What Ever Happened To Fire and Brimstone Preaching

As I sit here on a Saturday night and prepare my heart for the Lord’s Day tomorrow I can’t help but reminisce about the days I spent in church as a child. The one thing that stands out about the difference between those days and now is the style and topic of preaching in churches. It seems that Hell is a topic that preachers neatly avoid in their list of sermons these days. Perhaps that is why sin is so rampant in our society! Hell is a very real place. So why do preachers avoid this subject like the plague? I have a general idea that it is avoided in part because of the new mindset in the church that God is nothing but love. While it is true that one of the characteristics of God is that God is pure love, God also has other characteristics. Among those characteristics is justice. God is Just and by His very nature He has to judge sin. Therefore it is incumbent on preachers to remind sinners of the price to be paid for denying Christ Jesus. Another reason preachers may avoid the subject of hell today is because many preachers are career preachers. Therefore they do not want to disturb their congregations too badly! The Apostle Paul warned us that these types were eventually coming along. He says “For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths”, II Timothy 4: 3 New International Version. Hell is a very real place. It is imperative that the world wake up and realize that God wasn’t Joking when He gave us His word and demanded “…be holy because I am holy”, Leviticus 11: 44. As I sit here on a Saturday night and prepare my heart for the Lord’s Day tomorrow I can’t help but reminisce about the days I spent in church as a child. The one thing that stands out about the difference between those days and now is the style and topic of preaching in churches. It seems that Hell is a topic that preachers neatly avoid in their list of sermons these days. Perhaps that is why sin is so rampant in our society! Hell is a very real place. So why do preachers avoid this subject like the plague? I have a general idea that it is avoided in part because of the new mindset in the church that God is nothing but love. While it is true that one of the characteristics of God is that God is pure love, God also has other characteristics. Among those characteristics is justice. God is Just and by His very nature He has to judge sin. Therefore it is incumbent on preachers to remind sinners of the price to be paid for denying Christ Jesus. Another reason preachers may avoid the subject of hell today is because many preachers are career preachers. Therefore they do not want to disturb their congregations too badly! The Apostle Paul warned us that these types were eventually coming along. He says “For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths”, II Timothy 4: 3 New International Version. Hell is a very real place. It is imperative that the world wake up and realize that God wasn’t Joking when He gave us His word and demanded “…be holy because I am holy”, Leviticus 11: 44.