False Faith Found Out in Hell — E.A. Johnston

The Terror of False Faith in Hell

I'm in hell. I was a deacon, a good church member for years. I'm in hell. I thirst. I thirst out of this hell. Those are the sounds of terror of a person who in life was a faithful church member, but who did not possess saving faith and who died and in hell lifted up his eyes and saw his false faith found out in hell.

And that's the title of my message tonight. It's a solemn message entitled, A False Faith Found Out In Hell. My text is Luke 16, 23, which reads, In hell he lifted up his eyes. This message is for the unconverted church member who sits upon a false foundation of self-righteousness and good works.

And it is my prayer that this message will break up your false foundation of hypocrisy and alarm you to your lost estate and that you will become a seeker of God and recipient of his saving grace. That God would be pleased to take away your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh through the new birth.

Recognizing the Need for Salvation

Have you ever been lost friend? How do you know you were truly saved if you've never been lost? Jesus said, for the son of man has come to save that which was lost. You have to get lost before you can be saved.

Did you know that a person has to realize their need of a sin remedy before the remedy can be applied? Knowing about a medicine and taking that medicine are two different things. Has Christ been applied to your life friend in a saving way?

Have you experienced the change of the new birth? Does the Holy Spirit of God dwell in you and give you assurance that you are indeed a child of God? Do you know that when you get saved, you surrender to the Lordship of Jesus Christ?

Did you know that that Christ must be Lord of your life? He cannot be your savior if he's not your Lord friend. Do you believe that? Do you know all these truths and agree with them with your mind? But savingly, you don't know the Lord of glory.

Let me ask you, does Jesus know you? Have you ever been washed in the blood and born from above? In the South, during the Civil War, there was a plantation owner who had his slaves do his dirty work so he would not have to sully his hands.

And that plantation owner was very careful to keep his dirty deeds quiet as well, so not to bring dishonor upon his good family name. And if you are listening to this message and consider yourself a Christian, you may wish to listen very carefully because I'm preaching on the subject of a false faith.

Although you are a church member in good standing, if you were deceived and resting upon a false foundation of self-righteousness and works, would you not have your false faith found out now while you still have time here on earth, while you have ample opportunity to repent and come to Christ savingly?

Would you be willing to lay aside your pride and spiritual arrogance to learn that you do not possess Christ at all? In fact, there is a verse of scripture which describes your case and that is Romans chapter eight and verse seven, which reads, because the carnal mind is enmity against God, it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.

If you are honest with yourself, friend, you've not been subject to the law of God. You live by your own set of rules, even though you attend church and do good deeds in the name of God and religion, you are still in a natural condition and you have a carnal mind and your life's actions demonstrate you are an enmity against God.

I repeat, you are in a natural condition and there's no spiritual life in you for the natural man receiveth not the things of the spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them because they are spiritually discerned.

And you have no spiritual discernment because you are yet in a natural state, in a false faith, and God is greatly against you like that plantation owner who was careful not to sully his hands with dirty work and careful to guard his family's good name.

You have sullied your hands with your life of sin and you bring dishonor upon the name of God for taking his name and calling yourself a Christian when you are not. It's a double dishonor to him. Your sins dishonor him and you're calling yourself a follower of Christ is a great dishonor when it's obvious to God that you are still in your sins.

You have a position at the church where you are a member but unknown to you, God does not view you as his own child, rather he's greatly angered at you and your self-deception and your spiritual pride.

Pharisaical Religion and Hypocritical Profession

In the days of Jesus, the Pharisees were spiritually proud men who had all the answers in regard to religion but they did not answer to God and even opposed him when he stood in their midst in the person of Jesus Christ.

Jesus had nothing good to say about those religious leaders but called them hypocrites and you are a hypocrite. Your faith is false, your condition is very alarming because with your lips you claim to be a follower of Jesus and take the name Christian very proudly but you deny him with your life by continually breaking his holy law and you are guilty of breaking God's law.

God's law, his commands are strict and his punishment for breaking his law is severe. Every person who is born into this earth will be held up to that perfect law of God and one must be perfect to not break it through sin but man is a sinner by nature and therefore every time he sins he breaks that perfect law of God and is a transgressor of God's law.

On a future day of judgment all of mankind will be held up against that strict and holy law of God and all will fail that test. I am a sinner and I know I need a sin substitute in the person of Jesus Christ and so do you friend.

You cannot stand on your own merits against that holy law. First John declares, whosoever commit a sin transgresses also the law for sin is the transgression of the law and the scripture is clear and hereby we do know that we know him if we keep his commands.

The law is strict and severe and it demands perfection and you are a guilty transgressor of the law through your multiplied sins and it should be very alarming to you that you do not have a mediator in a sin substitute because you are not savingly united to Christ Jesus through the new birth.

You still possess an unregenerated heart even though you have a long track record of doing good things in the name of Christ and you consider your situation very well as a Christian. You claim to know Christ but he does not know you.

In the gospel of John it speaks of those followers of Christ whom he did not commit himself to because he knew what was in their heart. When Jesus was here in his earthly ministry when he passed through a village those who encountered him experienced change.

A person who has experienced the new birth has changed but when you are alone you know how unchanged you really are. Perhaps you teach Sunday school or serving your church in some capacity yet you continually tell lies.

You lust, you covet, you hate. Your heart is a black boiling pot of hatred and anger and resentment and if anybody rubs you the wrong way all those rotten contents spill out and scald everyone near you.

You have an unforgiving heart yet you still believe you are a Christian. Many make a profession of Christ and do good works and die and go to hell. The majority of church members lie in an unconverted state.

You are addicted to the love of the world and you are full of the world. You serve your idols and like the text of Jeremiah describes you well they have followed after idols and after them they will go and off you go to them.

God's word stands against you in an indictment for it declares if any man loved the world the love of the father is not in him. Many pretend to love God and honor him with their lips but deny him with their lives.

Jesus said if you love me you will keep my commands but you friend continually break the law of God with impudence and feel no remorse for you have a good opinion about your spiritual state but the heart is deceitful and many are self-deceived.

False Conversions and the Doctrine of Grace

Perhaps you have been the victim of poor evangelism. Some evangelist or preacher gave a man-centered gospel invitation that made it easy to come to Christ with no demands placed upon you. Perhaps you walked an aisle or repeated a prayer or believed the verse of scripture and felt that that was what saved you but you've never been awakened to your lost condition and never been convicted of sin by the Holy Spirit and never savingly converted by God.

God is the author of salvation not you. You don't make yourself a Christian. God gives grace to whom he will and has mercy on whom he will. There is no promise to you that he will even grant you the grace of repentance for his word declares in 2 Timothy 2 .25 if God per venture will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth.

Does that upset you? Does the doctrine of election upset you? God declares therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy and whom he will he hordoneth. Do you believe that? Romans declares for he saith to Moses I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.

So then it is not of him that runneth but of God that showeth mercy. Listen friend, you don't make yourself a Christian. Jesus declared no man can come to me except the father which hath sent me draw him and I will raise him up at the last day.

It is God who gives saving faith and God can withhold it from you and still be a just God. We evangelists have made salvation too easy. Just sign on the line and join the club and pay your dues and you will go to heaven.

Repentance, Obedience, and the Lordship of Christ

But Jesus said not everyone that saith unto me Lord Lord shall enter into the kingdom of heaven but he that doeth the will of my father which is in heaven. That means repentance towards God and obedience to God and a life of holiness.

Do you live for the will of God or is it your will that drives you every minute of your day? Even though you believe that heaven is already secured for you since you made a decision to be a Christian, hell is ready to receive you if you die because you are a lawbreaker because of your sins and God views you as his enemy because you stand on your own merits and good opinion of yourself.

But listen friend, you must realize that the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked. Who can know it? You are self-deceived. You rest on your good works and self-righteousness and if you were suddenly removed from this world you would enter another region, another world quite unintentionally and quite unprepared and that world and region is known as hell.

You would be screaming just like that person at the start of this message crying get me out of here. I'm in hell. I'm on fire. For if you possessed a good grace to see your awful condition you would realize that you deserve to go to hell because you are a rebel and an enemy of God and not his friend.

You live your life unto yourself to gratify every desire of your will and you have never lived for the will of God. You have never surrendered to the lordship of Jesus Christ. Self still is on the throne of your life and you sit there and rule there.

You consider yourself a Christian because you made a decision or repeated a prayer or believed a verse of scripture. Perhaps you walked that aisle in response to an invitation and you decided to become a Christian because you did not want to go to hell.

But when your life is examined under the searching spotlight of the Holy Spirit you are an individual who's never been awakened to their lost condition. You've never been convicted of sin. You've never repented from your sins and been converted by the Holy Spirit of God in a true conversion.

The faith you have is a false faith. You sit upon a false foundation and although you consider your condition very good you're still in a natural condition and an enemy of God. And the very God you claim to serve stands against you because you have no shelter in Jesus Christ and his righteousness upon you if you only knew how God really sees you.

The Certainty and Terror of Divine Judgment

God is angry with the wicked every day. If he turn not he will wet his sword. He hath bent his bow and made it ready. The arrow of God's wrath is pointed at you now and it is only his mere mercy that you are not dead and in hell at this moment.

He could remove you quite suddenly. Your position outside of Christ is a perilous one and extremely dangerous. You're on slippery ground and a slippery path. Surely thou did set them in slippery places.

Thou castest them down into destruction. How are they brought into desolation as in a moment they are utterly consumed with terrors. That's the terror of hell. If you knew how dangerous your position outside of Christ was you would be filled with terror right now.

Your alarm would be great. Imagine the shock of the person who's a good church member and who does good works in the name of the Lord and they die on their sins and drop into hell. And in hell they lift up their eyes and are alarmed that they are there.

A person dead in trespasses and sins is blind and living in darkness and only God can remove that blindness and give them faith and God can remove that person at any moment through death. Wherefore their way shall be upon them as slippery ways.

In the darkness they shall be driven on and fall therein. For I will bring evil upon them even the year of their visitation saith the Lord. You see friend, one day you made a decision to be a Christian and it was a decision you made with your head but you've never yielded your heart to the Lordship of Christ.

You made a choice intellectually to desire Jesus but you've never submitted to him and surrender. You made yourself a Christian but it is God Almighty who has power to save. Look up God's sovereignty and salvation is found in Isaiah 43 verse 25 which states I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake and will not remember thy sins.

Deep down you know that your spiritual condition is not well rather than peace, peace within you. In your heart it is war, war, war. You are still in a natural state and are like the ways found in Isaiah which described the lost condition of the wicked but the wicked are like the troubled sea when it cannot rest whose waters cast up mire and dirt.

There is no peace saith my God to the wicked. You know you must do to come safely to Christ but you refuse. You enjoy your iniquities and refuse to part with them. You reign in your life. You hug your favorite sin.

You will not bend your neck to a sovereign king. Your very heart is in rebellion to God and if you were in the garden of Eden you would have pushed Adam out of the way and reached up and tried to pull God down off his throne yourself.

You refuse to lay your shotgun of rebellion down and part with your sinful ways. Rather you hug your sins. You nourish them as they break out upon you like a fast and furious fire. You fuel them with your lust and your sins consume you as a hot flame.

You have driven a stake in the ground and have told God to keep his hands off that area in your life. He can have part of you but not all of you. Rather than God ruling in all authority in your life, you rule and all self-ruled persons die in their sins and are cast into hell for sin is breaking the law of God and all lawbreakers are guilty criminals who deserve punishment and you stand all alone as a criminal before God because you stand in your own merits.

You do not rest in Christ's merits. Listen friend, I know I'm a sinner. I know I need a sin substitute in the person of Jesus Christ and so do you. But sick as you are, you refuse to apply the remedy for sin because you are afraid that that scares you because the remedy for sin will come with all his claims and rites upon your life under his lordship and that frightens you.

You feel safer out from under him now but you were greatly deceived. Half a remedy is no remedy and unless you repent you will surely die and drop into hell. Jesus said so himself, unless you repent you shall likewise perish.

Perish means hellfire where you close your eyes in this world and open them in another, a region of outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. If you died right now and entered hell, you would scream I don't deserve to be here.

I'm the chairman of the deacons. I'm a member of first baptist church. You'd have all your excuses and reasons but you have to be born again. Your pride was the lid on your coffin friend. Your prideful heart was your doom.

It would have been better for you to hear God's word and yield to it as it declared for thus saith the high and lofty one that inhabits eternity whose name is holy. I dwell in the high and holy place with him also that is of a contrite heart and humble spirit to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.

But your pride got in the way of you ever humbling yourself before God. You are a person full of yourself and full of the world. Self is king in your life but you fail to realize the great precipice you stand near with a deep chasm below.

Your feet are about to slip into that chasm and quite unexpectedly will you drop off that cliff which is this earth. You feel it is not your time to die for you have many years yet before you but that opinion is entirely your own and grievously wrong for God's word declares for man also knoweth not his time as the fishes that are taken in an evil net and as the birds that are caught in the snare so are the sons of men snared in an evil time when it falls suddenly upon them.

Listen friend you live in an evil day and sudden death is all around you. People are snatched away from this world without any notice and your false security is your greatest danger because you rest upon something that has no more substance than a spider's web and your very weight will break through it and you will fall.

You have sat in church Sunday upon Sunday and your ears were closed to the very warnings of the gospel because you felt they were for others and not for yourself. Your self-righteousness hardened your neck.

The bitterness in your heart has hardened your heart to receiving the yoke of Christ upon you and the verse of scripture which should alarm you more now than any other is found in Proverbs and it relates to your dangerous condition.

He that being often reproved hardeneth his neck shall suddenly be destroyed and that without remedy without remedy friend the remedy for sin which is Jesus Christ. Your sinful life has hearted you. Your self-rude will has hearted your neck from receiving God's mercies.

Your cup of iniquity is practically full and yet you have not turned from your wicked ways and sought God for mercy. The publican prayed a prayer that God heard. God have mercy upon me a sinner. Have you ever seen yourself as a sinner?

Listen friend you are not a sinner because you sin but rather you sin because you're a big sinner. Your nature is depraved and you drink iniquity like water. You hate holiness and all that is holy and God's word seals your doom.

Without holiness no one shall see the Lord. No one sees the Lord in hell. Your wicked heart crucified the Lord of glory and your multiplied sins were the nails pounded into his flesh. Jesus came to seek and save that which was lost.

Personal Testimony and the Discovery of False Faith

Let me ask you a question and be sincere. Have you ever been lost? How can you be saved if you've never been lost? I vividly remember the day that God showed me I was lost. All my props were kicked out from beneath me for I had been resting on a false foundation.

I was a long time church member who rested on his good works and self-righteousness and God showed me mercy by showing me I was lost. I was lost that I was lost and on my way to hell and more than that I deserved to go there.

It was then I became a seeker of God. I sought his mercy and the grace of repentance and faith. By grace I was saved but it was because of a bloody cross. That cross had Christ's blood all over it because of my sins.

Listen friend it is far better to discover now that you are not truly saved than waste your life here on earth with a false delusion and die in your sins and learn in another world that you had a false faith found out in hell.

The Gospel Invitation to the Thirsty and Weary

Hell is a prison with high walls of regret. If you are sincere, if you are hungry for God, weary of your sins and thirsty for Christ then come to Christ and beg him for mercy. The gospel is for the person who is thirsty, hungry and weary.

Is that you friend? Are you in need of a savior? You must exercise repentance towards God. Have you ever truly repented of your sins? Have you truly repented and turned from your king sin, the one that easily besets you?

You must repent to be saved. Are you ready to come to Christ? Are you so sick of yourself and your sins that you're weary of your sins and ready for a change under his lordship? I have wonderful news for you.

In fact, I leave you friend with the best news I can offer you and that is the invitations of the gospel. I will preach them in your ears now. I pray that you do not hear the voice of this poor preacher but that you hear his voice as it comes in authority and majesty to your heart and very conscience.

Scriptural Invitations to Come to Christ

You have heard the gospel of the son of God today. Now hear his invitations to a poor sinner. Seek ye the Lord while he may be found. Call ye upon him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return unto the Lord and he will have mercy upon him and to our God for he will abundantly pardon.

And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness even so must the son of man be lifted up that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have eternal life. Look unto me and be ye saved all the ends of the earth for I am God and there is none else.

If any man thirst let him come unto me and drink he that believeth on me as the scripture has said out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you and learn of me for I am meek and lowly in heart and ye shall find rest unto your souls for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. I am the bread of life. He that cometh to me shall never hunger and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.

All that the Father giveth me shall come to me and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out. And the spirit and the bright say come and let him that heareth come and let him that is a thirst come and whosoever will let him take the water of life freely.