Here is the truth, everyone who denies in this life that Jesus Christ is Lord will be eternally damned. Here is also a truth, nearly every person that you speak those words to will hate you.
“Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?” (Gal. 4:16)
This is one of the main reasons that many who profess Christ will not speak of Him, they do not want to offend people, and speaking to people about the fact that they are not good enough, and never will be good enough no matter what works they perform to enter into heaven, tends to upset them greatly.
“A man that hath friends must shew himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.” (Prov. 18:24) Being friendly in these people’s minds does not include informing people that if they do not repent, they will go to hell. And so they don’t, they may attend church regularly, the midweek Bible study, they may even open their Bibles occasionally, but they will not speak to others about the condition of their soul, they will not bring up the name of Jesus in normal, everyday conversations, they do not want to offend, but it does not bother them to offend Christ by not speaking of Him..
I contemplate these truths nearly continuously, and the best I have been shown so far is that these individuals believe that the purpose of their life is centered around themselves and their supposed walk with the Lord. If they have two verses that they would consider most important to them they would be Hebrews 10:25, “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.” And “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” (James 1:27)
But they do not perform the first as a means to assemble together to worship the Most High God as a cohesive unit, but as it were an obligation that must be performed to prove to themselves the salvation they claim to have. The second is one they have deceived themselves with, for by never, or extremely rarely speaking of the Lord to any they meet, they have become as the world while deceiving themselves that they are set apart from it. They do not profess Him with their lips, and I fear they wrongly believe He is in their hearts.
I have watched this façade in many places over many decades of my life, the before the service conversations on Sunday morning are filled with greetings that are based upon self and the world, and after the service those conversations are exactly the same, the words spoken inside the church are no different than those they hold with any during the week, they do not revolve around the Lord Jesus Christ. They are “good” people, and so they consider themselves saved people, they trust their hearts, and so are thereby deceived.
Thinking is not doing, those who do not act upon the faith they say they have are not saved, it is that simple.
If someone says they have put their lives in the hands of God to do with as He pleases, and then does not live their lives for Him, they are not saved, if they say they love the Lord but do not speak of Him to others, they are not just embarrassed, but still lost. They are deceiving themselves.
You cannot say that you are employed by a company if you never show up to work at that place, but apparently there are many who believe that living a life devoted to Christ means an hour or so of supposed service once-a-week, with perhaps an occasional plea for assistance when they need something. There is no fear of God before their eyes, yet they profess to be one of His followers, they will not heed His commandments, but they consider themselves Christians, they do not want to offend any by speaking of the One they claim to serve, but it does not bother them to offend Him.
They want to be paid, but they do not want to work.
They want the cross, but not the shame that comes with it.
“For whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words, of him shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he shall come in his own glory, and in his Father’s, and of the holy angels.” (Luke 9:26) They are deceiving themselves, and one can only hope they see the truth of this before it’s too late.
