My husband and I had the opportunity to talk with an older gentleman the other day. In the course of the conversation, he offered the information that he had traveled several hours to get the “monument” that he and his wife had already purchased for the graveyard back home in his old state. They had moved and had decided to be buried in their new state.
It was a rather unexpected conversation to be having, but there it was. And, along with it, the perfect opportunity to talk about eternity.
And so my husband and I started asking him questions. Kindly. Gently. Do you know what is more important than preparing your gravesite? Do you know where you will spend eternity?
He replied with assurance that he most certainly did.
So I asked him: How do you know?
His response was terrifying but not unexpected…
“I feel it in here” and his fisted hand went to his heart.
As we talked further, we realized his great confidence in where he will spend eternity was based on feelings and his good works.
When we started talking about the Bible, we found out he never reads it and didn’t even know where his was. Somewhere in the basement, he thought.
After telling him about the sacrifice Christ made for us and why, we suggested that he find his Bible and read the book of John.
He sounded like he might do just that but we also realize that people will tell you anything for their own reasons. (You can pray that he does. Pray for “J”.)
That conversation was such a vivid reminder of a few different truths. I’ll share just two.
First, many people are basing their eternity on nothing but feelings. I guess it is natural, isn’t it? We live in a society where feelings are used to make the most important decisions.
I just read a post on Facebook by a middle-aged wife. Her kids were in their teen years and she no longer felt “connected” to her husband. And so she was walking away. It was all based on feelings. She didn’t feel love for him or from him and so she was going to follow those feelings into a “better life”. (Ironically, statistics show that the “better life” she is chasing is often just an illusion.)
If we let them, our feelings can control how we treat others, how we spend money, how much food we eat, where we go, and how much time we spend scrolling our phones or playing games on our iPad, or what we watch on TV. Feelings can lead us into deception, into sin, and into worldliness.
We want to feel good. We want to feel safe. We want to feel loved. We want to feel popular.
We don’t want to feel bad. We don’t want to feel insecure. We don’t want to feel unloved. We don’t want to feel backwards.
And so these feelings—driving every other decision made in life—eventually lead many into the assurance that they are going to heaven.
Their belief in what is true is more important than the actual truth. If they “feel it inside”, then it must be true.
But it just doesn’t work like that.
Just because someone feels like they are healthy and well, doesn’t mean they are. Deadly diseases don’t always give symptoms.
Just because someone feels unloved and like the whole world is against them, doesn’t mean it is. Many a people have committed suicide believing this lie that was never—even for a second—true.
Our hearts are very powerful and deceptive. It leads people into beliefs that simply aren’t true through the use of feelings.
The Bible tells us that our hearts are wicked and we cannot trust them—
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9)
He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool:
but whoso walketh wisely, he shall be delivered. (Proverbs 28:26)
As someone once wisely told me:
When it comes to decisions—small or large—feelings should be the caboose of our trains and not the engines. In other words, the feelings will tag along and change, when we choose to make the right decision. They should never be what is driving our decisions. It was good advice and I still remember it today.
We can’t afford to make decisions based on feelings. And we certainly can’t afford to make the biggest decision of our lives—where we will spend eternity—based on feelings.
Instead, we must anchor our lives in the Word of God—the only source of Truth that we can count on.
Second, it was a reminder of how many people that talk about Jesus so easily do not really know Him. Jesus tells us that we are His friends if we do what He commands (John 15:14). Many people never even open their Bibles to find out what Jesus commands. They just live in a comfortable, albeit false, belief that if they say they “believe on Jesus” they are good to go. But that is simply not what the Bible teaches. Genuine belief yields a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17).
Many people, particularly in America, know the “Christianese” language very well. And it comes very naturally to them.
The other day I saw an interview with a baseball player after a game. In the interview he shared his gratitude for God and His sovereignty in his life. All praise was due to God. Then, in the next sentence, he cursed quite naturally.
I am not making any judgment on him personally. I do not know him nor do I know anything about him.
But I use this as an example for what we are seeing today. We are living in the midst of a syncretistic religion called “Christianity” where anything goes (except for true, biblical Christianity…that doesn’t go over so well).
I think we often are tempted to believe that anyone who refers to God or tells us they are praying for us understands what the Bible teaches, but that just isn’t true anymore. Even if that person goes to church, most churches are not teaching a biblical Gospel.
Just because someone talks like they are a Christian, doesn’t mean they truly understand. The mission field for the Gospel is probably much bigger than we have assumed here in America.
Of course, if we go back to “J”, we will realize that most people have been inoculated against the true Gospel by the belief that feelings equal truth and so it is hard to have any really good conversations. Most people who believe they are going to heaven have no care for what the Bible says and are basing their beliefs on other things.
Thankfully, we know it is the Holy Spirit that opens spiritually blind eyes and we don’t have to worry about the results of any conversations we have.
We simply need to have them.
So let’s have the conversations.
I’m not very good at it myself. This conversation with “J” was the first time I’ve had the courage to bring up eternity with someone in a long time. But I want to do it more.
Because I have nothing to lose and they have everything to lose. And we never know how God will use even the tiniest seed of the Gospel that we hesitantly toss onto the soil of another life.