Transcription
Before I say anything else, I need you to hear this first. This video is not here to condemn you. God is not trying to scare you into a corner. He is trying to pull you back from one. The reason this message exists is the same reason a doctor tells a patient the truth about a diagnosis, not to destroy their hope, but because the truth, delivered now while there is still time to act on it, is the most loving thing that can be offered. Jesus said something in Matthew 7:13-14 that most churches never preach, that the road to destruction is wide and many are on it, not a few, many. And the people he was describing were not atheists, they were religious people, church-going people, people who called him Lord. Today we are going to look at seven types of Christians who, according to the Bible, are on that road right now and do not know it. I am not telling you this to frighten you. I am telling you this because you are worth telling the truth to and because there is still time. Stay with me.
The first type of Christian who will die and go straight to hell is the one who made a decision for Christ without ever making a surrender to Christ. These are two completely different things and the modern church has largely stopped distinguishing between them. A decision is something you add to your existing life. A surrender is something that completely reorients it. The person who walked an aisle, raised a hand, or prayed a prayer and then returned to exactly the same life they were living before, unchanged in their values, unchanged in their direction, unchanged in what they love and what they pursue, made a decision. But Luke 14:33 records what Jesus actually requires. Anyone of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple. Renounce all. That is not a decision, That is a surrender, and only one of them saves.
Second Corinthians 5:17 gives the evidence that genuine surrender always produces. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. The old has passed away. Not the old is improving. Not the old is slowly changing. The old has passed away, meaning there is a genuine, observable difference between who you were before and who you are now. The person who made a decision but never surrendered has no new creation to point to. The same loves, the same priorities, the same habits, the same trajectory with a Christian label attached. Matthew 7:21 gives Jesus's verdict on that label. Not everyone who says to me, "Lord, Lord," will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my father who is in heaven. Not everyone who says, "Lord." The ones who enter are the ones who do the Father's will. The ones whose surrender was genuine enough to produce obedience that is real, consistent, and lasting. A decision adds Jesus to your life. A surrender gives your life to Jesus. Only one of those is the salvation that gets you into heaven, and only you and God know which one you made.
The second type of Christian who will die and go straight to hell is the one who has taken the greatest truth in scripture, that God forgives sin through the blood of Jesus, and turned it into a permanent license to keep committing the sin they claim to be forgiven for. Jude verse 4 identifies this person with language that should end every comfortable theology of cheap grace permanently. Certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality. Pervert the grace. They did not deny grace. They distorted it, took the most beautiful truth about God, and twisted it into justification for the very thing it was meant to remove. And Romans 6:1-2 records Paul shutting this door with one of the most direct questions in all of his letters. Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means. How can we who died to sin still live in it?
Hebrews 10:26-27 gives the verdict that makes the eternal consequence of this type unmistakably clear. For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. No longer remains a sacrifice. The cross is real. The blood is sufficient, but the person who uses the cross as a reason to stay in the sin it was meant to break them free from has not received the cross. They have exploited it. And Hebrews 10:29 gives the divine assessment to that exploitation. How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by the one who has trampled under foot the Son of God and has profaned the blood of the covenant? Trampled under foot. That is the language of contempt, and it describes exactly what a person does with the blood of Christ when they treat it as permission to sin rather than power to stop. Grace is not a covering that hides your sin from God. It is a power that breaks your sins hold over you. If you were using it as one and not experiencing the other, something has gone deeply wrong.
The third type of Christian who will die and go straight to hell is the one whose Christian life exists entirely on the outside, the performance of devotion with none of its reality. They say the right things, they attend the right services, they use the right Christian language, they have the right reputation in the right circles, and inside the genuine transformation that genuine salvation always produces has never occurred. Jesus reserved his most severe words not for open sinners, but for this type. Matthew 23:27 records his verdict, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness." Beautiful on the outside, dead on the inside. The reason this type is so spiritually dangerous is that the performance is convincing enough to fool almost everyone, including eventually themselves. After years of performing Christianity, the performance becomes the only version of it they know. They have confused the approval of people with the approval of God. They have mistaken the comfort of a Christian identity for the reality of a Christian transformation. But 1 Samuel 16:7 gives the standard that exposes the performance permanently. The Lord sees not as man sees. Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart. God is not watching your church attendance, he is looking at your heart, not the heart you perform in public, the heart you carry in private. In the moments when the audience is gone and the performance is over. And the judgment that Matthew 23:23 describes, "I never knew you," will fall not on the people who looked wrong from the outside, but on the ones who looked perfectly right from the inside while remaining completely unchanged on the inside. You can fool your pastor, your church, and your family. You cannot fool the God who is watching not what you perform on Sunday, but what you are on every other day of the week.
The fourth type of Christian who will die and go straight to hell is the lukewarm believer, and this is the type Jesus spoke about with the strongest language of rejection in any of his letters to the seven churches. Revelation 3:15-16 records his words. I know your works. You are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot. So, because you were lukewarm and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. Spit out. Jesus did not say he would correct the lukewarm Christian. He did not say he would wait for them. He said he would spit them out with the visceral, complete finality of someone removing something nauseating from their mouth. And the reason the lukewarm Christian ends up in hell is not a dramatic rebellion against God. It is the accumulated consequence of a thousand small choices to keep one hand on God and one hand on the world until neither hand belongs to anything.
Revelation 3:17 gives the most heartbreaking detail of the lukewarm Christian's condition. They do not know how bad it is. For you say, "I am rich. I have prospered and I need nothing." Not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. Not realizing. The gap between their self-assessment and God's assessment is the most dangerous space in all of Christianity because the person who believes they are fine will never seek help. And Luke 14:33 gives the standard that the lukewarm Christian has consistently refused to meet. Anyone of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple. Half surrender is not surrender. A Christianity that costs nothing and changes nothing produces nothing. And on the day when every life is laid bare before a holy God, the lukewarm Christian will discover that the comfortable, manageable, low-cost faith they lived was never the faith that saves because the faith that saves is always the faith that transforms. And transformation and lukewarm are mutually exclusive. Hell will not be filled primarily with people who hated God. It will be filled with people who were comfortable enough with him to claim his name, but never surrendered enough to let him change their lives.
The fifth type of Christian who will die and go straight to hell is the one who carried unforgiveness to their grave, who held on to bitterness, refused reconciliation, and arrived before God still owing a debt to the person who wronged them. Not understanding that that debt had been transferred to their own account before God. Matthew 6:14-15 gives the condition that makes this type's eternal destination a direct consequence of their choice. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. Neither will your Father forgive you. This is not a peripheral teaching. This is Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, immediately after teaching the Lord's Prayer, attaching a direct, personal, non-negotiable condition to the forgiveness of God. If you do not forgive, you will not be forgiven. And a person who has not been forgiven cannot stand before a holy God and expect heaven.
Matthew 18:34-35 closes the parable of the unforgiving servant with words that every bitter Christian must sit with. The master delivered the unforgiving servant to the torturers until he should pay all his debt. And Jesus adds, "So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother from your heart." Every one of you. The person you are refusing to forgive may have genuinely wronged you. The wound may be real and deep and completely legitimate. And none of that changes the standard. Ephesians 4:32 gives the only measure that applies. Forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you. As God in Christ forgave you. Before you deserved it. Before you asked for it. At the cost of his son. That is the standard. Not how much the other person deserves your forgiveness, but how completely God forgave you when you deserved none of it. Dying with that standard unmet is not dying in peace. It is dying with a debt that God will require you to pay.
The sixth type of Christian who will die and go straight to hell is the one who accumulated years of biblical knowledge without ever allowing that knowledge to produce genuine obedience in their life. They attended church consistently. They could quote scripture fluently. They could identify false teaching, discuss theology intelligently, and teach the Bible to others. And their life in the private places where no audience existed bore almost no resemblance to what they knew so well. James 1:22 identifies this type with a diagnostic so precise it cannot be missed. "Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves." Deceiving yourselves. The self-deception of the Bible knower who never obeys is one of the most complete deceptions available to a human being because it uses the truth as the instrument of the lie.
Luke 12:47-48 gives the specific consequence that makes this type's eternal destination worse, not better, than the person who never knew. "And that servant who knew his master's will but did not get ready or act according to his will will receive a severe beating." The servant who knew, not the one who was ignorant, the one who knew. Jesus establishes a principle that turns biblical knowledge from a comfort into a responsibility. The more you know, the more accountable you are for what you do with it. And Luke 6:46 gives the question that every Bible-knowing, non-obeying Christian must answer honestly before God. "Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you?" Lord means master, the one whose instructions define your life. If you call Jesus Lord and consistently ignore what he says, the title is a lie, and a life built on that lie is a life that will hear, on the day that nothing can be changed, the words that no amount of biblical knowledge can prevent. "I never knew you." Your Bible knowledge will not speak for you on judgment day. It will speak against you as evidence of everything you knew and chose not to do. Knowledge without obedience is not a foundation. It is a testimony.
The seventh type of Christian who will die and go straight to hell is the one who spent their entire Christian life feeling sorry for sin without ever genuinely turning from it. Feeling sorry and genuine repentance are not the same thing and the church has largely stopped making the distinction. Genuine repentance, the kind that the Bible calls metanoia, is a complete change of mind that produces a complete change of direction. It is not an emotion. It is a turning. And Acts 3:19 gives the condition that connects repentance to forgiveness with a directness that cannot be softened. Repent, therefore, and turn back that your sins may be blotted out. Repent and turn back. The turning is not optional. It is the evidence that the repentance was genuine. And a repentance that produces no turning is not repentance. It is regret. And regret does not blot out sin.
Second Corinthians 7:10 gives the distinction that every person who has ever cried at an altar needs to understand. For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret. Whereas worldly grief produces death. Worldly grief produces death. Not a reduced salvation, death. The emotional response to sin that comes from consequences, from being caught, from the discomfort of guilt without the genuine turning that reorients the life, produces death. Because it looks like repentance from the outside and feels like repentance from the inside, but it never does the one thing that genuine repentance always does. It never changes the direction. The person who has wept at altars 10 times for the same sin without ever genuinely turning from it has not repented 10 times. They have felt sorry 10 times. And feeling sorry 10 times with no change in direction is not a path to heaven. It is a path to a judgment day where the tears come too late to produce the turning that could have changed everything. Feeling sorry for sin is the beginning of repentance, but it is not repentance itself. Repentance is when your life changes direction. And a changed direction is something you can see, not just something you feel.
I said at the beginning of this video that I was not here to condemn you, and I meant it. Every single one of the seven types we looked at today describes a person who still has time, right now, today, in this moment to become something different. The Christian who made a decision without surrender can surrender right now. The one who used grace as a license can genuinely repent right now. The performer can stop performing and start being real with God right now. The lukewarm can choose to become genuinely hot right now. The bitter can release the unforgiveness right now. The Bible knower who never obeyed can begin to obey right now. And the one who felt sorry but never turned can turn right now, completely, finally, and permanently. None of these types are sealed. None of them are beyond the reach of the God who sent his son to save them. The only sealed destiny is the one where a person runs out of time before they run out of excuses.
Romans 10:13 is the promise that stands at the end of every type on this list. The promise that does not come with conditions attached to how badly you failed or how long you waited. For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Everyone. That means the deliberate sinner. That means the grace abuser. That means the performer in the lukewarm and the bitter and the knowing but not doing and the feeling sorry but not turning. Everyone who calls genuinely, honestly, with a heart that is done making excuses and ready to make a surrender will be saved. Not might be, will be. That is the promise. And it is the reason this video was made. Not to show you how close you are to hell, but to show you how close you are to the God who is still reaching for you right now. Call on his name today while today is still available.
Subscribe to Faith A Blaze Network right now and hit that notification bell. We release teachings like this one every single week. Share this video immediately with every Christian in your life who needs to hear it because the most loving thing you can do for someone is tell them the truth while there is still time to act on it. And leave a comment below. Tell me honestly which of these seven types you recognized in your own life today. Your honesty in the comments ministers to thousands of people reading them right now. God bless you and I will see you in the next message.