Saving Souls

I know three people personally that have been to hell.  One friend is a pastor in the Caribbean.  He died, was dead 45 minutes, and went to hell.  His dad took him to a church, but he wasn’t a believer. He went right to the entrance of hell. When he told my wife and I about it that one night, I’m telling you, the fear of God hit me.  And I was thanking God that the Holy Spirit revealed Jesus to me.  He said, “John, I have never experienced fear.  There is no fear in this earth like that.  There is no torment on the earth like that.”  And yet he was brought back, and today he’s pastoring a great church.

Well, we have to understand God freely forgave us from that.  That’s what we deserve.  So a believer that cannot forgive is a believer that’s forgotten what we’ve been forgiven of. The worst sin that I can think of on the face of this earth, Richard and Lindsay, is child molestation.  Now if you can think of something worse, you tell me, but I can’t think of one worse. As horrifying as that is when an adult physically abuses a child, as horrifying as that is, that is nothing compared to hell.  If that’s what that child deserved, that’s what you deserved, that’s what I deserve, but yet Jesus forgave us.

Now that’s the foundation of Calvary.  That’s why Jesus said, “If you don’t forgive, your Heavenly Father will not forgive you.”  How can we be children of God when He has forgiven us of such a great debt, a $4.5 billion debt, when Jesus is the very worst debt that we can sin against each other is basically $10,000 compared to $4.5 billion.  I’m shortening this extremely, but I’m doing it because of the sake of time. And so a Christian has got to realize you can’t forgive until you realize what you’ve been forgiven of.  And, you see, there’s so many believers today that are trapped, and that’s exactly what offense is.  It’s a trap.  They’re tormented by demonic powers because an offense is a trap.

RR: Well, they’ve been hurt.

LR: You think you have every ability to say, “Well, he did this wrong, that wrong, this wrong, that wrong.”  And the greatest revelation I ever got on this, first of all, was reading your book.  It’s marvelous.  I have to say that flat out, it’s marvelous.  And everybody who has ever even taken a breath needs to read the book, because sometime if you live long enough, you’re going to get offended by somebody or you’re going to offend somebody else.