Or did we turn our attention away as long as he was succeeding?”

If the latter, the problem isn’t Jerry Falwell Jr.’s hypocrisy. The problem is us.

________

Adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Moore leads the Public Theology Project at Christianity Today.

Jerry Falwell Jr. isn’t a hypocrite. But the former Liberty president is a cautionary tale for cultural Christianity.

________

Countless friends texted me a Vanity Fair profile of former Liberty University chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr., featuring an extended interview with the man who went from being a kingmaker in the 2016 presidential election to resigning after a series of scandals.

What most people highlighted was not the salacious recounting of the stories but one particular quote from Falwell: “Because of my last name, people think I’m a religious person. But I’m not. My goal was to make them realize I’m not my dad.”

For some, this shows the problem: hypocrisy. If only it were.

When I say that Jerry Falwell Jr. is no hypocrite, I mean it in only one sense. Obviously, Falwell was hypocritical in, among other things, allegedly engaging in behavior that, for even the smallest of the offenses, would have led to fines or expulsions for his students.

In that sense, the scandal is similar to the revelations that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson attended Downing Street cocktail parties while the public was forbidden by law to gather due to COVID-19 public health measures. And, of course, beyond that is the much more fundamental matter: How can the chancellor of one of the world’s largest Christian universities justify his behavior by saying he’s not religious?

That’s precisely the point, though. Hypocrisy is an ongoing and always-present danger in the church. Jesus warned us to beware of hypocrisy — charging the religious leaders of his day with maintaining piety out of pretense.

For Jesus, the congruence between the inner and the outer — the heart and the mouth, the motivations and the behavior, the public and the private — is a crucial matter of integrity before God. The warnings were needed, Jesus told us, because hypocrisy is, by definition, crafty and hidden. Wolves look like lambs, which is why they are able to ravage the flock.

For such hypocrisy, Jesus used the metaphor of yeast (Luke 12:1) — a metaphor he also used for the kingdom of God (13:20–21). In other words, both hypocrisy and the kingdom work powerfully but invisibly, under the surface of perception. Only in the very long term are such hidden realities brought to light (12:2).

Hypocrisy typically leaves people vulnerable to deception and predation precisely because it is so carefully hidden. I often find churches or ministries unable to discover horrific things done in their ministries because they assume that evildoers in the church give off a creepy vibe or have a supervillain’s sinister laugh.

The most dangerous hypocrites, though, are those who are actually skilled at hypocrisy — at pretense, at hiding, at mirroring the look of true fidelity.

Yet Jerry Falwell Jr. told us repeatedly how he saw the world. When confronted with the immorality and scandals of his preferred presidential candidate, Falwell didn’t seek to measure the moral deficiencies against what he saw as the greater good as much as he ridiculed the premise of the question.

To him, Trump was moral because he had created jobs and made payroll. Unlike some other Trump evangelical supporters — with whom I disagreed but whose positions were reasonable and understandable — Falwell didn’t try to measure the business leader’s intemperate and crass attacks on people with some other objective, like judicial nominations, for instance. Instead he often mimicked such attacks, right along with the cartoonish and bullying tone of them.

Falwell Jr. frequently spoke not in terms of the gospel or the way of Christ, even parenthetically, but in terms of decidedly Machiavellian political aims and objectives. When individuals questioned the cost to Christian witness of merging evangelicalism with populist demagoguery, he often dismissed them as though they were morally preening puritans, out of touch with the real world.

When his own scandals started to proliferate, Falwell did not defend himself as a faithful follower of Jesus Christ. He didn’t even (as do so many scandal-ridden Christian leaders) present himself as a repentant David in the middle of Psalm 51.

Falwell said that he was a lawyer, not a preacher — as though the commands to integrity, obedience, repentance, and mercy were ordination vows, not the call of Jesus on every one of his disciples and, even before that, written by God on the consciences of every human being.

In many ways, Jerry Falwell Jr. did not hide from us who he was. He told us, over and over again.

If the problem were his hypocrisy, we could blame him. We could absolve ourselves of responsibility. After all, how could we know? We knew enough to know that something was wrong here. When some of the details of the final days of the Falwell Jr. era were revealed, lots of people said, “How could he be this stupid and self-destructive?” But I don’t think many said, “How could this happen? He was such a godly man.”

That is a crisis of accountability, yes. If we cannot see the problems even when a leader is telling us (at least the roots of) them outright, how can we expect to keep watch for leaders who actually are skilled at mimicking discipleship and sanctification?

But this is also a crisis of love. As evangelical Christians, it is a scandal that we didn’t hold Jerry Falwell Jr. accountable for all the vulnerable people who suffered because of his decisions. And yet it’s more than that: It’s a tragedy that we did not love Jerry Falwell Jr. enough.

My reaction to some Christian scandals — the Ravi Zacharias revelations, for instance — is a kind of simmering anger at the leader. In the case of the Vanity Fair profile, though, I fail to see how anyone can read it and not come away with at least some compassion for Falwell.

When asked whether he was seeking to self-destruct, he said, “It’s almost like I didn’t have a choice.” And then he disclosed, repeatedly, how he identified with the wilder side of his family — the atheists and bootleggers — rather than with what he seems to consider the puritanical piety of his mother.

In this, he does not appear to be a prodigal son, rebelling against his father, as much as a son who loved his father and who counts him as being on his side. He and his father understood each other, he said. They shared an irreverent sense of humor and a knack for institution building.

While Falwell Sr. was building a Religious Right empire, the younger Falwell’s description of his role is telling: “I’d be the kid in the back of the auditorium selling my dad’s books and records to people while he preached. I would have all this money stuffed into every pocket. That was my life.”

Indeed it was. And, later, when the university his father built was in financial trouble, Falwell Jr. was tapped to help lead them out of it. In the article, he discloses how his father affirmed and admired his business savvy. And he was successful at that.

As chancellor, Falwell Jr. built Liberty’s enrollment, campus, and financial reserves into a powerhouse. Even to the end while someone else was preaching, he was right there, selling.

In some ways, the Jerry Falwell Jr. story is emblematic of the state of American cultural Christianity. If, as the old saying goes, hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, then the older form of American cultural Christianity was genuine hypocrisy.

Some people belonged to churches so they would be seen as good people. Even if they never believed, they sang the hymns and prayed the prayers and played on the church softball teams. The adulterer would pontificate on family values, and the embezzler would teach Sunday school classes on the Ten Commandments.

In time, as always happens, politicians sought to make this kind of religion a political force — a moral majority — that could de-emphasize the less popular aspects of Christianity (Trinity, incarnation, blood atonement, carrying a cross) and emphasize the more marketable aspects (fighting for the soul of America, reclaiming the culture, saving Western civilization).

Now, though, cultural Christianity seems to have evolved to the state where many people don’t even have to pretend to belong to churches. They just need to know how to post Facebook memes about Christian values right along with profane slogans about the president of the United States.

And behind all of that, are real people — created in the image of God, destined for an eternity of glory or damnation. The consequences aren’t just societal or even just theological. They are strikingly and tragically personal.

Is it possible that Jerry Falwell Jr. could never see himself as anything but someone who had to succeed, who was trapped into leading a family business bound up in a religion he didn’t really embrace? I don’t know.

I do know that when a man tells us he was in such a desperate, self-destructive place for so long, we owe it to him — and to ourselves — to ask, “Were we so deceived that we couldn’t help him? Or did we turn our attention away as long as he was succeeding?”

If the latter, the problem isn’t Jerry Falwell Jr.’s hypocrisy. The problem is us.

________

Adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Moore leads the Public Theology Project at Christianity Today.